What movie features the most amount of fake blood?
Blood and gore are a staple of many horror films, turning the stomachs of faint-hearted audiences whilst amping up the shock value. The presence of lots of on-screen blood is often unsettling, reminding viewers of the impermanence of the human body. For many, the sight of blood, associated with danger and injury, immediately inspires an uncomfortable gut response, making it the perfect addition to the horror genre.
However, during the early days of cinema, directors struggled to show graphic scenes of blood for a long time — and much of this can be traced back to the Hays Code. Most early movies that showed blood were radical foreign productions, whereas, in Hollywood, movies were prohibited from showing “Brutal killings […] in detail”. Even in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock chose to shoot Psycho in black-and-white so that he could show significant bloodshed – the film wouldn’t have been able to show the same level of blood if it had been shot in colour.
Cinema has come a long way since then, and it’s now hard to find a horror film made in the past 40 years that doesn’t contain a significant amount of blood. Critic Stephen Prince even suggested that “blood reminds us of the reality of what’s being represented. You take that out, you remove it, and you’re in make-believe land.”
In 2019, it was reported that Andy Muschietti’s film It Chapter Two had set the record for the most blood ever used in a movie. Jessica Chastain, who played adult Bev, was so enthusiastic about the heavy use of blood in the film that she insisted on making the film like “Carrie on steroids”. For a scene in which Bev gets trapped in a bathroom stall as it fills with blood, special effects coordinator Warren Appleby had 5,000 gallons of fake blood brought in.
The scene only lasted two minutes, yet it was a laborious task for cinematographer Checco Varese to shoot. A special set had to be crafted for the scene, as production designer Paul Austerberry explained: “There was a bathroom set that was mostly used when she went in there and sat down. And we had a flexible door for the bits when the various tormentors were squeezing their heads through the door. We had one of the sidewalls off so you could see her on one side and the door on the other. And then we had a small replica of the bathroom stall for the bloody scenes that had a massive tank with the fake blood above.”
Despite the scene going well, Muschietti claimed that “the camera’s not frantic enough,” leading the crew to try another take – only this time, Varese decided to put on a wet suit and join Chastain in the pool of blood. The result is a much more chaotic sequence that communicates Bev’s fear.
Although Chastain claims that the film used a record-breaking amount of blood (to put it in perspective – the iconic elevator scene in The Shining only used about 300 gallons), Fede Álvarez, director of the 2013 Evil Dead remake, has claimed that in one day, his film used 50,000 gallons of fake blood. If this is true, that is an astounding amount of blood; however, there has never been any official evidence to back up this claim, apart from Álvarez saying, “I know we ordered a truck the other day that was…50,000 gallons?”
