High-Pressure Blood

The cure for hiccups.

The human body contains over 12 gallons of blood, sometimes more, under high pressure.

—Rules of Anime, #18

In real life the average adult has ten pints (five litres) of blood. One gallon is equal to eight pints (4.55 liters). When this trope is in play, for 'pints', read 'gallons.' Or more: all living things can contain several dozen gallons of blood, stored under incredible pressures. As a result, almost any damage by a cutting or piercing weapon will result in explosive jets of gore squirting out like a firehose.

The trope is strong in anime and samurai movies. This may stem from traditional Kabuki theater, where the "blood" was really a long red silk scarf thrown in a great big arc.

Ironically, this sheer amount of blood can have the effect of making the violence less disturbing because of how very obviously unrealistic it is. It is a prime example of Refuge in Audacity. It also helps to mask the wound, so the bone and flesh damage is not shown.

In real life the carotid arteries and the aorta do have high pressure that can spurt when cut. Other blood vessels, not so much. In general the limit is 3.3 oz (100ml) at each heartbeat. Some veins may even have negative relative pressure - that's what humans (and presumably giraffes) get for sticking the head up too much. Fiction is so much more fun than nature!

Contrast Bloodless Carnage. See also the Nosebleed effect, where arousal may cause spurts of blood from the nose. If it's used for comedy it's Bloody Hilarious.

Examples of High-Pressure Blood include:

Advertising

  • A Japanese Tea commercial explains that in most cases high blood pressure won't save you. There are exceptions.


Anime and Manga

  • In Cowboy Bebop. The "Black Dog Serenade" episode. Udai Taxim slits someones throat and the blood sprays out like crazy, however since they're in zero gravity. It's probably Justified.
    • What makes this example funny is that there is no wound animated to match the blood - it sprays from the victim's intact neck.
  • Every character in Fist of the North Star (especially minor villains). The show is probably one of the most graphic, violent anime in all of history, and even the most minor of cuts causes a blood spew of several dozen feet. Of course, when the main character possesses the ability to make anyone he feels like literally explode with a couple well-placed punches, this is generally overlooked. The manga is even more violent...
  • The trope is spoofed in the manga version of Bobobo-Bo Bo-bobo, where even the most minor injury causes characters to spit up blood. This joke is completely absent from the anime, though.
  • Kiba from Wolf's Rain. Judging by the amount of blood he loses in individual episodes, he seems to have enough for ten people.
  • Elfen Lied did this quite a few times, especially during the first episode.
  • Ninja Scroll has this trope in its purest form in the last act, albeit using the same scene of brutally slashed ninjas over and over.
  • Soukou no Strain has fountains of blood.
  • Saint Seiya is pretty infamous for this. The fights where one of the contendors (if not both) doesn't lose at least half of his blood are almost rare.
  • The anime Bludgeoning Angel Dokurochan has any injury involving the main characters causing a volcanic eruption of blood to the point (and intentionally so) of being absurd.
    • In the most extreme example, at the end of the final episode of the first season, the main character begins spewing blood at high enough pressure that his entire lower body starts moving around on the floor. Then flying around the room. Then out a window and into the night sky, landing several blocks away.
  • Anyone cut by a Shinigami's sword in Bleach. The worst example has to be when Renji gets hit by the full force of Byakuya's bankai. Cue massive explosion of blood.
    • What Kenpachi did to Tesla is perhaps more spectacular. By getting his hand cut, Tesla manages to make it look like he just got split in half. He didn't, but you wouldn't know it from all the blood he loses. He also does lose that hand.
    • Turn into Low Pressure Blood by Ulquiorra, who defies all logic when it comes to blood. His arm up to his shoulder gets chopped off, but it only gets a few drops going. And his waist down, an arm, and a wing? Good fucking god, there isn't even a speck anywhere! And I'm referring to the manga.
  • Excel Saga—The sickly Hyatt is prone to coughing up blood, then dropping dead in a pool of it. In the final episode of the anime she manages to cough up enough blood to drown the entire world.
  • An odd one goes out to Neon Genesis Evangelion. Angels get injured? The streets run red with blood. In the remake, Rebuild of Evangelion, this is even more extreme, as Angels who are defeated explode into a massive cloud of blood and gore. There is a ocean of blood in the middle of Tokyo-3 after the first fight with Sachiel. Shooting Ramiel ends up in the walls being covered in a wave of platelets. It makes sense, seeing as they're hundreds of feet tall, but my God, you could supply the Red Cross endlessly with what one Angel bleeds out in a fight. The blood is enhanced in Rebuild, and there's even rainbows forming in it. Sweet.
    • In End of Evangelion this trope is taken to its logical extreme when Giant Naked Rei's head comes off. Of course, she is the product of every single person rolled into one, so it's somewhat justified. The pressure is so high that it shoots blood so far that a line of red appears across the moon which is visible at the end of Rebuild!
    • Rebuild 2.0 has the absolute record: when Sahaquiel bites the dust, it explodes into a tsunami of blood. I'm not kidding, Tokyo-3 loses a few skyscrapers due to the pressure. The Angels are in fact beings formed of LCL liquid, essentially blood, and maintain their form with an Anti-Terror Field. If they are damaged, the field weakens and LCL returned to its base form in a gout of blood. If they are killed, their entire body reverts to LCL.
    • Overall, Evangelion is notable for the fact that the violence tends to be infinitely worse when there's minimal blood involved. Watching EVA-03 get physically torn apart with bones, limbs, and intestines flying everywhere with hardly any blood was perhaps the most gruesome sight in the remake movies.
    • Not entirely sure if Sahaquiel has the record. A tsunami of blood is fine, but GNR's throat-cut HITS THE MOON! And leaves a visible stain. On a planetoid. Sheesh!
    • This is probably all to do with the Square-Cube Law. An Eva is basically a giant human, so something that big is gonna need a lot of blood.
  • At the end of the Death Note anime, Mikami stabs himself WITH A PEN in grief, resulting in a blood fountain so over the top it's sometimes considered an unwitting source of humor amongst the otherwise dark tone of the scene. That was the only episode to get a TV-MA rating on Adult Swim.
  • Almost all the deaths in Basilisk: Kouga Ninpu Chuu.
  • Berserk. When you have a main character who wields a BFS with the greatest of ease (and insane speed), this is bound to happen, particularly since his kills tend to involve things like limbs and heads getting sheared right off, and at least several instances of people and monsters getting sliced in half.
  • Used in the Devil May Cry Animated Series. It's particularly noticeable when Dante guns down a four-foot-tall bad guy in the second to last episode and an overhead shot shows a river of blood on the ground.
  • Used in Mobile Suit Gundam: Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team when Norris Packard stabs a guntank through the cockpit. Blood splatters all the way up to his Mobile Suit's head.
  • Mahou Sensei Negima usually averts this, which making it much more significant when it does occur. So far it's only happened twice. It happened during a Battle in the Center of the Mind to show the pain that Negi was experiencing. The one that occurred in reality has Negi vomiting several gallons of blood after getting his internal organs more-or-less pulverized by Jack Rakan in the final match of the tournament.
    • Also played for laughs when Kaede is sent flying into a stone wall at about 90 miles an hour. Anya wonders if she's dead, and she immediately clears from the smoke with blood over her forehead and what looks like a water fountain of blood coming out of her skull. She doesn't even acknowledge it.
  • Done to a ridiculous extent in Angel Cop, where every time someone is shot it is as if someone just blew up an extra-large can of pasta sauce.
  • Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, despite being almost as bloody as Elfen Lied on many occasions, actually manages to avoid this. Blood does fly around, but it's spatters from the force of impact (killing is almost always done by bludgeoning; when the weapon is a knife or other bladed object, it's repeated forceful stabbing).
  • Detective Conan at the very first chapter has a scene where a girlfriend cuts off the head of her boyfriend during a dark part of a roller coaster ride. Once the coaster leaves the darkened area, you're greeted with a man's who has a fountain of blood for a head. It is so bloody that the anime replaced it with a glaring light, showing where the head once was. Other than that, the series has very realistic blood-spread.
  • In Baccano! Ladd slits a mook's throat to send his blood splashing out like a spray can.
  • Ayashi no Ceres, an anime misinterpreted by many as a romance anime. Enjoy seeing Wei lose blood after losing his eye, kids.
  • In Claymore, which is basically Berserk with girls wielding big swords, one attack from an Awakened One and you will gush blood. Not to mention the effects of those swords used by the warriors. And lets not forget the battle with Rigaldo. I call it The Bath of Blood.
  • The virus in Emerging uses this as its most dramatic means of infecting new victims.[1]
  • Expect this at all times during battle scenes in Hellsing, especially when Alucard starts going for an opponent's throat.
  • The anime version of Violinist of Hameln: One early episodes features an old man getting stabbed in the chest and immediately spewing a fountain of the stuff.
  • In the final of the future arc in Katekyou Hitman Reborn! Byakuran fights using his blood that rains out of his body in gallons.
  • In the manga adaptation of Breath of Fire IV, the scene in chapter 19 where Fou-lu decapitates Soniel is an explicit example—Soniel ends up geysering for a good bit afterwards.
  • Hanaukyo Maid Tai season 1 episode 4. Ryuuka runs headfirst into an I-beam Taro is carrying and blood starts spurting out of her forehead like a geyser.
  • Various fights in Blood Plus invoke this for dramatic effect. For example, Saya's first encounter with a Chiropteran ended with a severed lower Chiropteran body spilling a fountain of blood around a classroom.
  • At the end of Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin, when Gin decapitates Akakabuto, the blood bursts up like a geyser, pushing the head with it.


Film

  • Dozens of people in the first installment of Kill Bill. The effect was achieved with the old-fashioned method of filling condoms with blood and putting them under the actors' clothing.
    • The animated section covering the origin of O-Ren Ishii uses this as well. When her father is stabbed, geysers of blood spray from the wound and spray all over the room.
  • All characters in Evil Dead, with the exception of Ash. Taken to ridiculous extremes in Army of Darkness, where there is a huge fountain of blood.
    • People who went to see the musical adaptation of the Evil Dead films were warned to bring plastic macs if they were sitting in the front three rows. Although some who went to see it wore white t-shirts and kept them afterwards as souvenirs.
  • A scene in The Addams Family movie where Wednesday and Pugsley are having a duel at a school play; Pugsley loses an arm, and Wednesday gets slashed across her wrist and throat. (Don't worry, the limbs were fake. Don't ask where they got the blood from, though). By the time Wednesday finishes her fake death scene, the first two or three rows of the audience are drenched in their blood.
  • The 2007 film of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street uses this frequently. It also subverts it for the deaths of Sweeney himself and his wife Lucy. For those two, despite having their throats slashed just like everyone else, the blood flows out gently without spurting, unlike everybody else.
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street. A teenage boy is dragged into his bed by Freddy, disappearing into a hole—and a massive geyser of blood comes exploding out. No, this was not just in the nightmare world; later in the movie, we see cops carrying down buckets from the boy's room. Lots of them.
  • 300 features very stylized CG blood that sprays out from wounds to suggest the art style of the comic book it was based on.
  • The Xenomorphs of the Alien series are an especially dangerous version. Any damage to their carapace yielded high-pressure spurts of highly acidic blood. Apparently, they suffer from species-wide hypertension.
  • 28 Days Later has this trope incarnated in the form of Mailer. He's not vomiting. He's not bleeding from the mouth. He's literally gushing blood on people. And he never runs out. Unlucky for you, The Virus spreads through contact with membranes of the eyes and mouth as well (and probably the nose, just to be cruel) so... it's like trying to hold your breath while someone aims a firehose at your face. Charming.
  • Played for laughs in Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Midway through, Van Helsing has the hero pound a stake into vampirized Lucy Westenra. At the first blow of the hammer, the hero gets drenched with about 30 gallons of blood rocketing out of the coffin with the force of a fire hose. Van Helsing is safely out of the way, having taken shelter behind a pillar.
    • Also an example of Enforced Method Acting. The actor was not told there would be that much blood and is visibly trying not to laugh.
    • Another example is when Renfield gets a "paper-cut" and an obnoxious fountain of blood shoots out of his finger, much to the delight of Dracula.
  • The duel in Sanjuro (1962 Kurosawa Samurai Flick) in which the antagonist, when struck, shoots a horrific stream of blood accompanied by a loud discord.
  • Also by Kurosawa, Ran's ending showcases one of the best cases when General Kurogane beheads the treacherously evil Lady Kaede, for all the nasty acts she pulled throughout the film The resultant geyser of blood that spurts across the wall behind is a thing of beauty. The view of the actual decapitation, though, is nicely blocked from view
  • The tendency for "realistic" Vietnam War movies to engage in this is parodied in Tropic Thunder; the scene we see from the film within a film has characters shooting jets of blood from their heads and spewing more intestines than would fit inside their bodies, all while the hero is shot a preposterous number of times to little effect.
  • In the Robert Rodriguez vampire movie From Dusk till Dawn and its various sequels and prequels, blood sprays from the wounded villains and protagonists as though fired from a fire hose.
  • Sy's dream in One Hour Photo, where he gets a bad case of "red eye."
  • For The Machine Girl "Heroic Bloodshed" is a understatement. The amounts of blood these people release is so great they should be dead within seconds. Spraying out firehose pressured blood, that's gotta be releasing a pint a second. But instead they stand around screaming for minutes—if their head is in one piece, and if it is still attached to their body.
  • The director of Tokyo Gore Police (Yoshihiro Nishimura) had worked on special effects for The Machine Girl, so he was sure to include ridiculous amounts of blood spraying everywhere. This reaches a Crowning Moment of Awesome when a character spews enough blood from where his legs used to be that he propels himself through the air.
  • Nishimura also directed Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl, a film about two girls (matching the descriptions in the title) fighting over a guy. For this film, he ups it a notch and has bodies spewing gallons of blood in every other scene.
  • The entire team from The Machine Girl work together on Robo Geisha, in which in addition to the humans and cyborgs who spurt gallons of blood, buildings attacked by the Shiro Robot spurt blood several stories into the air.
  • Several of the victims in Hot Fuzz fall prey to this- though having said that, some of the blood spurts are fake, using ketchup to fake an injury or even death.
  • Kingdom of Heaven could be guilty of this. During the caravan ambush scene, when Guy de Lusignian kills a Saracen, blood spurts up into the and and onto his face. And on a downward stroke.
    • In the three hour Director's Cut, you actually see the brutal damage done by this downward stroke. It cleaves the Saracen from shoulder to opposite hip, presumably slicing through his heart which could potentially explain the spray of blood.
  • Happens quite a bit in Sin City the movie.
  • In Uwe Boll's ultra cheesy film |Blood Rayne, this is used a lot with very cheap looking blood spurting effects that look like red paint.
  • The explosive death of the giant mako in Deep Blue Sea, in which so much blood fountains into the sky and spreads out in a massive circle that it suggests the animal was nothing but a shark-shaped bag of red stuff.
  • Used for black comedy in National Lampoon's European Vacation, when the Griswalds' car knock Eric Idle off his bicycle. Dismissing his injuries as Just a Flesh Wound, Idle offers them directions to the next tourist trap, and a thin but continuous stream of blood squirts out from his cut wrist in the direction he's pointing.
  • Lots of killer-animal-on-the-loose films. With a slash of the claws or a chomp of the teeth blood and organs will fly everywhere. Especially in aquatic beastie films, where a person gets pulled underwater and a huge bubble of red wells up to mark their demise.
  • Every gore scene in Violent Shit involves copious amounts of blood spraying all over the place. Even the killer getting shot in the shoulder elicits several large squirts.
  • Subverted in Mimic, in which a man falls to his death in an alley and his landing splashes a junked mirror with a massive, sloppy spray of ... white paint, because his head landed on and crushed a paint can.


Literature

  • Beyond all the bloody displays in the Warrior Cats series, the most blatant use of this trope is at the end of Sunset after Brambleclaw stabs Hawkfrost in the throat with a wooden stake. After he removes the stake, blood splashes out of Hawkfrost's wound like there's no tomorrow. Hawkfrost then gets up and proceeds to deliver his Final Speech, which causes blood to flow faster and faster from his wound. By the time he's done, you would expect him to have lost at least three cats' worth of blood; but then he falls into the lake and proceeds to fill it with what little of the red stuff he's got left in him.
    • Tigerstar has some High-Pressure Blood moments, too. Maybe it's genetic? Any time he gets wounded, blood pours out, most notably when he bleeds to death nine times in a row after being wounded by Scourge in The Darkest Hour.
  • The Iliad has some amazing scenes in it. Apparently ancient Greeks had brains that exploded in impact with spears.
  • How Not to Write A Novel recommends not claiming, even if it is more accurate, that blood leaps out of a cut throat "exactly the way juice squirts out of a juice box when a toddler falls on it".


Live Action TV

  • Referenced in a Monty Python's Flying Circus skit where a movie director talks about a scene where "the blood comes gushing out, pshhh! in slow motion". Then, of course, there's the "Sam Peckinpah's Salad Days" skit. And the Black Knight in Holy Grail.
  • Parodied before the trope became famous in an original-cast SNL sketch. Julia Child (as played by Dan Ackroyd) nicks a finger while cutting up some chicken. We don't see anything at first, but soon a drop of blood shows up. The drop becomes a trickle, the trickle becomes a stream.... You get the idea.
  • In Kamen Rider Den-O, dying Imagin usually just explode like most everything in Toku. However, in the third movie, when Momotaros is badly injured fighting Yu-Ki, he exhibits High Pressure Sand (since Imagin are time traveling monsters made of sand) because it's more dramatic that way.
  • In Spartacus: Blood and Sand injuries most often result in a jet of CGI blood shooting across the screen. Injuries ranging from limb removal to puches to the face. In particular, a throat-slit is likely to turn into a high-pressure blood fountain.
  • Though most deaths are portrayed realistically, sometimes the blood spray can be over the top in the Spike show 1,000 Ways to Die. Other times, the show inverts this trope and the wounds yield very little blood, if any at all.
  • Grey's Anatomy: In the two-parter episode "Crash Into Me" a patient's carotid artery (quite literally) blows up. The blood gets everywhere. It's even commented on that the nurse standing next to him looks like Carrie at the prom because she's "wearing, like, half [his] blood."


Music

  • In a strange example is the band GWAR. Their stage show, which consists of killing famous people and GWAR slaves by ripping off their faces or limbs or head or genitals or combinations of said parts. Removal of parts is always followed by ludicrous amounts of high pressure blood, and always directed at the audience. Oderous also douses the audience in other high pressure liquids throughout the show.


Proffesional Wrestling

  • The Indie wrestling federation CZW has an annual tournament of death. Within the usual excesive injuries sustained, there was one particular incident during the third tournament. The wrestler Sexxxy Eddie was fighting in his second match, where he had managed to cut through a vein in his arm. Probably caused by the large amount of glass around the ring. At the end of the match, blood was seen to be visibily arching from the wound, which he then proceeded to drink. Thankfully doctors were on site to patch his arm up with a roll of Duct Tape.


Videogames

  • Various enemies in Nanobreaker spewed gallons of "liquid" every time you hit them. Doing this enough would give your character life and energy boosts (a very literal definition of Leaked Experience).
  • Being killed with a shot to the head in Gears of War with certain weapons will pretty much cause heads to explode. In the sequel, the game has stuff lose what appears to be enough blood to easily knock someone out from the impact of bullets hitting alone. Then, your character falls to the ground to crawl around and bleed on the floor. After that, everyone can shoot your remains for kicks.
  • The original Mortal Kombat games earned at least part of their (at the time) legendary notoriety for the sheer amount of blood that spewed off the fighters with each connected punch or kick. The more recent sequels have toned this down. Very slightly.
    • Although Mortal Kombat 9 takes this trope Up to Eleven. To drive the point home, there is actually an achievement/trophy for spilling 10,000 pints of blood. You will earn it quickly.
  • No More Heroes uses this to the extreme: often, blood will spurn out wildly and cover anything in a 100-yard radius. No to mention, its equivalent of Everything Fades is dead bodies vanishing in a puff of blood—apparently, any non-major character who dies simply explodes into a smoky cloud of blood.
  • Suda 51's earlier title Killer7 also had the blood coming by the gallons: enemies killed normally would spray blood for several seconds before vanishing while those hit in their weakspot would explode into a blood mist, and one character's special ability involved spraying blood from her wrist to break barriers. And then there's Cloudman (4:45 for those who don't want any story spoiling).
  • The defeat of most characters in the original Vandal Hearts game, both allies and enemies, results in a geyser of pixellated blood. Even ghosts and animated skeletons die bloodily. Only stone enemies don't bleed - they explode in a massive shower of small rocks instead.
  • The cutscenes of God of War often show Kratos killing his enemies. These killings usually involve fountains of blood spilling forth.
  • Eternal Fighter Zero is a bloodless game with the sole exception of Ikumi Amasawa. Many of her attacks spill lots of high-pressure blood around; she can collect it for use in her special attacks.
  • When you stab the Colossi's weak points in Shadow of the Colossus, lots of blood spurts out.
  • Side-scrolling shooters Liero and Soldat have copious amounts of blood. Liero's in-game options allow you to have 500% blood amount, although outside game applications can increase this to over 32000%!
  • I Wanna Be the Guy has your tiny character bursting in a huge explosion of blood should he so much as graze an apple. As well as everything else out to kill him. Repeatedly.
  • In Dead Rising, people apparently turn into water balloons when they become zombies, shedding at least a gallon of the red stuff if anything remotely pointy hits them. The same goes for the living, though not to such an extreme. Interesting that Burt and Paul are able to follow Frank to the maintainence room without assistance even after leaving splatters all over the walls.
    • The best example is that you can get a shower head and jam it into a zombie's forehead. It will then rain blood for about thirty seconds, though the zombie will continue to shuffle around (and you can take a picture for hilarity's sake), only falling over when the blood stops flowing. That is some high pressure blood!
  • In the Xbox 360 game Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom, all of the mobs and even the Player Characters have this, especially some of the bosses.
  • Protagonists in Castlevania tend to spray blood everywhere when they run out of health.
    • They turn red and disintegrate into blood, so the blood is pretty much all that's left.
  • The Team Fortress 2 short "Meet the Sandvich" includes a (mercifully censored) variant of this, best summed up by the line: "My blood! He punched out all my blood!".
    • Then there was "Meet the Spy", where the spy's head is utterly obliterated with a thin stream of blood flying out of what's left of his neck.
    • The Eyelander or The Scotsman's Skullcutter. When either scores a kill, it severs its victim's head from their neck, accompanied by a veritable geyser of vital fluids.
  • In the opening of the first Mega Man Zero game, La Résistance Reploids were sliced in half by several Golems' lasers, with blood spilling out. This was of course edited in the English release.
  • Samurai Shodown characters finished off by a blade attack can possibly result in the character standing straight as a large stream of blood exits their bodies, before they slump to the ground, dead.
  • Blowing off a Nazi's head with the upgraded Kar98 in Wolfenstein results in an enormous fountain of blood spewing out of the guy's neck as he slowly slumps to the ground.
  • Breath of Fire IV had a scene where Fou-lu ends up decapitating usurper Soniel with the very Evil Weapon that Soniel back stabbed Fou-lu with. The screen goes to black silhouette, you see Fou-lu's silhouette whip out the sword, and you see Soniel's silhouette suddenly headless and geysering (silhouette) blood. This scene was completely Bowdlerised from non-Japanese versions of the game, to the point where the manga adaption turned the scene—including the graphic depiction of Soniel's decapitation and all the PSI in his aorta -- Up to Eleven in a deliberate Take That.
  • In the Karoshi games, when you throw yourself against spikes or various other death inducing interior your character explodes in a fountain of blood.
  • A finishing move while using a sword style in Jade Empire has your character decapitate the enemy, who falls over with blood fountaining from their exposed neck.
  • Bioware also uses this trope in Dragon Age: Origins, where a decapitation in melee results in a gusher of blood.
  • The fighting game Blood Warrior, in an attempt to one-up Mortal Kombat in the Gorn department, has the fighters stream jets of blood at every opportunity. Even if they're standing in place in a dizzy stance.
  • Fable's decapitations cause fountains of blood to gush from the enemies' bodies.
  • Oh, The Conduit. Headshot a human enemy, you get Pink Mist. Headshot a Drudge alien, and you get a fountain of orange blood gushing from their body, along with their heads exploding.
  • School Days. One of the endings feature a major character ( Sekai) being slit across the throat. After three seconds, two fountains of super high pressure blood spew like hell for around twenty seconds. The weirdest part is that all the other characters just stand there as if nothing happens. In reality when the artery in the neck gets cut, bursts of blood like this are not uncommon. The victim is unlikely to remain standing upright though—and it´s quite a shocking sight for bystanders.
    • Also: Kotonoha's infamous suicide, in which she throws herself off the building Makoto lives in right after he definitely rejects her—and she hits the ground VERY bloodily in front of Sekai and Makoto.
  • Ms. Fortune from Skullgirls is not only an example of this trope, but she also uses it to her advantage. She jettisons blood from her scars for propulsion during her backwards dash, and while her head is severed, she can cause her head to zip along the ground quickly by shooting out a stream of blood from it.
  • The first modern Ninja Gaiden title featured simple head decapitations; the sequel ramped it up to Bloodier and Gorier with limb and complete body dismemberments. The last in the trilogy does away with decaps entirely, replacing it with this trope instead.
  • When Mario dies in Super Mario XP, he dies in a bloodsplosion like Richter Belmont.
  • Some of the more devastating super attacks in Kinnikuman: Muscle Fight cause their victim spill tons of blood. Atlantis's St. Helen eruption, Junkman's Junk Crush attacks, and Mammothman's Ghost Canvas stand out the most.

Webcomics


Western Animation

  • Done comically in The Boondocks episodes "Catcher Freeman" and "The Hunger Strike". Considering the show's anime style, it's to be expected. Also episode "Stinkmeaner 3: The Hateocracy" when someone is decapitated.
  • Used in The Simpsons after Homer's arm is slashed open by broken glass from trying Percussive Maintenance on a jukebox. Also seen in the episode where Homer and Mr Burns are throwing coins off a tall building. One penetrates Lenny's skull and blood spurts from the wound when Carl removes it.
  • The Venture Brothers, "Dr. Quymn, Medicine Woman":

Indigenous chief: *Speaking unintelligible native language throughout*
Dr. Tara Quymn: He says it tore the head off their mightiest warrior... He says it was as if someone shook up a 6-foot can of... blood soda, a-and someone popped the top off.
Indigenous chief: Whoosh! *gesticulating to invoke a fountain*

  • Used on Aqua Teen Hunger Force a number of times. Parodied in one of the opening segments with Dr. Weird, where his latest experiment involves trying to use this as a form of transportation:

Dr. Weird: Gentlemen! Chop off my head with such velocity that my blood will rocket through my neck and propel my lifeless body all the way to Phoenix!
Steve: Okay, uh... what's in Phoenix?
Dr. Weird: Why, it's your momma, Steve! Now get the axe!

Kyle: Dude! How are we gonna move twenty three calves to your house?
Stan: I don't know.
Cartman: I've got it. We could kill Butters, and then float the calves on a river of blood.
Kyle: Don't be stupid, Cartman! Butters doesn't have that much blood in him!
Butters: Eh yeah I do too!


Web Original

Web Animation

  • Played for laughs in the Flash cartoon series Rats On Cocaine. Characters regularly have their limbs fly off in bloody geysers and don't notice it at all.
  • Happy Tree Friends - the cute forest critters hold a lot of blood.
  • Although it's not high pressure, in Bonus Stage Joel notes that Phil has blood drip from his fingers (or lack thereof) for 6 hours. Joel fits the trope; his neck spurts blood after being punched off by a giant fist. This could be explained by Phil having superhero blood.


Real Life

  • Depending on where you are cut, this can happen easily in real life, though the amount of blood is nowhere near the fictional amount. Doctors or nurses who cut into those places either unaware or accidentally can easily get sprayed with spurting blood, which quickly stops shooting so high because of the loss of blood pressure.
  • Hockey player Clint Malarchuk getting his carotid artery severed by a skate during a televised game in 1989. (Videos of the injury can be found on YouTube, but warning: they are very graphic.) Thanks to the efforts of team doctors, he managed to survive the injury and was back to practicing four days later.
  • An errant skate blade caught Florida Panthers forward Richard Zednik during a 2008 game. He somehow retained the presence of mind to fly over to the bench before things got out of hand, but the footage...gah.
  • The horned lizard of America uses this as a weapon. It has specialized sinuses behind its eyes that shoot high pressure blood through a tiny opening when it's under stress. The blood contains foul chemicals that drive off large threats and can be shot up to three feet.
  • Head injuries usually bleed more than injuries to other body areas, mostly because the vascular spasm, a reflexive constriction of damaged vessels, is weaker or absent there. Given a choice between losing more blood or reducing the flow of oxygen to the brain, bleeding is preferable to brain damage.
  • Thomas E. Ketchum, better known under his alias Black Jack, was accidentally decapitated during his execution by hanging (the rope was too long and he had gained weight). According to the 1901 newspaper article about the event, his headless body "pitched forward toward the spectators and blood spurted upon those nearest the scaffold".
  1. ↑ Though not the only means, as it's shown to be transferred through saliva, and is hinted at being airborne.
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