_{How To Make The World's Most Violent Stage Play}

Prop Examples: Examples for props can include...

Breakaway bottles: Put a blood container inside a "reusable" breakaway bottle to make it look like the actor playing the victim has been injured by sharp glass shards.

Stage blades: A stage knife that is designed to retract could also have an openable handle where stage blood of any type the knife would be designed to handle can be added into the blade, and since a big handle would generally indicate a big blade, this would make intuitve sense since a smaller blade would have less blood able to be added into a smaller handle but a bigger blade would have more blood. Regardless, the handle may not necessarily require that it be filled to the brim, and the stage knife could be controlled by a button or two anyways to control blood flow, blood velocity and blood effect timing. Depending on the type of scene, blood could spill out immediately after a victim actor is stabbed, or a dramatic scene could have the victim actor stabbed but there is no blood effect until after a pause where blood slowly drips where the actor was stabbed, or the stage knife is pulled out and a dramatic blood effect is sprayed on the victim.

Compressible long weapons such as swords or crowbars: You know how a common, or at least sterotypical, Halloween costume decoration is an arrow through the head that is actually curved to fit the costume wearer's head? This idea would be quite similar. For example, if you could somehow make a safe curving prop sword, you could simulate a scene similar to the one in Sukiyaki Western Djanjo where a person gets a sword through their head. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAESFi7dQLQ

Boulders or rocks with a hidden blood pack carefully glued on and painted to blend in with the color of the boulder or rock: Fairly obviously, if it's a big boulder, it could use a bigger blood pack, if it's a little rock, well, I wonder if the scene is brutal enough, the entire rock could be a hidden blood pack?

Retractable pop-up arrows: Basically the only safe way I can think of to do an arrow penetration scene in a stage play is to use a pop-up arrow rig like what Tyler Bell demonstrates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3BxILDpT6k

But even though there are safety concerns about retractable knives, a retractable arrow that can be hidden in the victim's clothing that suddenly appears on the victim in a dramatic fashion is probably a great dramatic arrow shooting scene. And probably the only one that is both easy to do and safe to do. You don't even need any fancy blood effects depending on the tone of your stage play.

Body Examples: Examples for the actor's physical body can include...

Eye protection in the form of COOL SHADES: Safety is most important for anything, so if an actor is playing an action movie type character such as an action hero or an action villian, and they might be doing risky combat techniques close to their head or face, they could be wearing a special eye protection that doesn't look like eye protection but is instead a glasses prop that is suitable to what typr of character they are. For example, the standard procedure is to not break a breakaway prop directly on the character's face, but if the script calls for such a thing, it could be an action movie hero who is wearing COOL SHADES and gets their face broken by a bottle hurled directly in their face, but they persevere to show the world how badass they. It could also be a pair of nerdy-looking glasses a weak vulnerable character might concievably wear, where a bottle is also hurled in their face but they end up crying and screaming for their mommy as their face is cut severely but at least they were wearing eye protection disguised as nerdy glasses.

(Concievably, there are also examples of "anti-reflective glass" which could concievably be applied to an victim actor to have a form of eye protection that is invisible to the audience who would not think the victim actor is wearing anything on their eyes at all, but is that recommendable? I'll let the stage fight choreographers decide for themselves.)

Skin layer: The term "skin layer" is my own made-up term, but a very similar thing has been used in countless films beforehand for throat slice effects and such. It would be a layer of fake skin over the actor's real skin made to blend in, and can be used for various effects.

More blood generally: Whereever the actor pretends to be injured, with whatever stage prop weapon, a skin layer could be used for additional bleeding effects after the intial effect with the prop weapon. It would also be useful for injury effects using prop weapons that do not touch the actor's body, the most immediately obvious example being firearms.

How to do the bloodiest throat slice scene:

Rig the blade of the knife to emit blood.

Have the actor have a blood pack on both hands, and have the actor find a way to "painfully" grab their throat with both hands to disperse as much blood as possible from the hands to the throat

Have the throat itself come with a skin layer that disperses blood directly from the throat area.

Rig an obvious blood tube that is hidden underneath the actor's shirt, and have the actor have their back to the audience while the obvious blood tube is taken out of the shirt so the actor can appear to spray additional blood from their throat, then put the obvious blood tube back in the shirt when the actor turns around back to the audience so the audience doesn't notice anything.

Have parts of the stage floor itself be rigged with blood effects so when the actor falls to the ground in a designated area, more blood can appear to come out of the actor's throat when in actuality, the actor's neck area is on a prearranged area of the floor that is rigged to pump out more stage blood.

Near the mouth or nose: A skin layer near the mouth could be used to hide a tube that goes directly into the actor's mouth to simulate blood or other bodily fluids such as copious amounts of vomit. It could also be applied to both nasal cavities to have a (relatively safe) way to make it look like the actor is vomiting so severely that vomit is gushing through their nose as well. Maybe make the nasal tube a perfect fit for the actor's nasal cavity and design a "door mechanism" in such a way so that it can only gush out when it blocks the actor's nasal cavity, and then have it be open when the actor is supposed to actually be breathing.

Over the torso: This would have many uses, one example would be where a victim actor is stripped naked or to their underwear, gets beaten severely and then hanged for a final execution. A big skin layer over the actor's torso could be used to hide strap gear that is actually designed so the victim actor playing the role of a naked hanging victim can actually do without hanging themself for real, it just looks that way because the actor may look completely naked with their genitals hanging out, or is just wearing rough looking underwear that doesn't make it obvious where the straps would go in their underwear.

Compressable internal organs: If a prop artist specialising in gore effects could sucessfully make fake internal organs that can be compressed into a flat shape until said organs are "harvested" in a particularly violent scene, for example, the victim actor might be wearing a "skin layer vest" that has stage blood and literal guts that is flattened over their stomach so the actor can pretend to be brutally disemboweled in a stage play with just the illusion of coming out of the victim's body with a perspective trick.

If it's for the stomach in particular, well, a real person can push their stomach in to compress it, so I wonder if some method of tying the stomach to compress it in a similar way could be done to layer on a fake stomach for gore effects, and what would be the most comfortable and medically recommendable method of tying a stomach in?

Environment Examples: Examples for scenery in stage sets can include...

Soft floor parts painted to look hard: If the script calls for the victim to be beaten on a hard floor or ground material, such as having their head smashed into pavement, the victim actor could be directed to an soft area that is specially painted and uses some method of light bending so all the actors on sztage know not to walk on the soft area and give away the secret, but the area so painted is invisible to the audience seeing the play. The actor could have blood effects or bruise effects on the "skin layers" plasted over their face that activate at the right time to make it look like the actor has been injured severely on the face.

Survivable Gore And Non-Survivable Gore: It is important to distinguish between severe injuries that pernamently main a victim but the victim is able to live, as contrasted to attacks on the victim's body that said victim could not or would not likely survive.

This is for movies specifically, but the reason why it is more common to have horror movies where a bunch of victims have their heads cut off or blown off, or get sliced in half vertically, et cetera, as opposed to movies of any genre, including horror, where a victim gets a limb or two cut off, or gets sliced in half horizontally like in a "hemicorporectomy" but survives and has to spend the rest of the movie being physically disabled, even though both the limb and hemicorporectomy examples would perfectly suit a horror movie, is because it is simply easier to deal with motionless props on camera such as motionless body parts to be disposed of, isn't it?

Rather than to spend the whole movie trying to storyboard and visually compose a movie feauturing a previously fully limbed character who then becomes an amputee, dealing with things such as what kind of amputee subsitute actor could play the fully limbed actor, whether all the close-up shots of the character's face should be played by the amputee actor in a starring role even if the character is fully limbed at that time, whether an amputee actor should be limited to playing amputee characters or if they should be allowed to play fully limbed characters in family friendly Disney movies where NO ONE EVER GETS THEIR LIMB CUT OFF THAT WOULD BE SO CRUEL using prosethic puppet replacement arms or fully limbed body doubles or just adding them limb back in using post production CGI which seems to be all the rage these days, would be a headache, wouldn't it? But if an amputee actor has a realistic arm part they bring to work every day, it's reusable, isn't it? The amputee actor could "land a hand" or "land an arm" for use in another motion picture production where said arm has a covering wrapped around it so as to not disturb the amputee's actor "natural arm color" and it could be painted a different skin color for an interracial amputation scene, so the amputee actor could be a living white actor but another actor who the arm is lended to could be a stunningly hot Vietmanese lady who gets killed in a dramatic fashion by first having her arm blown off and then shot some more times, but that might raise issues about racial discrimination or some such thing, I don't know.

Firearm Effects: It's a stage play, so it does not have to look totally real, but there are Japanese "model guns" that are quite expensive which can produce smoke and fire effects, and there are cheap Chinese toy guns that simply emulate the shell ejection mechanism. I'd like to bring up this video which shows prop cigarettes for the stage that puff "smoke" made out of flour, and I wonder if some Chinese manufacterer could make a cheap prop gun for the stage that has a smilar smoke puffing effect to simulate smoke coming out of the barell using "gunflour" instead of "gunpowder."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tIT3HNAul4

An even safer retractable knife: So some prop artists don't particularly like those convincing-looking retractable knives where the blade pushes into the handle as it touches a surface. So I have a better idea. Put a button on the retractable knife to make it fully or partially retract, either a part of the blade into the rest of the blade for a partial stab effect, or fully retract into the handle for a full stab effect. Since the actor who plays the role of the stabber would retract the blade with their own finger, if such an actor is trustworthy enough (?). said actor could threaten the victim actor with a ghoulish looking blade before both actors carefully position themselves so where the blade would be would not be clearly visible, or maybe just have dramatic high-contrast stage lighting where the actor's faces are clearly visible but the blade is not, then the stabber actor could have the blade fully retracted and safely simulate a particularly viscious-looking repeated stabbing gesture.

Lighting effects to enhance the feeling of violence: I mentioned high-contrast lighting, and it's because it's pretty much inherently dramatic looking while also hiding clear details. It means that while the audience may not be able to see the details of someone's internal organs as clearly, high-contrast lighting with bright lights and dark shadows can make a brutal scene look particularly convincing while also making setting up said brutal scene easier and cheaper since there is less need to worry about whether something looks too fake or too cheesy in low-contrast lighting. It would make some particularly dramatic scenes like someone being disemboweled or having their heart cut out of their chest easier to set up on stage and scare the audience because the scene looks horrifingly real to them except they would know from life experience that stage actors would not actually be killing each other, they're just pretending to do so, but if the same scene was performed in low-contrast lighting, the audience would burst out into laughter because it could not possibly look any more fake, couldn't it!

How to do an live decapitation scene with a moving character: Note that I said "moving character" and not "actor", because if you use a living person to do a decapitation scene, it would be a bit difficult to just "pretend" to cut their head off, but... this "head drop" magic trick using a coat could be a potential inspiration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2SCi3nyI8M

So even if you do the head drop trick with a live actor to mimic a live decapitation, probably the easiest way to do so convincingly is to simply not have the living actor pretending to be decapitated facing the audience, but have their back turned. But then it would not be as easy to then have a prop head then fly off dramatically, would it?

So this solution with a "moving character" would be to use a puppet animatronic that could still be played by an off-stage live actor using remote controls or something along those lines, the animatronic would still not be facing the audience directly because trying to make an entire animatronic face with all the facial expressions a live actor could do without inspiring the "uncanny valley" would probably simply not be worth it budget wise, just for one brief decapitation scene where the character dies, the only reason it would be worth it would probably be if the script called for a character who would miracuosly survive being decapitated and live life as a talking decpitated head, like if you were doing a stage production of Lollipop Chainsaw and you couldn't just change the script so Nick Carlyle still has his head attached to his body for most of the play.

Even as an animatronic with limited facial expressions, it could still be possible to give a "chilling" puppet performance if the general body was made reasonably well and the off-stage live actor managed to give a good puppet performance, the other issue is how the animatronic would still be heard talking, do you just have an animatronic deliver prerecorded voices through a speaker through their mouth, or could the puppet actor deliver improvised lines that are blasted through that same speaker, and could the speaker be of good enough quality so it doesn't have an obvious "digital sound" effect that breaks audience immersion, could the puppet actor also be a ventriloquist, or could the puppet actor speak through a tube delivered through the animatronic puppets mouth, could the puppet actor actually be under the stage floor and speaking and acting through non-electric wires and a tube that moves the puppet character that are made convincingly enough to make it look like a real person is moving.

But regardless of whether the decapitation puppet is directly behind the audience, facing the side with their face mostly obscured, or even directly in front of the audience but their face is deliberately covered in some humiliation ritual, a moving puppet allows for more options with stage violence that simply could not be done with an actor who is expected to continue working. Along with dramatic decapitaions with large blood sprays and heads flying off, the puppet could also be stripped naked, have their head covered with a bag in a demeaning ritual, and then "hanged for real" because since the puppet is not actually alive but is just played by an off-screen actor who makes it look alive and doesn't need medical insurance.

But I realized a trick that uses a living actor doing a head drop magic trick and has their back turned behind the audience, is to have the actor already have their head dropped and just have a fake head on their top, and it would a combination of a live actor and a puppet because the live actor could be actually flailing their real arms, but the head that is visible is a fake head that still moves due to puppet work. And the head could be cut in half, be repeatively smashed with a crow bar, or have some "non-violent" surgical procedure done on it like in one of the Terminator films with the mirror scene if you're doing a FAMILY FRIENDLY DISNEY PLAY!

Realistic Bullet Hit:

This is based off of this video, but adapted for the stage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANXcNihpiwY

Basically, it a two-part bullet hit effect, it's not one big dramatic squib effect, basically, first the initial bullet hit effect would activate, than a second "air squib" would activate to pump out a post=bullter hit bleeding effect, and it would look less "action movie" like and more like a "realistic crime drama" scene of "OH GOD I'M BLEEDING SOMEONE HELP ME!!!"

Clothed Bullet Hit Without Exploding Clothes:

Just cut a hole in the shirt or pants or whatver to reveal the "visible" squib underneath, then paint the squib to match the color of the clothes. If it's s split second shot of the unstained clothes, no one would ever know!

General acting designed to look brutal:

This is a clip from the play "The Removalists." It's just one kick so as to not spoil the whole play. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfqNngUatV0

HOOD BLOOD!!!!!

Dish soap! Red Kool-Aid! A little bit of instant coffee!

Put that shit togetha and yo' punk-ass has got HOOD BLOOD, for use in HOOD FiLMZ!!!!!

If you don't like coffee, you can also use COCA-COLA!!!!!

Fun with throwing paint everywhere!

Get a paintball with red HOOD BLOOD and throw it a victim actor for a dramatic blood effect!

Ok, but you can cut the top of a plastic bottle and then make further cuts to make it sort of have a claw shape and then bend the claws and then attach it to the actor for a more dramatic looking blood effect.