"It's blood!" said the carpenter.
"It's blood, isn't it?" said a musician.
"Blood!!" screamed Christine. "Blood!!"
It was Agnes's terrible fate to keep her head in a crisis. She sniffed her finger again.
"It's turpentine," said Agnes. "Er. Sorry. Is that wrong?"
This is when an innocent substance - almost always red - is mistaken for blood. This substance is, more often than not, ketchup, and, less often than not,
Hilarity Ensues. Usually played for comedy and occasionally used seriously when someone is trying to fake an injury.
Someone may or may not dip their finger in it and taste it, much to everyone else's horror, and pronounce it as being 'tasty.'
It's also worth noting that ketchup looks absolutely nothing like blood, apart from its colour.
Examples:
- Discworld, as shown by the page quote.
- In Hot Fuzz, a bullet shatters a jar of bolognese, showering it on one of the Andies' faces. The other Andy shouts in despair, thinking the aforementioned Andy has been hit and is bleeding.
- Also, Danny Butterman is adept at using a packet of ketchup as fake blood, so he can make it seem like he's stabbed out his own eye with a fork or even fake Nicholas Angel's death.
- In the opening credits of Dexter, ketchup squirting across Dexter's breakfast plate is for a split second meant to make the viewer believe it's blood, at least for the first time watching, thanks to the show's gory subject matter.
- In Metal Gear Solid, when you're captured and imprisoned by the bad guys, one way to make good your escape is to use a ketchup-bottle to fake your death, causing the idiotic guard to run into your cell to investigate...
- Another Metal Gear Solid example: The last Mystery mission in VR Missions has you going into a locked room where there's an apparently dead soldier on the ground. There's "clues" all over the place to look at but no suspects. The real goal of the mission is to not give up in frustration at being unable to solve the problem, because just before the time limit runs out, the guy gets up and the camera zooms in on a broken ketchup bottle on which he'd fallen asleep.
- In Looney Toons: Back in Action, the characters do an homage to the shower scene from Psycho. Turns out it's done with a carrot instead of a knife, and Bugs Bunny is squirting chocolate sauce down the drain.
- Parental Bonus, the blood going down the drain in the original movie WAS chocolate sause.
- Bugs Bunny loves this. He's done it to Elmer Fudd loads of times, and has done it Yosemite Sam at least once.
- In one Tom And Jerry short that was particularly graphic even for that cartoon, Jerry makes Tom think he's been stabbed by dripping ketchup onto both a steak knife and Tom's chest.
- Subverted in Thy Dungeonman 3. The "ketchup" in the sandwich shop is, in fact, fake fake blood. You die unpleasently when attempting to consume it.
- Parodied in a The Far Side cartoon, with antromorphic bottles of ketchup (yes) are watching a horror movie. When an on-screen bottle of ketchup gets murdered, a bottle in the audience turns to his young son and says "Don't worry, son. They're just actors, and that's not real ketchup."
- Bill Cosby does a comedy bit about getting his tonsils removed, and when one of the other children comes back he begins to whine "Why's there ketchup comin' out of his mouth? Please say that's ketchup 'cause we'd hate to think that you killed Johnson."
- The "ketchup resembles blood in no way beyond color" bit was lampshaded in a certain Fox Trot strip where Jason accuses Paige of punching him so hard that he's coughing up blood, and "proves" it by presenting his Red Right Hand.
Andy: Jason, that's ketchup.
Jason: It could just be that my blood is naturally thick and zesty.
Andy: Just how many colas did you and Marcus drink today?
- In Trigun, bottles of red wine were used to fake injuries on at least one occasion.
- Done in a Donald Duck short, where he and the nephews go camping. Donald puts ketchup on himself to get his nephews thinking he's severely injured, but gets bandaged up from head to toe, as is typical of those shorts.
- Also seen in an episode of Lois And Clark, where Clark uses ketchup as a trick to prove he isn't Superman.
- Radio example: In Doctor Who: The Chimes of Midnight, it opens up with Charley and the Doctor in the dark, when there's a crash and sudden wet feeling. It turns out to be raspberry jam, but it's a unique example because this is a) on the radio so we can't see it, and in the dark so the characters couldn't see that it was red either.
- Happens in a guest artist story on Sluggy Freelance, where Zoe thinks Riff and Torg are dead, but really they went a little crazy eating tacos and got hot sauce all over themselves.
- Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu does this with red paint in the Haunted Hospital episode. Since Chidori had just fallen through the floor and bumped her head, and the paint was splash under her head, it was rather disturbing. Actually it was probably one of the more serious notes in that whole comedy series.
- Happy Tree Friends: "Flippin' Burgers". The results are messy.
- In Sam Raimi's The Quick and the Dead, Sharon Stone's character fakes her own death with red ink. When she comes back to kill the Big Bad, we see the little blind kid smiling and pouring red ink on the ground. It's definitely a Crowning Moment Of Awesome.
- In an episode of Lost, Desmond wakes up in a flashback covered in red paint after being in an implosion.
- In a flashback episode of Shakugan No Shana, Shana sets a trap for the animated training skeleton Shiro that involves a giant, hidden hole in the ground full of ketchup. Shiro sees red and... doesn't take things so well...
- In Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations, a white apron with a ketchup stain is first mistaken by everyone but the partially color-blind prosecutor for a blood stain.
- Parodied on Rocket Power:
Twister: Oh, man! There's blood all over that broken ketchup bottle!
- In the novel Farthing, a murdered man is found stabbed with a pool of red liquid on his chest, but the police quickly determine that the victim was gassed to death and the liquid is actually lipstick.
- An episode of The Magic School Bus had Ms. Frizzle, in a vampire phase, present the kids' parents with glasses of "blood". Keesha pointed out that it was obviously really tomato juice, but no one listened to her.
