Blood, Breasts and Beasts - But first, the Blood!

 

Welcome back, fellow Mutants!

     For my following few articles, I would like to focus on the Three B's of our Mutant Fam Oath: Blood, Breasts, and Beasts. This is an excellent opportunity to remind myself of the significance of this portion of our calling card. This week, we'll look at Blood and its history in cinema.

     As we all know, blood is the liquid life force necessary to sustain us. Being an integral part of our make-up, it has fascinated and repulsed humankind since its inaugural involuntary shedding. It consists of red and white cells, plasma, and platelets. We are intimately connected to it and have been throughout our history. It's  importance to uncivilized humanity for thousands of years as tribute and sacrifice can't be under stated. This all has translated into a primal recognition, reverence, and fear and, as such, we have figuratively injected it into our arts, like most things that carry this sort of influence on our species. Now, let's take a look at it within cinema, shall we?

     To really understand how impactful the idea of bloodshed has been in entertainment, we have to travel back to ancient Roman gladiatorial times. Romans would put on plays for their bloodthirsty audiences that would involve removing actors about to die in the scene and replacing them with convicted criminals. The criminals were set to be executed, so this was also a part of their justice system. While seemingly barbaric in this more civilized age, it was a tactic used to draw huge crowds to their amphitheaters. During Shakespearean times, for theatrical purposes, other sources of fake blood were used (including but not limited to animal blood). Different materials were utilized, as theater progressed, to create the fake blood that would splatter across the stage. Regarding theater before film, of particular interest to us Mutants is the Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol (translated as the Theater of the Puppet), also known as the Grand Guignol, which operated from 1897 until it closed in 1962. It specialized in naturalistic horror short plays and was infamous for its ubiquitous use of gore and fake blood. If you were so inclined, I'd encourage you to read up on the Grand Guignol. It's a rather exciting piece of theatrical history.

     In some time shortly after, silent film began to gain traction, and while blood was used in the colorless films, it was minimal. Even in Nosferatu, where the protagonist is known to be a creature who subsists by drinking it, very little blood is shown on screen. This was primarily due to the fact that filmmakers didn't want to alienate possible audience members by showing something some viewers may find repugnant. This was exacerbated by the possibility of government censorship, untested at this early point in cinema, and they wished to keep as much creative control as possible over their products. This is because the Supreme Court had initially ruled that films were commerce, not art. Therefore, they weren't protected by the First Amendment. Eventually it all led to implementation of the Hay's Code, a heavy-handed regulation and set of rules that self-censored much of cinema and all but wiped out blood of any type from being shown on celluloid. 

     It would be World War II that would begin to instigate changes in cinema and its representation of blood and gore. Filmographers capturing battles on the front lines would bring footage back home to the states. Filmmakers wanted to capture the same viscera of war in their wartime movies. In 1952, the Supreme Court also updated its ruling on film and the First Amendment, saying movies should be protected as artistic expression under it. Filmmakers would quickly take advantage of this new freedom of expression, with one of the most notable instances coming from a British director, Alfred Hitchcock, and his seminal film Psycho. Hitchcock let loose with the legendary shower scene, in which we see gallons of Janet Leigh's character Marion's blood wash down the floor drain. Audiences were not prepared for this after being sheltered for decades by the Hay's Code, and blood became a minor character in much of cinema.

     Hollywood horror would eventually become awash in blood. While Psycho was kept in black and white (partly to stymie the effect that much 'realistic' blood would have on the audience), we would soon see cinematic blood of all colors and hues, from the almost brownish gel used in 1956's Moby Dick to the reddish-orange goo that proliferated Hammer horror films through the '70s, and the brightly red shine present in all giallo films. Colloquially coined 'Kensington Gore,' theatrical blood would begin to ramp up with directors like Stanley Kubrick and his elevator scene in The Shining and Wes Craven's dropping gallons of the goop during the bedroom scene in A Nightmare On Elm Street.


     In the end, blood would be as vital and necessary to the horror genre as it is to ourselves – a pumping, life-sustaining substance that we,  as Mutants, can't do without.