Chocolate, cherries and putrid guts: the gruesome reality of on-screen gore

Human intestines are chewy and sweet and wriggle down the throat like udon noodles. An index finger has a rich tang and delightful crunch. As for a chest wound, oozing warm blood, it’s to be sucked on as delicately as a lover’s lips.

In his new film, Bones and All, Timothée Chalamet’s Lee and his lover Maren, played by newcomer Taylor Russell, chomp through a smorgasbord of flesh. They play a couple of young outcasts drifting through the beaten-down byways of Eighties America – a Gen X Thelma and Louise. Directed by Luca Guadagnino, it has the same woozy alchemy as his 2017 film Call Me By Your Name, which launched Chalamet’s career.

As in that Italian romance, in which Chalamet’s naive student mooned after Armie Hammer’s older man, its stars are united by an illicit love – except this time it’s for human meat, rather than homoerotic bella vita. (No Armie Hammer jokes at the back, please.)

Bones and All is a film to sink your teeth into, unsettlingly blurring horror and romance. It’s striking, too, for the palpable relish with which these fine young cannibals tear into their gristly feasts. And small wonder, when you consider what the prop team were actually feeding Chalamet and Russell.

“Luca [Guadagnino] said we were eating corn syrup,” Russell told Slashfilm. “But I know that I wasn't, because I remember the incredible effects team told me that it was maraschino cherries, dark chocolate, and Fruit Roll-Ups...it was very sweet and [tastier] than anything else you could imagine.” But Hollywood viscera hasn't always tasted so sweet.

Elaborate make-up and practical effects stretch back to the beginnings of commercial cinema. A century ago, Max Schreck was transformed into the skeletal Count Orlok in F W Murnau’s Expressionist masterpiece Nosferatu. Even now, his stylised silhouette, with its claw-like fingernails and deeply-lidded eyes, sends shivers down the spine. A decade or so later, Charles Laughton’s Quasimodo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) showed how makeup could bring to life nightmarish grotesquerie and deep sympathy.

But it was American make-up artist Dick Smith who popularised horror make-up and “blood gags” – industry lingo for gory special effects. He won an Oscar for his work on Amadeus, but his work on The Exorcist (1973) truly demonstrated the potential of the artform. He masterminded Linda Blair’s spinning head and projectile vomiting – some of horror’s most enduring and unsettling images. In David Cronenberg’s Scanners, meanwhile, he engineered the film’s gruesome calling card when Michael Ironside’s Darryl Revok explodes a man’s head with his mind. To achieve its full splattered glory, he filled a mocked-up head with dog food, fake blood and chopped rabbit livers before blowing it up with a shotgun.

Less splashy but still shocking, in The Godfather, Smith constructed some of the first live-action blood effects. For the scene when Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone offs Sollozzo and McCluskey in a restaurant, he built a fake latex forehead with an exploding blood squib to pour blood through a pre-drilled hole. It added immeasurably to the dirt-under-the-fingernails realism of Francis Ford Coppola’s drama.

In fact, realism was Smith’s watchword. Prior to his work in the late Sixties and early Seventies, filmmakers made do with the same make-up tools as theatre, including John Tynegate’s famous “Kensington Gore”, a corn-syrup-based fake blood formula. Bright-red under stage lights, it looks luridly gaudy on camera, and its extensive use in Hammer Horror features is an indelible part of their creaky, splash-dash aesthetic.

Smith was dissatisfied with this approach, and made one crucial tweak to the formula – the addition of Photo Flow, a wetting agent used in film development. It gave on-screen blood an oozy viscosity and the right level of sheen.

“I’m very particular about blood,” says Howard Berger, an Oscar-winning make-up artist who has worked on more than 200 films and TV shows including Patriots Day and Breaking Bad –  including the famous face off episode in which Gus's head explodes. He has also just released a book, Masters of Make-Up Effects, about the century-old industry. “But Smith’s formula reinvented the wheel. When I was 12, I wrote to him asking for it – and now, 35 years later, my company still uses it.”

Berger is Quentin Tarantino’s make-up guy, having worked with him on all his films since Reservoir Dogs. And unsurprisingly, the master of genre cinema is a connoisseur of on-screen splatter.

“On Kill Bill, we burned through 500 gallons of blood in the House of Blue Leaves scene,” he remembers. “At the studio, we have multiple blood formulas – human, zombie, vampire, which has a pearlescence to it and looks good in low light. But we also have a Quentin Tarantino specific blood.

“We were on the set of Kill Bill and Tarantino was berating the prop guys – he wanted this shade of blood from the Sixties and Seventies Samurai movies which inspired him. I know what it's like to be in the sights of Tarantino, so I ran upstairs and added a little bit of milk to the blood, which gave it the right transparency. I handed it to the prop guy behind his back and we were working happily again.”

Berger is one of a generation of make-up artists who changed Hollywood in the Eighties. This scrappy gang – which included Tom Savini, Rick Baker and Rob Bottin – grew up on a diet of Universal monster flicks and fanzines such as Famous Monsters of Filmland, honing their childhood obsessions in back bedrooms with equipment scrumped from parent’s kitchens. A few years later, they made their mark on the industry with a wave of low-budget, ultra-violent horrors.

Berger, for instance, got his break aged 19, working alongside Tom Savini and his future business partner Greg Nicotero on 1985’s Day of the Dead. Filmed in a mine-shaft in Pennsylvania, the shoot involved long hours, little sunlight – and a strong stomach.

“There was one scene where a character had to be torn apart, so Greg [Nicotero] went out and brought buckets of guts from an abattoir,” he recalls. “But we were about to go on Christmas break, so he put them in the refrigerator for when we got back.

“Except the power went out when we were away. When we came back two weeks later, it was the worst thing I’d ever smelt in my life. It was horrendous – but we had to shoot. So Greg just poured bleach on it to try and kill the smell. But the stink on set was so intense. In fact, there’s a behind-the-scenes video of that moment when the cast are pulling the guts out, and as soon as it was cut, all the actors just started retching. That was when we realised we needed to use fake guts.”

Smell aside, the once-common practice of using real-life gore in films has caused other problems. For instance, the Italian special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi’s work on the dog-mutilation scenes in A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin was so horribly realistic that its director, Lucio Fulcio, was prosecuted for animal cruelty. He would have faced a two-year jail sentence if Rambaldi hadn’t proved in court that the animal carcasses were mock-ups. Similarly, Ruggero Deodato’s found-footage horror Cannibal Holocaust became notorious for depicting the slaughter of animals – and, after its release, Deodato had to provide evidence he hadn’t murdered the actors in his pursuit of verisimilitude.

More surreally, many viewers were convinced the Japanese Guinea Pig film – released in six parts – was an actual snuff flick. Conceived by manga artist Hideshi Hino, it depicted hideous sexual violence and torture in a ultra-low-budget, grainy fashion. So realistic was the second part, Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood, that when the actor Charlie Sheen encountered it in 1991 he was persuaded it was the recording of a genuine murder. He contacted the FBI, who opened an inquiry and interviewed Hino and the film’s American distributor. They only dropped the case when they were shown a making-of documentary, proving it had been faked.

Berger, though, doesn’t look back fondly on this naturalistic era. Alongside animal corpses, human skeletons were used – most infamously in the scene in Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist when JoBeth Williams finds herself in a pool full of bones. Her horror at finding out they were real is entirely unsimulated.

“We used to get skeletons from medical schools,” explains Berger. “In fact, there was one company which specialised in supplying Hollywood, but we began to get suspicious when we noticed their teeth were all f_____ up. And we figured out they were coming from India – they were killing people, sending them to the skeleton factory and getting a few bucks for it. So it’s now illegal to buy human skeletons. But I still have a couple of skulls I brought in the Eighties which sit on my desk and give me the willies.”

If anything, Hollywood today has swung the other way. Practical effects are elaborately choreographed and painstakingly risk-assessed, especially if it involves big-name stars ingesting gore, as in Bones and All. Any moulds for creating, say, silicon guts will themselves have to be approved for human consumption. Fake blood now comes gluten-free as standard.

Method-acting affectations, such as the (vegetarian) Leonardo DiCaprio insisting on eating a real bison liver on set of The Revenant, are frowned upon. Delays cost thousands of dollars a day: accounts departments don’t look fondly on actors holed upon in their trailers with gastric issues after choking down raw meat. “If George Clooney wants to eat real intestines, then knock yourself out. But count me out,” laughs Berger. “It’s like: ‘Guys, it’s the movies. It’s called make-believe.’”

Besides, the greatest effects have always relied on misdirection and sleight-of-hand. The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Berger points out, had very little on-screen blood. And aside from its gore-slick finale, Bones and All largely continues this trend; despite its 18 certificate, its worst moments are implied, rather than shown.

Yet even when effects are explicit, trickery helps sell the illusion. For the climax of Kill Bill, when the top of Lucy Liu’s head is neatly sliced off, Berger and his team constructed an appliance makeup, rigged with blood squibs, that sat atop a bald cap. Filmed in false perspective, it gave the impression of the entire top of her skull sliding sickeningly away. “Someone suggested to Tarantino we do it in digital – that was his last day on set!”

Still, many of Berger’s contemporaries have now retired. He occasionally feels like one of a vanishing breed. “We respect movie-making. But we don’t have a lot of people to pass the baton on to. The new [make-up artists] didn’t grow up making stuff in their bedrooms, they grew up on YouTube and social media. And I worry what will happen when it all becomes digital.”

But that day is a while off. Especially when directors of singular vision, such as Tarantino and Christopher Nolan, continue to insist on the power of practical effects. After all, deep in the beating, bloody heart of what make-up artists do is the enchantment of cinema: its essence, bones and all.

“That’s it – that’s filmmaking,” says Berger. “When human beings come together and figure out an illusion live on-camera. It's great magic.”

Bones and All is in cinemas now. Masters of Make-Up Effects is published by Welbeck