Profile: Blake Myers, Creator of movie gore

Blake Meyers, aka Blake the Blood Guy, has been making fake blood for more than a decade. He also works as a set dresser for local films and some Hollywood movies.

What exactly is it that you do?

I make fake blood. I read Lloyd Kaufman’s book, All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned From the Toxic Avenger, and I instantly wanted to make a movie where someone got their head crushed by somebody’s foot. And from then on it was just like, every movie I wanted to make was, ‘We’ll rip somebody’s arm off in this movie, and we’ll crush somebody’s head in that movie.’ It just got addictive. I was shooting in black and white, and I learned how to spray chocolate syrup everywhere.

Then, in college, all my student films were about zombies and chicken babies eating people — weird stuff. The first color special effects I did was for a locally made movie called Blood Car. In the future, gas costs $45 a gallon and there’s a guy trying to make a car that will run on wheat germ. But he accidentally makes a car that runs on blood. And he kills everybody and puts the blood in his car.

I had to make 55 gallons of red blood. And I had to learn how to make it shoot out all sorts of different ways. I got myself a couple of fire extinguishers and learned new things with hoses and pressure. So, basically, I can spray blood out of anything and shoot it over a building.

What goes into making blood?

Corn syrup, chocolate syrup, red food coloring, red food coloring, red food coloring laughs. It depends whether a director wants Spaghetti Western-style blood or Italian gore movie blood or old ’50s fake blood. Everyone’s going for a different type of feel. Sometimes it’s just red paint. But my favorite is an invention we came up with: red velvet food cake mix, corn syrup and chocolate syrup, all mixed together. And then you throw in shredded coconut and it becomes this paste you can smear on people and, oh, it is horrifically disgusting and terribly yummy to eat.

I’ve been a vegetarian for 17 years, so I make all my blood vegetarian because I don’t want to mess with a bunch of real meat. Also, when you’re shooting in the middle of summer under those hot film lights, real meat is so gross and it smells so bad. You don’t want to stick rancid blood or meat in someone’s mouth, but if you can give them a mouthful of corn syrup and chocolate syrup, they’re happy.

Tell us about some of your other projects.

I did a feature in New Hampshire called Yellow Brick Road. All these people go out in the woods and start murdering each other and ripping their legs off and faces off. And I just did a little work on My Super Psycho Sweet 16, a new MTV movie.

I’m starting to make a living doing blood. I’ve been paid for the last three projects. I also work a lot with Brett Wood, who does shorts here in Atlanta and calls me if he needs anyone’s brain shot out.

As for short films, my big Internet hit — I’m 20 hits away from 15,000 hits — is Jump Rope With Gutz. Six-year-olds and gore. I wrote, produced, directed and did all the special effects for that. You’ll see a lot of my movies YouTube, such as How to Extract Your Cranial Fluids. That was my last black-and-white gore fest. And Blood Farming Gothic Babes, which is girls who are gothic farmers that kill people.

On your current project, you’re working with Ice Cube and Bow Wow?

Yeah, that’s not one of my gory things. I’m a set dresser and do art stuff. A nice paying gig, so I can do some other stuff.

When I’m not making fake blood, my other independent project is a documentary about Danger Woman. She’s a lady who has autism and thinks she is a superhero who fights for the rights of disabled people. I’ve been following her for 13 years and shot almost 250 hours worth of footage. I’m almost done editing it together! So, when I’m not making gory movies, I make nice, poetic documentaries about people with disabilities and how they live their lives.

And you also work with the Silver Scream Spook Show?

I help them tape all their shows and they’ve been in a lot of my films. They’re a blast, I love those guys. I also help out with Splatter Cinema, where we put together a gory movie scene the second Tuesday of every month at the Plaza, the same place they do the Spook Show. We just did Ricky O, the Kung Fu gore film.

(Photo by Joeff Davis)