The color of blood: a study in scarlet
"Yellow... is the color of caution."
-- Opal from the BBC (Geraldine Chaplin) in Robert Altman's "Nashville"
Red is the color of alarm. Perhaps because it is the color of blood. Over the years, that color has changed, along with our taste in blood. In movies, I mean. What was once alarmingly "realistic" now looks either stylized (if it's a good movie) or fakey (if it's not so good). When Neil Sedaka and Elton John sang about "Bad Blood" in 1975, maybe that's what they really had in mind (because, after all, who knows what "Doo-ron, doo-ron, dit-dit-dit-di ron-ron" was supposed to mean? Apart from the reference to the Crystals).
Before the late '70s, blood was generally (and, remember, these are generalizations -- there are certainly exceptions) bright red and opaque, like nail polish or latex paint. It was often compared to ketchup, which in many cases it was. Since then, our taste for blood runs darker, anywhere from ruby red to almost black. It's a bit more transparent than it used to be, and appears somewhat shinier and stickier -- perhaps because, as we now know, the effects folks have supposedly hit upon the magic formula for photogenic blood made from Karo corn syrup (in some cases the high fructose variety, the same ingredient used in... almost everything that doesn't use a low-cal sweetener). The shade changes with the lighting, the thickness (a smear or a puddle?), and the surface on which it is splashed. The blood splashed on Samuel L. Jackson's Jheri Curled hair naturally appears darker than the blood all over the upholstery of the back seat, or the blood splooshed on the back window as daylight streams through it.
(Red Alert: Possible bloody spoiler text and images ahead for "Heroes" [Season One], "There Will Be Blood," "Deep Red," "The Conversation"...)
"It's not blood, it's red."
-- Jean-Luc Godard on the use of color in "Pierrot le fou" (1965)
Red is not a color to be treated carelessly. It has a visceral impact when we see it -- not just in the form of blood, but in stop signs, fire trucks, police lights, stoplights and stop signs. The "finger on the button" button is assumed to be red, as is the Cold War "hot line" from the Oval Office to the Kremlin. It helped the domestic propaganda efforts significantly that Soviet Communism was identified with red. "Commies" themselves were "reds." And, of course, there were the "Red Chinese." Red lights always indicate warning or danger -- off-limits, do not proceed -- unless they're in a "red light district," where they suggest another kind of forbidden activity.
View image Drowning in a sea of blood: Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" (1980). This image made for the most powerful teaser trailer ever. Kubrick liked it so much he felt he had to incorporate it into the movie.
In Nicolas Roeg's "Don't Look Now" (the scariest movie I've ever seen, and I love horror movies), the very sight of red sends a chill down your spine. It begins innocently enough with a little girl in a red mack, but immediately the scene takes on an atmosphere of dread. A spreading smear of red on a slide. A glimpse of a figure in red in the dark alleys of Venice. A pool of blood spreading and spreading as if to engulf the screen. (See "The Conversation" and, of course, "The Shining.") Likewise in Kubrick's Outlook Hotel, where a red(rum) bathroom or a red jacket worn by a tiny figure in a maze sets off alarms in your head.
* * *
My favorite movie-blood story belongs to Martin Scorsese. The way he tells it, the MPAA freaked when they saw the bloodbath in "Taxi Driver" (1976) and was ready to slap it with an X rating for violence. They suggested he tone it down -- as in, tone down the red -- in order to get an R. So, Scorsese put the scene through some kind of chem wash or something that made the blood more brownish. In his view, it made the scene more sickening and disturbing, but he got his R rating.
View image One of the most effective and horrifying uses of blood-red ever, in a pristine white bathroom: Francis Ford Coppola's "The Conversation" (1974).
Alfred Hitchcock said he knew he had to shoot "Psycho" (1960) in black and white because in color the blood going down the drain in the shower scene would be pink. And pink is not all that scary.
I have been catching up with the first season of "Heroes" recently (and, by the way, it's far and away the best comicbook/superhero adaptation I've seen since "Superman" in 1978 -- but more about that later). There's a shot of blood dripping down a woman's face that made me wonder if it was supposed to be molasses or chocolate sauce or something dripping from a shelf above her. Ironically, and quite wittily in keeping with the cleverness of the show in general, she's standing next to two bottles of red syrup, opening a large can of what looks like stewed tomatoes (with a bright red label) when it occurs. She falls out of the frame and spots of red appear out of focus behind her. The next shot features a plastic squeeze bottle of ketchup in the lower right corner, followed by a shot of a woman in a bright red apron. (This episode, "Seven Minutes to Midnight," was directed by Paul Edwards, who has also done installments of "Lost," "Pushing Daisies" and "Battlestar Gallactica." I'm going to be looking for his name from now on.)
View image A cleaver creates quite a splash... of not-so-terribly-deep red nail polish: Dario Argento's "Deep Red" (1975):
View image It is customary for the dead and injured to drool red. Note the waxy build-up. "Deep Red."
View image Modern dark blood, as in "There Will Be ____" (detail). Image cropped to protect the guilty. Nobody's innocent.
Some movies avoid red altogether, while others weave it into the design of the film. So, what blood (or red) images have most strongly affected you and why? Which have struck you as the most surreal ("The Shining"), disturbing ("Don't Look Now"), funny ("Monty Python and the Holy Grail") or phony (???)?
P.S. Be sure to read Girish Shambu's perceptive piece in Artforum on the new Criterion DVD release of Paul Schrader's "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters," which includes this pertinent paragraph:
Included in the DVD set is the only film Mishima ever directed, the half-hour-long "Patriotism" (1966), and it’s a shocker. In it, a naval officer and his wife make love and then commit seppuku for the sake of the emperor. The film features no dialogue and narrates its story through calligraphic writing in the credit sequence. The sets are Noh-like, severe and minimalist, with blazing white walls. When the unrelenting whiteness of the images is finally relieved, it is with violent sprays and splashes of black, the color of blood in this black-and-white film.
You should include a picture of real blood to give a reference point. Maybe some of the pictures of green blood and other crazy-color blood from Evil Dead II.
It bothers me to see blood done poorly. Do we not know what real blood looks like? Are we so dumb? Suspension of disbelief doesn't stop it from being annoying!
A few:
CACHE - the splash on the wall
LANCELOT DU LAC - the gory battle sequences
JULIET OF THE SPIRITS - all over the place
BLUE VELVET - the roses during the opening and closing montages
I really enjoy reading your stuff, Jim. The insights you offer always offer a fresh perspective that really interests me. Reading this, I couldn't help but be reminded of that unforgattably shocking scene in Haneke's Cache where a massive amount of RED unexpectedly and suddenly appeared in the frame.
I think the movie that seems the most saturated in blood is Bergman's Cries and Whispers. The red fades are extremely unsettling to me in a way I can't explain. The broken glass scene is another one that sticks in my memory for its use of blood.
Apart from that, The Dreamers is another film that uses blood very memorably, as in the loss of innocence of two characters that is intimately shared between them.
I'm trying to think of my own contribution to this post of blood, but I can't. You've stolen maybe my favorite moment of blood in all cinema: the toilet in "The Conversation". While I've seen that movie a number of times, I believe that if I'd have only seen it once, I would never, for the rest of my life, forget that image of blood coming out of, and then coating the outside of the toilet bowl.
By the way, I don't get "Don't Look Now". Maybe I need to see it again, but it wasn't scary in the least to me. Silly is more like it. I loved "Walkabout". But once is never enough to see a good movie, so maybe I'll try it again sometime.
The blood in "Superbad" was pretty hilarious.
And let's not forget the use of blood and blood symbolism in [i]Carrie[/i], where blood is emblematic of life [i]and[/i] death.
I have a few more, but life calls, once again.
What about the old "no blood at all" technique, as seen in Halloween.
All this talk of blood, and not one mention of the bloodiest movie ever made...Peter Jackson's "Dead Alive"???
The blood splashed on the television screen with Porky Pig dancing in the first season finale of Buffy.
How about Kitano Takeshi's Zatoichi, with small lines of gushing blood, forming japanese letters for a moment or two?
I'll always remember that image in 'Ran' (1985) by Kurasawa. Its been a while, so I don't remember the characters, but at one point the queen or princess or someone (a woman) is rapidly beheaded with a katana. Its a quick cut (literally and movie-ly), you see the motion of the sword and the camera follows the blood as it sprays the wall. The blood was perfect, I can't remember a better, not too bright nail-polish red, not too oil-slick deep dark crimson, just right, red. This kind of cut (again lit and mov) was used ALOT in Kill Bill Vol. 1's final showdown, but it was quite shocking in 'Ran', which, for all its massive battles and such was not terribly violent by today's standards, except for that wonderful slice!
I'll always remember that image in 'Ran' (1985) by Kurasawa. Its been a while, so I don't remember the characters, but at one point the queen or princess or someone (a woman) is rapidly beheaded with a katana. Its a quick cut (literally and movie-ly), you see the motion of the sword and the camera follows the blood as it sprays the wall. The blood was perfect, I can't remember a better, not too bright nail-polish red, not too oil-slick deep dark crimson, just right, red. This kind of cut (again lit and mov) was used ALOT in Kill Bill Vol. 1's final showdown, but it was quite shocking in 'Ran', which, for all its massive battles and such was not terribly violent by today's standards, except for that wonderful slice!
I like stylized blood better than the realistic stuff because it reminds me of when I was a kid watching Hammer movies late at night, so there's a comfort level to it.
I remember liking the purple/lavender blood that Kubrick used in "Full Metal Jacket" during the prolonged sniper sequence at the end. I liked it again when I saw it on VHS and then... was shocked and disappointed when I saw it on DVD and the blood looked distinctly more red and dark. I don't know if Kubrick approved the change or not but if you do a side by side VHS / DVD comparison there is a difference. I guess someone figured stylization had no place in a Vietnam movie. Too bad. I liked that touch a lot.
I didn't know about the Mishima film, in B&W, but it makes me wonder if Quentin Tarantino knew of this when making Kill Bill? He converted most of the Japanese Restaurant fight scene in Pt.1 to B&W, to placate the censors, rather than cut it. I think it works artistically, too.
For use of the the color red, I think The Sixth Sense did a great job
SPOILER ALERT
For actual blood, I think the scene in The Talented Mr. Ripley where Matt Damon kills Jude Law is great. Damon whacks Law with an oar, and for a brief second all you see is the split skin, before the wounds fill with blood and start to run down Law's face.
Nice piece, Jim. It got me thinking about Robert Bresson's L'Argent, and I found a few stills from a web site here:
http://www.mastersofcinema.org/bresson/Words/LArgent_NewYorker.html
Note the blood on the ax wielder's hands; the color of the poster; the red sweater in the classroom. The red pops because the rest of the film, including the acting style, is so stifled.
Someone should do an entire post on the evolution of gunshot wounds in film. Real-life entry wounds are small, while exit wounds are huge and ghastly, but Peckinpah wanted every hole to be an exit wound.
"Taxi Driver" (and later "Lethal Weapon" and "Die Hard") moved us from just liquid blood to bits of flesh and brain matter. "The Deer Hunter" had the squirting entry wound in Chris Walken's head.
"The Untouchables" features a shotgun wound in the wind, in which blood comes off the victim like mist, and when Brandon Lee is shot at close range halfway through "The Crow" we see what appears to be a cloud of red-and-white dust behind him.
Real-life gunshot fatalities don't usually involve victims falling over backwards (like they do in movies). If guns had that much force, wouldn't the shooter fall over as well? Instead, the life goes out of you and you fall forward, which can be much more disturbing or just comical, in the way bystanders dropped dead in "Ronin." And I've yet to see a movie that features the SOUND of a heart pumping blood out of an exit wound, which is rumored to go "vrrrrt, vrrrt, vrrrt."
Maybe I'm being morbid.
Terrific post Jim, movie blood has always been a subject of interest for me because it’s been done so many ways. I’m glad you’re catching up with “Heroes”, which is one of my favorite shows. Don’t get discouraged during the first half of season two, they were trying new things and they didn’t always work, but they figured it out again by the end.
While you gave some terrific examples, my first thought when anyone mentions blood in movies is immediately Kurosawa’s “Ran”. Both the bright red blood covering the battle fields and especially the blood that sprays on the wall during that famously brilliant murder at the end. That spray on the wall is so much more effective than actually seeing the murder would’ve been. It’s probably my favorite shot in Kurosawa’s entire catalog, where he changes between seeing and not seeing the person within one shot, coupled with the blood on the wall.
Good choices all, although a personal favorite that hasn't been mentioned yet is the "red stained her gold" shot in Two English Girls. After shooting almost the entire film with a minimum of red, suddenly it fills the frame. And it's overwhelming.
Unbelievable that Kurosawa's Ran has not been mentioned. From the title card to the first battle to the best splash of red ever put on screen at the end, Ran shows how "fake" blood can be used to far more shocking effect than "real" looking blood.
Reading this was like plunging through thoughts and images I've had and seen over countless years of film watching, none of which have surfaced in any conscious way. We've all seen spools of blood over the years and have become numb to its effects. This may account for why there have been "stages" of blood aesthetics -- ranging from the colorful to the colorless -- that have shifted according to viewers' implicit recognition of a certain blood style's "fakeness," or what have you. In a sense, then, once a certain style of visualizing blood became so normalized, filmmakers and viewers desired a something new. While we all recognize these stages and aesthetic styles, as we do with anything else (like narrative structure or performance) we rarely reflect on in an active way so as to identify the breaks and gaps in these shifting aesthetics. So reading about (and seeing) these stages of blood in cinema is really intriguing, and it opens up a number of possibilities for examining blood in movies, as an effect and as affect.
Now that darker, thicker blood is the new "serious" blood, colorful blood seems (almost by design) intentionally fake, as if to remind you that it's fake. This worked to perfection in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a very bloody film that is both hilarious and repulsive in its bloodletting.
George A. Romero's Dead films are represent a nice trajectory of blood in cinema. Even though Romero has never been in the mainstream, his movies have always captures the pulse of horror cinema and cultural sensibilities. The second and third film in the Dead series -- Dawn and Day -- both feature very colorful, almost organ blood, much like Dario Argento's films of that time, as if this blood is boiling under someone's skin, ready to spurt everyone and stain clothes. But a lot of this blood is almost too dry. It's like it bursts from a wound and then dries up immediately.
Which brings me to another aspect of blood that's changed over the years, along with color, is density. As effects have improved and aesthetics have become more gritty, and "realistic," blood has gone through the same changes. Nevertheless there's still some variation, depending on the stylistic settings of the movie. Some horror films with digitized effects depict darker, but weightless blood. Romero's new Dead films are particularly interesting, as he seems to blend the old, colorful aesthetics of blood with the new, thick-n-dark style, resulting in some nice blood in Land of the Dead. (Interestingly, however, his newest film, Diary of the Dead features the littlest amount of blood for a Romero movie).
Outside the horror realm, blood has many physical and symbolic manifestations, many of which can be experience in the way the blood plays a role not just in the visual style of the movie, but in the narrative. For example, black-and-white films seem also to have a built-in bloodletting style, which is consistent from Psycho to Night of the Living Dead to Schindler's List -- all of which feature a inky blood; although in Schindler's List the blood is tricky, spurting at random, following no steady flow as in most horror films.
Steven Spielberg gave blood the same personality in Munich. In the case of the scene in which Avner and co. kill the female assassin on her boat, the color adds another layer to the sensation of life draining away. When they shoot her, there is about a 30 to 40 second time during which very little blood pours from her wound, where she is in a daze of what seems to be an intense pleasure; the kind that Foucault wrote about when speaking of death. She walks over and cradles her cat, its fur gingerly brushing up on her skin. Then as she sits down her wounds unleash a free-flowing, but calm blood, which pours down her naked body. It's one of the most memorable images of any movie in recent years, and the nature of the blood --specifically how it interacts with other aspects of the compositions-- is disturbingly beautiful.
Great topic. I've always been fascinated by how the look of blood has changed over the years.
"It's not blood, it's red"-JLG, is one of my favorite movie related quotes.
Some of my favorite blood moments are often noticeably fake on purpose or decidedly weird without explination.
In 'The Holy Mountain' (Jodorowsky '72) the use of strawberries and cherries, birds flying out of a wound or the use of colours other than red where the pipes used are in plain sight are all poetic and call attention to the artificiality of it all. fun stuff.
How about 'Macbeth' (Polanski '71. A very bloody movie indeed) where the landscapes are covered in red flowers to evoke a blood soaked terrain. Shakespeare would've been proud.
The black blood spewing from between the tiny chicken legs in 'Eraserhead'(Lynch '77) has a nightmarish and darkly humorous quality, like all of Lynch's work, that's impossible to explain.
The very bloody battlefield shots in 'Ran'(Kurosawa '85) and the bright paint like quality of the blood is very surreal, haunting and, well, just painterly.
The explosion of chocolate syrup at the end of 'Sanjuro' (kurosawa '62) makes me burst into laghter everytime.
I'll take the splash of blood on a pillow in 'The Bird With Crystal Plumage' (Argento '70) over his more grisly stuff...well except for the still beating heart in 'Suspiria', a wonderfully bizarre touch.
Despite the fever dream/over the top quality, I've always felt the private Pile suicide in 'Full Metal jacket' (Kubrick '87) also has a disturbing snuff film quality due to the angle and the blood against the wall without cut. Same with the opening of 'Wild at Heart' (Lynch '90), possibly the most violent scene ever.
Sorry this is starting to get long. One more: the drips of blood on the side of the bathtub in 'The Piano Teacher' (Haneke, 2001) to go along with the already mentioned devastating scene in 'Cache'. Haneke can sure make one squirm.
Blood is used so often that it's surprising when it's used in an interesting way, these are just the few that immediately jump to mind.
I recall a number of "blood scenes" that disturbed me greatly, most of them involving blood splattered on a wall:
- For me, the more effective and disturbing use of blood by Kubrick was the scene in Full Metal Jacket when Vincent D'Onofrio's character Gomer Pyle shoots himself in the head in the latrine. The combination of antiseptic white and splattering visceral is, well, visceral. To me, this scene is far more creepy and shocking than the "elevators filled with blood scene" in The Shining.
- There are several similar Martin Scorsecse "Blood on wall" scenes that stick with me. A few are in "The Departed," but particularly the double-cross in the elevator.
Other memorable uses of blood, albeit not quite as disturbing
- The Cohen Brothers' sending of a hapless victim through a wood chipper, resulting in a fine red mist, in Fargo
My nomination for bloodiest film ever, and funniest use of blood:
- Peter Jackson's Dead-Alive
Also:
- I always found non-red blood a bit disturbing, particularly the white blood of the Andriod Ash in Alien
Another obvious example would be Marnie: a drop of red ink on Tippi Hedren's white sleeve leading up to a saturation of Bruce Dern's blood on the wall. "There now..." Killed by a fireplace poker, just like Dirk Bogarde in Our Mother's House.
However, the first scene that I thought of was the blood letting of Joan in The Passion of Joan of Arc.
What color film blood should be is an incredibly vexing one for cinematographers and effects people. This is mainly because real blood is actually "too red"---footage of people really bleeding often looks like a fake-y '70s movie, due to the hypersaturated color of real blood, *especially* if it's high-oxygen arterial blood (as you would get in your standard horror-flick throat slash). The push for darker blood is much like the push for dark brown environments in video games---by desaturating your colors, you get the audience to think "that's realistic!" even though it looks little like real life.
Rob mentioned Cries and Whispers, which came to mind immediately, but, in a distinct mode, I was also struck by Carole Laure's bathing naked in a tub of brown chocolate at the end of Sweet Movie, juxtaposed with shots of Polish Nazi victims, and then the seemingly dead, then suddenly living, bodies brought off the Karl Marx boat. The line being drawn between the obscenely violent and the sexual (or scatological) in that film (blood becoming disgustingly visceral in contact with sugar, for example) is broken down repeatedly though the visual medium by Makavejev, and it makes me wish more people would try to understand what he's doing there before simply tossing more blood on the screen for simple entertainment.
Interesting article. It's always interesting to watch older movies that have blood in them, because there didn't seem to be any standard type of fake blood. The blood in, say, "The Wild Bunch" is amazingly fake, but it doesn't detract from the viciousness of the violence. If anything, it highlights. And the blood in "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (only 3 or so years older) is quite different, but equally horrific.
As an aside, I really liked the first season of Heroes. That is, except for Peter Petrilli. He whines more than Spider-Man, and that's saying something.
Jim, I don't now why, but the first thing I thought of when I saw this piece (before I read it) was Sam Peckinpah's Salad Days, Monty Python's viciously funny parody of movie violence in which a genteel garden party turns into a wild orgy of severed limbs and spurting arteries. And along those lines, the incredibly, pointedly violent Tom and Jerry parody "Kit and Kaboodle" found in the pages of National Lampoon, from whose Itchy and Scratchy apparently sprang.
I wonder what it says about me that these are the first things I think of when I think of stylized blood? I' not sure, but I do know that some of the most disturbing violence I've seen on screen of late is almost entirely psychological, where little blood is exacted but much in the way of psychic damage is inflicted.
But no matter what, I'll always have Carrie and Dressed to Kill, guaranteed to do the trick when nothing else will. And you've really got me intrigued to see Don't Look Now again...
And of course no discussion of the use of the color red in movies can be complete without mention of Kieslowski's Red. Not much blood in that one, although she does run over a dog at the beginning.
Regarding "Heroes," it turns out that the show is an enormous disappointment on all fronts - but you'll discover that for yourself in due time. They began with an interesting premise and shrunk from it in every respect, and the show became careless in plotting, characterization, and even that area in which it can least afford to fail the viewer - pure comic book spectacle. A sad loss.
Regarding blood, I think the regular sprays of day-glo red in the original "Dawn of the Dead" are some of my favorite examples. It's so grotesque that it's almost iconic.
I think the use of dark blood in There Will Be Blood also (probably intentionally) had a very close resemblence to oil.
How about another post on wounds looking real or not? Or is that too morbid? For example, the gun Pyle shoots himself with in Full Metal Jacket would have taken the entire top of his head clear off and put a nice=sized dent in the wall as well. Or so my dad tells me. Probably would have been a bit too much for the film.
These are great examples! "Cache," "Dawn of the Dead," "Cries and Whispers" -- magnificent use of red. (One of my favorite moments in "Dawn of the Dead" is when, in the midst of shopping mall mayhem, somebody stops to put his arm in one of those blood pressure testing machines -- just in time for his arm to be ripped off and the pressure drops to zero.)
Raymond: I thought of including a shot of real blood, but that color can vary just as much, depending on the light, the film, the color and texture of the surface on which it's spilled... What interests me most is how we respond to the way blood (or red) is shown, not whether it's "realistic" or not, and how our tastes in screen blood have changed over the years. Same with violence in general. I quoted Pauline Kael recently talking about the new standards for realism in screen violence set by Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch." Today, we see it as highly stylized, even poetic. But at the time the visceral impact, combined with the shock of the new, made us perceive it as realism when, of course, it isn't at all...
I don't have much to add, just that all this reminds me of my favorite quote from "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern":
The Player: We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.
Guildenstern: Is that what people want?
The Player: It's what we do.
As far as blood goes, I've always been partial to Romero and Argento's use in "Dawn of the Dead" and "Suspiria" (espec. the opening scene). And to whoever mentioned "L'Argent": Right on. Bresson always gets praised for his work with sound (justly so) and his compositions, but color seems equally important to his work, as these comments make plain, color was an integral aesthetic component (in his non-B&w films, natch).
One that I'd like to throw into the ring, on the blood count, is "Thieves Like Us." There's not much blood in it (spoiler) ... only really when Keith Carradine gets his face smashed up. But Altman makes the blood so ... so grimy. It looks like he's bleeding rust, which, of course, fits perfectly into this Depression-era movie.
When I think about red in film, though, my favorite uses of it are not really blood-related (though they clearly have blood connotations). One poster mentioned the roses in "Blue Velvet," but I've always been keen on the lipstick in that movie. I mean, really, I've never found cosmetic products so unsettling... . (Incidentally, there's seems to be just as much red as blue in that flick ... go figure.) And then there's "The Wizard of Oz." There's something so luscious in the shade of red used for the ruby slippers (and Dorothy's lipstick). The particular hue seems so like candy, which seems apt, I think. It always made me want to lick the screen.
I'll always have an affection for the bright red, opaque blood of 70s-era Italian horror movies. There's something I love about the scene where Jessica Harper pours a glass of suspicious wine down the sink in 'Suspiria.' First there's this startling, bold splash of color, then a funny/awkward/surreal moment when she tries to wipe the rest of it down the drain and it's clearly drying red paint. Given how genuinely odd a movie that is, it's hard to say whether you could even call it a mistake.
As for phoniest, no contest--the scene in 'Earthquake' where several people find out firsthand why you should never take an elevator during an earthquake. If there's a more astonishingly, hilariously phony display of "blood" than that, I don't think I'd be able to handle it.
(I'm not describing it, because seriously, you MUST see it for yourself.)
I'd have to agree with the Special Agent's assessment of "Heroes"' trajectory above...though would also add that, IMO, another show on your list of Paul Edwards credits has done the exact opposite: "Battlestar Galactica" has just ten episodes to go before its series finale, and if it maintains the quality of what came before, it'll be not just one of the best, but also one of the most consistently excellent shows ever.
As others have mentioned, the Coens often have memorable uses of blood in their films. My personal favorite is the scene in Blood Simple where Marty doubles over and vomits blood all over his desk. Of course Marty's blood makes other appearances (Ray has a hell of a time washing those Marty's blood out the back seat of his car).
An extremely effective use of blood red that I haven't seen mentioned yet is in David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. The blood red color is not so much tied in with death here as it in with the invasion of the human body (particularly the female body) by doctors. The opening credits, which simply show medieval surgical instruments against a blood red background is quite disturbing. Also, I still think one of the most horrifying scenes ever filmed is when Jeremy Irons shows up for surgery (where all the sugeons and physisicans are wearing blood red scrubs, btw) whacked out of his mind on drugs and tries to perform a vaginal operation on his patient with his bizarre handmade instuments.
Regarding a previous poster's description of shotgun wounds and how "the life goes out of you and you fall forward"...I was always struck by the effectiveness of the locker room scene in 'To Live and Die in LA', when (SPOILER?) William Peterson's character is shot pretty much point blank with a shotgun. His entire body just goes limp and falls to the ground, like a marionette with its strings cut.
A movie that does a good job of excluding red: Don't Look Now (except at certain key points), directed by Nicolas Roeg
A movie that makes the color red an extensive part of its design: Corman's The Masque of the Red Death, with cinematography by Nicolas Roeg
My favorite use of cinematic blood is in another Argento film, "Tenebre." (SPOILER) A woman gets her hand chopped off, and the stump of her arm sprays blood all over a clean bright-white wall which just happens to be nearby. It's Argento's clearest statement about his ethos: "I'm an artist; blood is my paint, my films are my canvas, and if you don't like it you can take a hike."
I had to make fake blood for a comical video shoot recently and found that Nestle's chocolate syrup mixed with a bit of strawberry syrup and a few drops of water looks 100 percent real on video. The chocolate syrup already has a bit of red coloring to it, and the consistency is uncanny. It would be too expensive for large quantities, but mmmm....chocolate.
Robert: I have not seen Dead Ringers, but your description of it and its use of blood sure makes me want to.
On the topic of Cronenberg, the image that locks immediately in my mind is the shower of blood that coats Viggo Mortensen when his son shoots Ed Harris, in A History of Violence. In that film, for sure, blood is more than just a marker of death, but visual motif serving to unveil identity. Laying atop flesh, it reveals layers as much as it creates them.
"Cries and Whispers" is the only time I've ever had to pause the dvd and leave the room. The glass. The cut.
"Ran" was spoken of, but another great Kurosawa moment comes in "Sanjuro" (the sequel to "Yojimbo") wherein the final few moments of the film blood shoots out of a samurai who wasn't quite as quick as the other. Fantastic. The man knew how to use blood.
I don't know how many of you have seen a Takashi Miike film, but that guy...whew! Blood runs thick in his movies (and effectively so)...sometimes wonderful, sometimes too much. One moment in the Alice in Wonderland-esque film "Gozu" the main bodyguard of a triad boss is losing it and thinks a poodle is spying on them. So naturally he grabs the poodle from the lady throws it against the ground a couple times then spins it by it's collar and slams it against the restaurant window, where it slides down slowly leaving a trail of blood behind. Close up of the bodyguard's crazed face through the window as blood streams down into frame. Horrifying, bizarre and hilarious.
"The Conversation"...one of my favs.
One of my favorites is in John Waters' Serial Mom (his most underrated imho), when the kids who grew up on Hershall Gordon Lewis pictures see the end results of a real murder:
"I saw blood! And it's brown! Not red like in horror movies,but brown!!"
What about the scene in William Castle's The Tingler when a faucet is turned and blood runs out? The film is in b/w but the blood is in colour. I've often wondered if this was an influence on the little girl with the red coat in Schindler's List.
The scene where the blood drips onto the girl's sandwich in Chabrol's The Butcher always makes me a little queasy too.
As for gunshot wounds, what about the ridiculous but brilliant ones in Sam Raimi's The Quick and the Dead? Firstly Gene Hackman only realises he's been shot when he sees the sunlight shining through the bullet hole in his chest then he does a backwards somersault when he's shot in the head. Amazing!
The VSHH VSHHH sound of blood pumping out of a fatal wound is faintly audible in both Goodfellas and Schindler's List...As I child I heard that sound described vividly by someone who'd heard it, never forgot, and was startled to hear it in those films....I suspect Scorcese heard it at some point in his childhood (he's always been honest about how much street violence he witnessed in Little Italy) and passed it on to Spielberg--and remember Marty was going to do Schindler's List at one point.
Interesting connection between Kill Bill and Patriotism--the woman's suicide does seem strangely reminiscent of O Ren Ishi's death, and there is the blood in black and white. Whether or not he'd seen Patriotism, he'd DEFINITLY seen Mishima (which does recreate scenes from Patriotism); think about that film in relation to Kill Bill. Divided into chapters; bright colors; overhead views of sets; Japanese culture and Samurai swords; sequences in black and white; heightened, surreal sets. Somebody's really gotta examine Schrader's unheralded influence on Tarantino.
Here's another amusing way to finesse the color of blood to avoid an unwanted rating: in Stardust, Michelle Pfeiffer's witch slits the throat of a prince (Jason Flemyng). There's a lot of blood. To keep PG-13, the movie (don't know if it was director Matthew Vaughn or co-screenwriter Jane Goldman) makes a clever visual joke: the prince's blood is blue.
This may be giving away a bit too much about my nerdier side, but while watching the beginning credits of Sweeny Todd, I noted to myself that I thought the blood depicted looked too much like Klingon blood, way too fake. By the end of the movie I was very thankful about it, because of the quantity of it in the film. I think if it had looked more real, I would have felt a bit queasy.
There's a comical saying amongst artists/painters: "If you can't make it better, make it bigger. If you can't make it bigger, make it red."
Although there were mentions of Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA and its vibrant red, one of the best bloody moments occurs after the first set piece murder. Blood spills on the floor and one huge puddle takes the shape of a witch appearing to straddle a broom. Of course SUSPIRIA fans will understand this gnarly shot of foreshadowing, which points to Argento's warped sense of humor...
Nothing takes you out of a movie horror scene faster than the recognition of stage blood. I distinctly recall receiving a round of angry shushes during "Gorillas in the Mist" when I declared openly that Dian Fossey's spilled blood looked like paint. Sheesh, some people.