![]() ![]() In the 1950s, England’s Hammer Films helped stir new interest in classic monsters via blood-soaked revivals of Frankenstein and Dracula. Unconcerned with matching the color of real blood, Alfred Hitchcock used chocolate syrup-Bosco, reportedly-for the shower scene in Psycho. But the longer answer involves a tug-of-war between an effects genius willing to give away his secrets to kids and the chemical innovations of a Midwestern corporation hired by the film industry to save time and money on stains.Įffects artists working in the black-and-white era had it easier than their successors, on the rare occasions they needed to make fake blood at all. The short one: It’s not easy to make fake blood, and each new era of filmmaking places new demands on special-effects and makeup artists. Why? There’s a short answer and a long one. But watch films as diverse as Dario Argento’s Suspiria, Bill Gunn’s dreamlike Ganja & Hess, and Wes Craven’s grimy The Hills Have Eyes and you’ll encounter the same eye-searing shade of red. ![]() When Edwin Neal cuts open his hand in the opening moments of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, it pools and thickens with sickening believability. Many of the decade’s horror films are filled with fake blood that bears little resemblance to anything that’s ever coursed through a human body, so much so that the exceptions stand out. Whatever it is will look familiar to anyone who’s watched even a handful of classic ’70s horror movies, however. Only … the bright fluid that gushes from her doesn’t look much like blood. Then the camera lingers, however, and when a woman rushes to embrace her undead husband and he takes bites from her flesh, her blood flows in abundance. It’s horrific but, like the gunplay that precedes it, just a glimpse of the resulting gore. What follows establishes just how graphic the violence in the film will be, first with an exchange of gunfire then with a showstopping moment from makeup-and-effects wizard Tom Savini: a zombie’s head exploding after ending up on the receiving end of a shotgun blast. Now a hotbed of undead infection, the building’s mostly Black and Latinx residents, understandably distrustful of authorities, have refused to give up their dead. After opening on a Philadelphia TV station that’s descended into chaos-and where a public health expert repeats, in vain, the safety protocols that might have prevented the zombie pandemic-the film shifts to a housing project that’s moments away from being raided. ![]() A sequel to Night of the Living Dead, Romero’s 1968 film that introduced the zombie as we now know it, Dawn’s first scenes find the zombie apocalypse already in progress. George Romero’s classic 1978 horror film Dawn of the Dead begins in a state of high panic. ![]()
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