Blood squirt
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Blood squirt (blood spurt, blood spray, blood gush, or blood jet) is the effect when an artery, a blood vessel in the human body (or other organism's body), is cut. Blood pressure causes the blood to bleed out at a rapid, intermittent rate, in a spray, squirt, gush or jet, coinciding with the beating of the heart, rather than the slower, but steady flow of venous bleeding. Also known as arterial bleeding, arterial spurting, or arterial gushing, the amount of blood loss can be copious, occur very rapidly, and can lead to death.
In popular culture
Squirting blood is used as a visual effect in anime, cartoons, comic books, film (mostly horror – particularly slasher – and action), literature, television series (mostly horror and drama), theater and video games.
Perhaps the earliest epic film to have explicit scenes of blood squirting, often filmed in slow motion, was Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969). It was rated R, then a new category, by the MPAA.
The Monty Python sketch Sam Peckinpah's "Salad Days" (1972) involved an orgy of blood gushing, in a parody of Peckinpah's gore-filled directorial style. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), King Arthur must cut off all four limbs of the Black Knight to pass by in a forest, as the Knight bleeds on him.
Cormac McCarthy's 1985 novel Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West includes a scene in which one of the two Jacksons decapitates the other by a campfire, leading to a graphically described blood spurt.
In the movie National Lampoon's European Vacation, Clark Griswold hits a cyclist with his car. Blood spews out of the cyclist's hand as he points to give directions.
The rape and revenge film I Spit on Your Grave, first released in 1978 and re-released to a wider audience in 1980, contained several gory scenes.
The 1991 film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country has a scene where a Klingon is shot ("phasered") in zero gravity. The blood that spurts out of the Klingon's wounds was created using computer generated imagery (CGI); the animators had to make sure that the blood floated in a convincing manner while still looking interesting and not too gory. The effects artist looked at NASA footage of floating water globules to match the physics of the blood particles.
Video games can use a particle system to create blood squirt effects. The blood-gushing special effects in Mortal Kombat (1992) engendered controversy which only served to boost its popularity.
The 2003 film Kill Bill has several scenes where katana is used in combat, often resulting in squirting of blood.
Conan O'Brien has his head first spiked and then bitten off by two kraken-like sea monsters in the SyFy film, Sharktopus vs. Pteracuda (2014); his head continues to squirt copious amounts of blood as it is tossed by volleyball players.
Television
The television series Dexter concerns the life of a blood spatter analysis specialist Dexter Morgan, who is a serial killer working for the Miami Police Department
The 2010 television series Spartacus: Blood and Sand has "geysers of blood [that] gush from the bodies of the newly dead", and "every blood spurt is filmed in slow motion and stop-action".
See also
- Bloodstain pattern analysis, in forensic science
- Bodily mutilation in film#Blood
- Spurt of Blood, a 1925 French surreal play
- Theatrical blood
