How to Make Fake Blood: Dick Smith Recipe — Step-by-Step Guide & Transcript

[00:00] Hey, I'm Jeff Ballard and I'm here at the Rocky Jump Film School to teach you how to make one of the most essential tools in a filmmaker's school kit.

[00:18] But, before we dish on the really good stuff, we are going to open up a bag on the history of the Kino Group. Blood has been shed all over the silver screen for well over 100 years now.

[00:32] Fake blood is arguably cinema's most frequently employed pop. Filmmakers and special effects artists have rewritten the recipe for fake blood hundreds of times over the years. Today there are dozens of different recipes for fake blood. Oftentimes you'll see multiple different recipes in a single film.

[00:45] Blowing blood, pouring blood, fresh blood, old blood, dry blood, scab blood, CGI blood, zombie blood, monster blood, mouth blood, eye blood, etc, etc. What are you gonna do, bleed on me? Quite often, it's simply a matter of aesthetic preference on the filmmaker's behalf.

[01:03] Master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock is often credited with being the first to use chocolate syrup as a blood substitute in the famous Psycho Showers thing. But the truth is, many filmmakers were using chocolate syrup back then. A black and white film?

[01:15] Chocolate syrup made a starker contrast in Red Blood Anyhow, and no one in the theater would ever know the difference. That's the way it went. For decades. From 1915 when we first saw cinematic bloodshed and D.W. Griffith's intolerance, up until about the late 50s, there was no need for a variety of actual red stage blood recipes, until horror filmmakers started filming in Technicolor.

[01:35] In 1957, the maniacs at London-based Hammer Films released their first color feature, The Curse of Frankenstein. The Brits painted the town red with a slew of gory sequels and other gooey hits.

[01:48] Those of you watching with a keen eye might notice the Hammer blood looks cartoonishly bright. American exploitation filmmaker and godfather of gore, Herschel Gordon Lewis, knew this was a problem, and he hired Barfred Laboratories to create a more realistic fake blood than existed at the time.

[02:02] He splattered it all over 1963's Seminole Blood Feast, the realistic gore on display in New Splatterfest caused a sensation with the drive-in audience, and, well, the floodgates were opened. But the man who revolutionized movie blood?

[02:15] That was Dick Smith. Employed by a new crop of filmmakers fresh out of film school and with a penchant for realism, Smith was tasked with creating ever more realistic fake blood recipes, ones that ran over skin and soaked in a fabric just like the real thing.

[02:29] Almost too real. When the Motion Picture Association of America saw the first cut of Taxi Driver's climactic bloodbath, they threatened it with an X rating. Director Martin Scorsese had to desaturate the climax just to get that R rating.

[02:42] FX legend Smith passed his recipe down to guys like Winston and Savini, and then on to Baker and Bottin. Each perfected their own brand before passing their recipes along to the next generation,

[02:54] and so on and so on. Thank you. You're welcome. Whether it's Thorbot, Homemade, or CGI, none is considered hands-down better than the others, which is just a problem. Storytelling tools chosen by the director to control their artistic and dramatic vision.

[03:08] See, French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard was originally criticized for his overuse of bright, unnaturalistic blood in his movies. When Cahiers du Cinema shook its finger at his use of blood in Perrault, Grosard shot back,

[03:20] that blood, it's red. You got red on you. Alright, time to make some blood. But I'm going to need the help of an assistant today, so let me introduce my friend, Joey Scummo.

[03:34] Gary Coe. Hey, Gary, here. Hey, what's up? Hey, Coe, cool. I'm Gary Coe. How's it going? Doing good. You want to make some blood today? Absolutely. So these are all the different ingredients. We're going to focus on a variety of different recipes. Rather than making just one particular type of sludge, we were focused on the fact that they are made.

[03:48] Most of you have a lot of this stuff in your cupboards at home right now, you wouldn't even know. The rest of the stuff you can pick up at the local grocery store. Some of these ingredients are easily found in Amazon. So let's get started. Yeah, what do we got here? Okay, this is your base. This right here is a clear corn syrup called Carob.

[04:03] So why don't we each start with a bundle, and go ahead and dump in a whole quart of it. Now you got your red food coloring. You got our silver big jar here.

[04:15] You don't necessarily need to start. You're going to make a fire quart with corn syrup base. You're going to need a couple of tablespoons of red food coloring. Let's say we'll go with four tablespoons. Again, this is all in approximation. We're going to list...

[04:27] That was four? That was four. Okay. Four tablespoons. Exactly. We going to list all the recipes Easy How many was that One and three quarters Yeah there I get it It all approximation It does not have to be precise

[04:42] No two recipes are exactly like... Here, you can go ahead and throw these out. So this right here, believe it or not, is the most simple blood recipe you can create. This is do it yourself, two ingredients,

[04:54] now you've got some blood. This is definitely darker. I don't think I put it in. juice it up, juice it up. We should get our gloves on. Yeah we probably should have done that before.

[05:06] Alright now let's say we want this a little less goopy, we want it to flow a little bit. Yeah. Just spray some water in there. Inch that up. Now this is really good flowing blood. So before we had a real sticky mixture. Remember that scene in Hooper and Roger Rabbit when you go...

[05:23] I'm going to add just a little bit of blue now. Very carefully, one drop at a time. Stir it in, see what you get.

[05:36] Now this is like a very fresh, we just cut an artery, thick, oxidized, bluish blood. I'm going to add a little yellow to mine. Do you want some blue? No, I'm going to do just yellow in mine.

[05:48] This is like a few hours old look. look more like that orangey yellow blood and again because of what the theme called for see that's a little better than that pink look we got look at this we got really nice

[06:00] and blue it's a fresh blue color right still a little thick a little smoothy you want to thicken this up a little bit right yeah yeah not quite ready not quite right yet okay you can get away with this this would be okay for throwing on the wall yeah you know you get a

[06:13] good flower effect yeah as you can see it doesn't really blend into the clothes all that much right It's not a good red color, but we want to thicken this up a little bit. We want to darken it. Like, this is just cocoa powder. This is the, again, it's on the baking aisle.

[06:28] We got some cocoa. Stir that up. Now what's this for? This is going to thicken and darken the recipe. Okay, we got that thick corn crisp. You really got to mix it in. Not bad. Now you've got a far

[06:41] thicker, starting to coagulate material here. Yeah, it's looking pretty good. This also tastes a lot better. You want to flip it here? No. I can't really. It tastes like pancake batter. Can you see how chunky that is? Let's just check this out. It's a little better, right?

[06:53] Yeah. It's a fresh paint. Fresh colored, it's not as pink. Yeah. It's a nice... The problem with the first time I ever used blood is that when it got on my clothes it dried pink. Hey. Well, how's that? Yeah, it looks like a hammer. Nice and thick. It sticks if you want to do exploding heads, caner style.

[07:05] You got a fun little thing. Yeah. It's a nice little thing. It's a nice little thing. It's a nice little thing. It's a nice little thing. It's a nice little thing. I'm going to do exploding head, caner style. Much better.

[07:17] I'm going to give it a shot. Looks like weird. Delicious. Taste it. It's pretty good.

[07:30] There you have that. Evil Dead Blood. Evil Dead Blood started with this exact same recipe. Now we're talking. And then they've added just quite simply a little non-dairy cream. So, I'm going to add some of that in there.

[07:43] Cool. This is the recipe. They didn't use blue like we have in yours. Only they started with the mostly red food coloring and a little yellow. This is far more opaque. It does not look like real blood.

[07:56] Yeah, that's what they were going for. Even that blue is a little more cartoony, loony-toony. This is a very cartoony looking blood. It's very thick, very soupy, with the cociacus and all this stuff. Yeah.

[08:08] You know? I'm going to go up and look at the wall. Really stick it to the wall. I'm going to go up and look at the wall. Again, it's good if you're not going for a realistic look, but again, it's red. It's not necessarily

[08:21] blood, it's red. It's a cloth before you go into it. We want to get to the yogurt part, right? Yogurt blood, you see the alien? Yeah. This is some yogurt, half-yolk yogurt, and a little bit of milk.

[08:33] Just throw that in there. Okay. We got a little renin-arb, but this is Android blood. So it's Android blood. So I just wanted to illustrate the fact that not all blood has to be red. Of course you need to bleed red because you've got a segmented spot.

[08:45] Now green blood, this right here, suffices. There's Android blood that you've seen in the movie Sashim. The only color you want is just the source of the blood. So you get green, now you've got alien blood.

[08:57] This is the type of recipe that you control too. Sure, sure. Oh my god! This is a dark corn syrup.

[09:10] You can use it as a base if you wanted something again say you wanted to create like a two week old course and you wanted to start with a dark corn syrup base you wouldn get away from this bright red one. Yes.

[09:22] So I'm going to throw this up. And this just grows. This dark corn syrup develops a nice thick skin on it once you set it out. If you wanted to create something that you want to coat your after in that's going to

[09:34] jab over, that's how you get this one right here. Nice, thick, veiny, disc-ish. Yeah, that is just a... And it's specifically dark corn syrup? Yeah, dark corn syrup.

[09:46] See, look how thick it is. Yeah, that's definitely good. There you go. All right. One last thing I wanted to show you. One last thing. You can tell that this stuff stinks, right? You get red on everything.

[09:58] Now, let's say you're a film student. Oh, I know. You want to coat your dorm walls in blood so you're afraid of losing your deposit. What you can do is add a little bit of dishwashing detergent to any of these recipes.

[10:11] You can thicken them up a little bit and it makes it easier to wash any of your materials, your wardrobe, your walls, what have you, and get some of that redness. You can just start with a soap base instead of corn syrup.

[10:23] It's not going to be sticky. You cannot use this in your mouth, but around the eyes. This would be good for getting on upholstery, a nice hardwood floor, or on the walls. And again, you don't want to look and this is soap base, it's going to wash right out.

[10:37] Yeah, after the fact. So technically only like this section right there will wash out. Exactly. Yeah, because we're soaping it. The rest of it is just going to stay. Yeah, it's just going to stay. But again, looks pretty good, just like the last one.

[10:50] Entirely different base, can't use that in our next video. So that's that. All of these recipes, if you notice, are for like a fresh, drippy, runny blood. If you want something that's going to dry and take on and coagulate more like a real blood,

[11:07] it's very difficult to do that with a corn syrup base. There's a lot of products that are available online. For example, this one right here, the Real Creations, this is called Real Blood. This stuff looks like the rest. This is not something that is fake.

[11:21] This is a toxic material. You don't want to use this on the mouth and eyes. There's a great color to it. And if you let this sit for a while, once it dries out, it'll start to thicken or cake

[11:33] and coagulate, clump and crack like you would see with actual blood. So this right here, real blood. These aren't the only guys that make one. You can find all this stuff online. We're gonna post a bunch of them.

[11:45] All right, so that's it for all the goofy, fun stuff that you can make on your own or purchase online. There's one last thing before we wrap this up, though. I gotta buckle this thing. Okay, are you down? Yes. All right. I wanted to recreate the most famous blood recipe

[11:59] known to filmmakers and special effects artists of the life. The one everyone claims to be the most perfect recipe ever created. And that was the one devised by the grandfather of special effects,

[12:11] the one and only, the late Dick Smith. You ready? Yes. Let's do it. Okay. Let's start with a giant mixing board. We're going to recreate Dick Smith's classic blood recipe. And again, this one is far more precise than the others.

[12:23] We're going to post the recipe below. This one also, like the others, starts with a Karo syrup base. So we're going to dump that in here. This is a clear Karo syrup, this is not the dark Karo syrup. You start with a Karo syrup base, right?

[12:35] Then you're going to use powdered food coloring. So instead of the liquid stuff, which Dick experimented with, and said affected the opacity of the blood, and he wanted to get it as close to real looking, flowing human blood as possible,

[12:50] he found best results with powdered food coloring. stuff is a little more difficult to find, I believe we found some on the market. So you got a couple ounces of the red-potted food coloring. Again, we're going to post the exact recipes below. So you got a little red, a little yellow, go ahead and stir that up for me, Joey.

[13:06] Sure. So far, this is entirely edible, also entirely perishable material. Like we were talking before, with all these other recipes, since they're food-based, they will mold, they will go bad on

[13:20] So, this is a product that you want to have a transfer and be mixing up new blood everyday and use on the side of the stage of the diastole or the exit system, the taxi driver. So, he threw in what's called methylcarotene. Now this is a preservative.

[13:33] And this is an anti-mold agent. It has a variety of different purposes. But for this application, I want to prevent your food-based blood mixture from molding on you. The second to last ingredient is Kodak Boil Flow.

[13:45] This is used in film processing. And what it does in the blood recipe here is it recreates a similar consistency again to human blood most specifically the way it will sting a shirt

[13:59] A lot of these other mixtures you see, they don't necessarily sting, they kind of stick to the area where it's been applied. This will recreate sort of a flowy mixture. So with a one quart chair serve base, we want to do roughly two ounces of Kordak Photo Flow.

[14:15] This is toxic stuff. So this is no longer good to use in your actor's mouth. So go ahead and stir that up good. And the last thing, just a couple ounces of water.

[14:28] Just to thin this up. Go ahead and stir that up. And we can already see, so if you use this in taxi driver, this is what blobs when you're recovering.

[14:40] covered in head-dip tones at the end of that film. This is what pours out of Sterling Hayden's head when he gets shot in the god-fuckin'-ball.

[14:55] This is the exact reference you want. You can see it's got this rich, fresh, like, fresh open wound. I haven't made this before. Color is really great. Now, again, film size has to be taken into consideration.

[15:09] This looks great on Kodak Fuji stock, you know back in the 70s. May not look good with the particular type of camera that you're using today. So you're going to want to experiment just like you would with any other crop. Use it under certain lighting conditions.

[15:22] You can add yellow, you can add blue. Mix it up, experiment, see what works best. Go nuts. That looks great. Doesn't it? Looks really good. So that's it.

[15:34] These are all the different recipes you guys can create with the exception of the Dix-Mith This is the Dick Smith recipe, which all these ingredients are found online. Any of you die-hard gorehounds out there who want to recreate this on their own, you can find all this stuff on Amazon and elsewhere.

[15:48] And again, we'll post the links below. The rest of this stuff can be found in the local grocery store. All these other more professional products that have a longer shelf life can be found at make-it-perfect retailers, particular types of country.

[16:02] Is this one of those, what do you guys have? These are the blood caps. It's like a little magic trick. Do you bite into it? It's a gel cap filled with a bio-drable non-toxic sometimes

[16:14] mis-flavored blood recipe. You want that zombie vampire. Like it went bad? No, it's just like sour flavored. I'm sure it's fine. Yeah, it's sour shit.

[16:26] Oh, that's hot. Oh. Oh. Oh, man. Yeah. It's awful.

[16:38] Like, oh, it's sour. And bitter. It tastes like... It's disgusting. Well, after all that talk, you were like, oh, yeah, you put this in your mouth and all this shit. I was like, what are you talking about?

[16:51] It tastes like ass. Oh, it's like not mixed with air. You know? Pardon me. I'm sorry, I didn't even know how long you guys... I gotta warn you, it's not the most pleasant material, but it certainly gets the point across.

[17:09] I would rather do the cocoa. So how do we end this thing? You should probably say that. So how do we end this thing? Joey, thank you so much for being my assistant today.

[17:22] I couldn't have done this without you. Yeah, you could have. Thank you for having me, though. This was a lot of fun. Again, this is just a good place to start. Yeah. But thanks, Tom Red. Do it. Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween.

[17:58] Thank you.

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