THE GRUESOME HISTORY OF FAKE BLOOD IN HOLLYWOOD OCTOBER 24, 2016 | By
Alex Swerdloff
Blood. Blut. Sangue. Veri. Krof. Rakta. Chi. Dam. Xuè. Whatever you want to call it, it’s literally in us all. Given blood’s obvious centrality in all things human, it’s no wonder that theatrical blood has been around for as long as there have been theaters. Once the old red handkerchief trick ran dry—which was probably really, really early on—performers needed a substance that would replicate with some authority the real, ichorous thing. Without an extensive knowledge of mid-16th-century stagecraft, you might think that animal blood was used onstage in early performances of plays like Titus Andronicus, the bloodiest of Shakespeare’s works. But experts today are increasingly doubtful that animal blood was ever widely used, for practical reasons. As Farah Karim-Cooper, the Head of Higher Education & Research at the Globe Theater in London puts it, “The question of whether or not animal blood was used on the stage is difficult to answer in the light of evidence about the expensiveness and quality of actors’ costumes and their inability to launder them.” In other words, no dry cleaning, no animal blood. Given that, a recipe for stage blood has been required for centuries, and several different recipes developed over the years as productions moved from the stage to film to television and now to high-definition, computer-generated sources of entertainment. So if stage blood has long been cooked, how was it made way-back-when? Well, one early recipe came from bugs. The Grand Guignol—the Parisian theater that opened in 1890 and was known for its horror plays—made stage blood using red pigment derived from boiling dried insects. When that recipe cooled, it coagulated and created some delightful-looking scabs. With the development of the movie industry, early black-andwhite films used a quick and easy shortcut for their bloody needs: chocolate syrup. Yes, in a world of blacks-and-whites, chocolate syrup stood in stark contrast to light backgrounds. Overbearing censorship guidelines helped—they did not allow much blood to be shown on screen at all. And to apply the syrup in realistic-looking drips, another unlikely solution presented itself: the squeezable bottle. These had just started to hit the markets when Hitchcock’s makeup supervisor on the iconic thriller Psycho, Jack Barron, was devising a way to make a blood-centric movie appear
authentic. He told author Stephen Rebello, who wrote The Making of Psycho, that syrup in a squeeze bottle was a new, space-age innovation that did the trick: “Shasta had just come out with chocolate syrup in a plastic squeeze bottle. This was before the days of the ‘plastic explosion,’ so it was pretty revolutionary. Up to that time in films, we were using Hershey’s, but you could do a lot more with a squeeze bottle.” With the advent and adoption of color in Hollywood-made movies, the pressure on fake blood to look real mounted exponentially. Fake movie blood became known as “Kensington Gore,” after a retired British pharmacist, John Tynegate, began to manufacture and sell a popular stage blood named after Kensington Gore, a street in London. Tynegate’s formula was heavily used throughout the 60s and the 70s. The most famous recipe for stage blood, however, comes from Dick Smith, a Hollywood makeup artist who died a year ago at the age of 92. Smith was responsible for the blood you enjoyed in such classics as The Exorcist, Taxi Driver, and The Godfather. Called by some “the greatest makeup artist who’s ever going to live,” Smith’s recipe for fake blood is a classic— but it also happens to be, like, super poisonous. Why, you may ask, is Smith’s poisonous recipe so famous if blood is so often required to trickle from actors’ mouths? It turns out that edible versions—all variations on Smith’s original formula— abound. Today, the vehicle for disseminating stage blood has also advanced beyond the squirt bottle—to the condom. Warren Appleby, a special-effects coordinator who has worked on such films as the 2013 re-make of Carrie, points out that the condom is the perfect way to make a nice, bloody mess: “It’s cheap, and it already has a reservoir that you can fill with blood. You affix that to the wardrobe, then put a small explosive charge called a squib between the blood bag and the performer. We used vacuum seal bags so we could make a nice square—sometimes the condoms don’t break, sometimes they do.” Alas, the craft of making stage blood may soon come to a coagulated close—at least for film and television productions. More and more, sleek CGI blood, made purely of pixels, is becoming the method of choice for directors.
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