Gore
a vocab word that’s jargon in one of my artistic fields. Also, for Halloween.
This is Halloween…
In honor of a particular upcoming spooky holiday, I wanted to share this old post from 2019, where I describe a day of teaching at [REDACTED] University on Halloween morning (as well as reminisce about gore creation back in the day at RenFaire). It looks like I was staying with my partner at the time of this class, and so I had only one simple light rail trip to get down to campus, and was already in costume and dressed up. I taught two different classes that day, as I recall, and the first one of the day was Stage Combat. What does the curriculum contain, for a theatrical fight class on October 31st? Simple: costumes and gore.
The word ‘gore’ is a term of jargon for the field of theatrical combat and special effects—it refers to blood effects, mainly, though it can widen to include other things. This Halloween of 2019, I took the morning in a different direction than what we had been working on till then and made it a special occasion: an opportunity to teach the stage combat students how to make different types of blood packs. Since the class was focused on live theatre and not film fighting, I kept it to the type of blood you can make and use for stage.
I do have fun making stage blood, and it’s especially fun to do it with a class, who then proceeds to use it with joy and aplomb. Especially on Halloween. But it’s funny—when it comes to gory slashers and bloody horror movies, they’re not really really my (raspberry) jam. I do like me a tense thriller, a fabulous violent action sequence, or a mysterious murder. Even a police procedural or a sexy vampire can be entertaining for me if they’re well done. But the bloodier stuff? Even though I compose theatrical violence as part of my job, I don’t really gravitate towards that sort of thing with my own brain and heart. Funny, huh?
Well I thought it’d be fun to take a look at a rundown of my Halloween day from 2019. Plus, some gory details re: my past gigs at RenFaire, as a sword bro. I’ve revised this Musing a tiny bit, but not much—think of it as a period piece of sorts. Ahem.
Gore
[slightly revised from 10/31/19]
It’s Halloween and I am absolutely dead. I look it, too—no amount of blood created by my students has managed to sustain me, to give me energy nor to ease the physical pains of one as ancient as me.
Probably because: I look dead on account of makeup, I didn’t warm up today, and the blood made by my Stage Combat students this morning was created from dark corn syrup and food coloring. Not exactly a breakfast of champions.
I like doing this realistic vampire makeup on Halloween—it’s a lot easier than concocting a whole costume, and I’m good enough at it that it does make passersby pause. Especially those sleepy ones early this morning on the commuter train: most of them weren’t sure if… I mean, their sidelong eyes said, it *is* Halloween, but… damn that looks real though… till the security guard told me with a twinkle in his eye that I look positively dead today…
The vampire-makeup-as-costume tradition for me began back in the mid ‘90s, when I was in Frequent Flyers Productions’ aerial dance piece called Theatre of the Vampires. Since I had to be in vamp costume all through Halloween and that whole weekend anyway, I just ended up doing that for anything else I was up to, for the celebration of the thinning of the veil. Which usually wasn’t anything, occupied as I was with the show. After I left that company, it was an easy zero budget choice that always looked super cool. I used my old RenFaire outfit as a pirate costume a couple times for the same reason, because of that gig around that same time. And this is why no one wonders why my right wrist bothers me so much these days. Trapezes and swords. And writing. Oh my.
When one has Stage Combat class on Halloween morning, one uses the time wisely—by teaching young people how to cheaply and effectively make stage blood. Laundry detergent (blue, ideally) and red food coloring for bigger body packs, and corn syrup with red & blue food coloring for the stuff that goes in or near the mouth. This year, the kid that was assigned to bring the Karo syrup couldn’t find clear—he brought a big bottle of dark brown stuff instead, which was all he could find at Wal-Mart. I’d never used the dark kind before, but it turns out it’s much better! All you need is a little red added (if indeed that), and it’s perfect! A happy accident, as Bob Ross would have said, as he mixed.
Oh, and sandwich baggies. Not the kind with the ziploc closure—the thin kind, with the flap. What you do is: pour some of whichever liquid (detergent for clothes, Karo for mouth) into one corner of the baggie. Use a little more than you think you should. If the liquid is clear, drop a little red and then a little blue color into it, then mash it up, mixing the color smooth. If the liquid is blue (or dark), only use red. When it comes to color, use a little less than you think you’ll need. Then, twist the rest of the baggie tight, then tie a tight knot very close to the surface of the liquid. Try and get as much air out of the little pocket as you can, or your blood will end up spurting farther than you think when the pack is punctured. This very thing happened to me as I demoed with a heart-sized laundry detergent blood pack this morning, which I Kali-maaa-ed in front of my class as audience, expecting it to rupture and drip down my arm. Well, it did that, but not after having projectile-shot across the stage…
The cool thing about the corn syrup too is that it dries and crystallizes on one’s face, if one doesn’t wash it off right away. Which is perfect for a long day of Halloween appearances.
O, why the long lesson on homemade stage blood, when buying it is easier? Because the homegrown article is a fraction of the price, a much better color, and customizable—you can add chunks to it, or water, or change its color, as needed. Plus you can make a lot, out of one bottle of Karo, one small jar of detergent, and only a few drops of dollar food coloring. Plus, it’s fun.
The final fight of the final day of RenFaire, we’d invite all the walkaround actors, booth babes, anyone, to join us, not just the trained fighters. We’d give the n00bs some nominal things to do, and it would end a-la Hamlet: a giant blood bath. One year, we set up an arm burn, a firearm and squib, a knife throw, an evisceration, some acrobatics….several fancy and unusual moves. Funny enough, that knife throw trick was the first meaningful contact between my now-ex-husband and me. Wonder what that means. But. That’s not the important detail of the story:
Each final fight at RenFaire—and you have to understand, we all camped there, worked in the hot sun or pouring rain each day (nothing in between), and as such were already dirty, rough, grimy, and fatigued. The final fight, though: there’d be a big white industrial bucket in the middle of the playing field. Not adherent to time period as per the org’s strict requirements, but we didn’t care—the final final fight happened just before closing time on the last day. What were they going to do, fire us?
Said bucket would be filled with the following, piled on in order of timing of need: blood packs, rubber tubing filled with blood, spaghetti in red sauce, hidden weapons, breath mints to represent dislodged teeth. At varying intervals, actor/combatants would dip into the bucket, extract whatever gore they needed, slather it on themselves, etc. and continue and conclude the giant fight scene, often consisting of as many as 20 people.
It was a way of celebrating the end of a lot of rough and glorious artistic labor, and we’d all often end up going out in various states of mess, to drink each other’s health, and the end of another summer gig.
The penultimate year I worked there, at the far end of those tender years whilst I was single and blessedly alone (though I didn’t think it blessed at the time), I remember it was raining all day at the Faire, and so by the time the final-final fight came about, we were all chilly, muddy, and soaked. I didn’t have a proper change of clothes, and it was so wet out that the squib, blank pistol shot, and arm burn didn’t work. Not only that, the handspring which my soontobehusband/soontobeex used to propel the dagger throw at me, fucked his knee up badly, on account of slipping on the wet woodchips strewing the ground (I heard later).
Covered in spaghetti, fake blood, scar makeup, corseted and soaked to the skin, I left with all of the RenFaire rabble after, to go out for drinks. I was messy enough that someone felt sorry for me and gave me an awful pink sweatshirt with a horrifying pink and glittery kitten on its front. It was almost more disgusting than the fake offal covering me (or so I thought at the time) but then it was so soft inside and so warm to my chilled limbs, I had to thank the woman that lent it to me.
I have no memory of who it was that let me wear that sweatshirt, or where we went (probably that one sushi place) or even how I got home to Boulder that night, but that was my last night being one of the guys. A messy coming of age ritual that wasn’t the same the following year, just as all our jobs there weren’t, and my new engagement distanced me anyway.
Well. Cheers, Halloween weirdos: cheers to grimy, sticky, messy fun. The best kind of fun to be had on this day of darkness.
NOTE (from the future, in 2023): Check out this video clip of the above proceedings in stage combat class, Halloween 2019. I wasn’t able to download this, and for some reason I don’t have it saved anywhere either (it was originally on my phone), so you’ll have to enjoy it on the VisageTome, I’m afraid. Fun though, huh? It was taken by a student, I don’t remember which one. Man, I miss this class.
⚔️🧛🏻♀️