Guts And Glory

When you need on-screen claret – or sputum, emesis and excrement – where do you turn? We delve into the horror SFX department to find out what they use for blood, puke and poop…

- JANE CROWTHER

It’s like Art Attack, but with bodily fluids,” chuckles Daniel Martin when describing his job, which often entails “looking at horrible websites and reference books and getting a feel for how a body comes apart”. Martin is not a psycho, but a special-effects designer whose company, 13 Finger FX (@13fingerfx), has provided squeamish moments for a catalogue of movies from High Rise, Colour Out Of Space and In Fabric to Lords Of Chaos and The Human Centipede 2.

A keen magician as a kid, Martin transferred his trick-of-the-eye skills to designing stomach-churning SFX and now spends his days figuring out how to make grue and gore cinematic (having a pathologist father-in-law helps, he admits). “There’s no greater satisfaction than them calling ‘cut’, and hearing a director say, ‘That was so gross!’” he says. So what does it take to faithfully recreate our mortal fluids? And why are some of them so damned tasty?

There will be blood

“The early blood recipes were all basically just powder paints, which is why those ’70s movies have such lurid, light, bright blood. Then in the early ’70s, Dick Smith came up with his own recipe based on inverted sugar syrup, which became the standard for ages.