When examining the film industry, the use of blood--albeit "fake" blood--is ubiquitous. As a literary and visual tool, blood can be seen in practically every genre of film. For the most part, the use of this visual tool goes unquestioned by audiences. It is most commonly seen as just a visual depiction and reaffirmation that a character is dying or has already died, or that a character has been wounded either mortally or superficially. Through this research project, however, I hope to shed light on the use and meanings behind this literary and visual tool, and to enhance the already existing discourse surrounding blood in film.

Although, as previously stated, blood as a visual tool appears in most, if not all, genres of film, I will be focusing on the use of blood in the horror genre specifically. Part of the reason for this decision to focus on the horror genre in this research project comes from my own affinity for this particular genre. As a child and now as a young adult I have spent countless hours watching films from this genre, and feel comfortable working within this genre in order to reveal the discourse surrounding blood in film. My hope is that other fans of the horror genre and of film in general will be able to examine this research project and have a better understanding of the use and meanings of blood in film. I also hope to further enlighten these horror fans by highlighting how images gain significance from their utilization of myths and ideologies, and that the meanings behind these images are dependent upon their relationship to other forms of media and other images as well.

In order to accomplish this sort of analysis, I will be making use of a psychoanalytic and discourse analysis framework. Through my use of a psychoanalytical analysis I intend on looking at the meanings, ideologies, and myths contained within specific images. A psychoanalytical analysis will also be of benefit to this project because of the existing scholarly work within this framework that focuses on fetishization. It is my belief that particular parts of the body are fetishized when they are shown bleeding, and a psychoanalytical analysis will be able to dig deeper into the meanings behind this fetishization. For this part of the project I will mostly be drawing from Mulvey's theories regarding fetishization. The sexual connotations that blood and bleeding have also lend towards a psychoanalytical analysis. In regards to my use of discourse analysis, I will mostly be working with the theories of intertextuality and Michel Foucault's theory of discursive formation--the idea that a discourse gains meaning through its multiplicity in medias (Foucault, 63). By highlighting the multiple uses of blood and the pervasiveness of certain depictions of blood in film, I hope to show how certain discourses about blood and bleeding are reinforced through their appearance in multiple films.

In order to accomplish this sort of analysis, I have focused my work on four specific uses of blood within film and the horror genre. These four uses of blood are depictions of eyes bleeding, characters (predominantly female characters) covered in blood, the consumption of blood by vampires, and the appearance of extreme volumes of blood in certain films such as "The Shining". To highlight the use of these depictions of blood in film, I have chosen examples of these depictions from a number of different films within the horror genre. Again, by using multiple examples of the same kind of depictions of blood, I hope to show how intertextuality reinforces the discourses around blood within film. The films that I have chosen for this project also happen to be well known films. By choosing films that are known by most all movie-goers and especially by fans of the horror genre, I hope to make this research project more accessible to a wider audience ,and to give my audience the tools necessary to further analyze visual texts with which they are already familiar. Since the films that I have chosen to analyze are all fairly well known to begin with, they might also be able to attract the attention of horror fans.

Please click on one of the links below to further explore the uses and meanings of blood in film:

Foucault, Michel, and Colin Gordon. Power/knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Print.