part of the exterior set for Mayberry on The Andy Griffith Show. Several of Blackburn's family and friends had roles in the production. Release Lemora had its premiere in Claremont, California, on April 30, 1973, at the Garrison Theater on the Scripps College campus. The audience response at this screening was allegedly so poor that Fern and Blackburn quickly sought to sell the film and recoup part of the money spent to produce it. Media Cinema Group purchased the movie, cut it from 118 minutes to 80, and distributed it to drive-in theaters and local cinemas in the United States, opening in December 1974. Critical reception Lemora received mostly negative reviews upon its initial release, with some calling it "anti-Catholic". Author and film critic Leonard Maltin awarded the film a BOMB, his lowest rating, calling it a "Perfectly awful low budgeter." Elvis Mitchell from The New York Times wrote, "Lemora wants to surpass the expansions on vampire film mythology that propelled the fecund, tightly wound horror movies from Hammer Studios. The film falls far short of its goals, but it is a classic of sorts." Modern assessment On the internet film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 86% based on , with a weighted average rating of 7.1/10. On Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average rating to reviews, the film has a score of 49 out of 100, based on 4 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Barry Meyer from Film Monthly called Lemora "A real creeper", writing, "What makes this film work so well is that director-writer Richard Blackburn understands how to shock people with out exploiting the gimmickry of the genre, like so many other films of the era were so willing to do". In 1992, film writer John Flynn noted Lemora as "an artistic offbeat vampire movie which recalled the best of Bava and Bunuel." Maitland McDonagh from TV Guide awarded the film 3 out of 5 stars, writing, "An art-house vampire movie with lesbian undertones, Richard Blackburn's debut film puts an ambitious and surprisingly effective spin on traditional vampire movie cliches." Dennis Schwartz from Ozus' World Movie Reviews gave the film a B+, calling it "A haunting and intelligently accomplished work". Home media The film was released on DVD by Synapse Video on August 31, 2004. As of 2020, Synapse Films has declared that they have no plans to release the