The first horror movie to show blood and guts in colour
For years, people were seemingly too afraid to show realistic blood and guts on the big screen. It’s nothing we’re not used to these days, but before the time of torture porn cinema and gore so realistic that you have to double check that you’re not watching a snuff film by mistake, horror movies really were incredibly tame.
People had read about terrifying things in books, and of course, there was the Grand Guignol, but most people couldn’t even comprehend using cinema to create life-like special effects infused with gore. If special effects weren’t mastered properly – which was often the case – they usually ended up making the whole thing look a little comedic.
So, for many years, horror movies either accidentally made us laugh with obvious uses of dummies and cheap props, or they relied on creating genuine fear through suspense, a shadow, or something a little more ominous. Blood and guts were rarely seen because Hollywood censorship reigned over the industry for decades, preventing anything of the sort from being presented in the mainstream.
Over in Britain, though, horror was gaining a lot of attention due to the rise in Hammer Horror’s popular productions. Often taking well-known stories and transforming them into spooky slices of accessible entertainment, Hammer eventually became responsible for what is argued to be the first movie to show realistic blood and guts in colour.
What was the first horror movie to show blood and guts in colour?
Before Alfred Hitchcock was forced to shoot Psycho in black-and-white to get around censorship issues pertaining to the amount of blood he wanted to show, Hammer had shocked many audience members with some realistic gore in one of their Frankenstein movies.
Of course, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein remains one of the most beloved pieces of literature ever written, pioneering the sci-fi genre and enduring decades on through various re-interpretations across mediums, namely film. Long before Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein was released with Jacob Elordi playing the Monster, Hammer offered a much lower-budget alternative, beginning with 1957’s The Curse of Frankenstein.
The film marked the production company’s first colour horror film, and, in turn, it became the first horror movie to show us the abject, frightening reality of what’s inside of us, all laid out in bright hues of red, unavoidable and inescapable.
According to Professor Patricia MacCormack (via BBC), it was the “first really gory horror film, showing blood and guts in colour,” which was no small feat for this low-budget British movie. It was 1957, so Hollywood censorship was still in full swing, but over in Britain, there was more of a chance to get away with this kind of thing – and that’s exactly what Hammer did.
From then on – slowly but surely – horror started to become more graphic, which was only further emphasised by Psycho emerging just a few years later, also coinciding with the release of more explicit movies like Mario Bava’s Black Sunday and the controversial Peeping Tom. These films amplified the intensity of violence on the big screen, and by the ‘70s, gory horror could be much more easily found in mainstream movies.
Horror forever changed, but we have The Curse of Frankenstein to thank for this development, even if it’s not exactly remembered as one of the greatest horror movies ever made.
