Blood on the Big Screen: The Evolution of Fake Blood in Film and Theater

It’s a fun fact that octopus, squid, and crustaceans have blue blood due to a high concentration of copper in their circulatory system. However, this is not true of all animals: human blood has iron-rich hemoglobin, which reacts with oxygen to create a reddish color. While it can sometimes appear blue--for example, in the veins on the back of your hand–this a product of deoxygenated blood combined with the way light hits your skin.

The unique properties of human blood–the exact hue, saturation and viscosity–is quite difficult to match, and it’s no surprise that Hollywood and theaters have been tinkering with the perfect recipe for fake blood for the past hundred years.

Back in the early 1900s the Grand Guignol (literally “big puppet”) theater in Paris was notorious for its plays with bloody scenes, many of which included dismemberment and eye gouging. Their formula relied on carmine, a naturally bright-red pigment which comes from beetles (yum!). However, this and other recipes were rarely used in early movies: despite the popularity of old horror films, they rarely featured any blood at all due to self-censorship. Films followed the Motion Picture Production Code (aka Hays Code), which forbid brutal killings from being presented in detail.

The 1952 ruling from “Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson” which argued that film scenes are protected under the First Amendment, ended this practice, and movie directors quickly set out to replicate human blood. The 1957 film “The Curse of Frankenstein” famously used the “Kensington Gore” recipe, which consisted of gold syrup, warm water, food coloring, and corn starch. This glorious bright red blood was also used in The Shining (1980): the infamous elevator-blood scene used an estimated 360 gallons. And in the 1960 black and white horror film “Psycho,” Alfred Hitchcock used a delicious-sounding chocolate syrup, due to the high contrast and viscosity. However, using syrup-based recipes came along with their own caveats; in the 1976 film “Carrie,” the syrup-based mixture hardened onto an actress coated in the fake blood when the gymnasium set burst into flames behind her.

Modern filmmakers are less concerned about finding an exact match for blood, since CGI has rendered many of these old recipes obsolete. However, the search for the perfect recipe continues on the theater stage!
Bonus fun fact: films are still appeasing rating groups, and for both Taxi Driver (1976) and Kill Bill: Vol 1 and 2 (2003, 2004), the blood was desaturated to make it more palatable for audiences.