High-Pressure Blood

Turning oneself into a human firehose is the most effective cure for hiccups.

"The human body contains over 12 gallons of blood, sometimes more, under high pressure."

— Rules of Anime, #18

In real life, the average adult has ten pints / five liters of blood. One gallon is equal to eight pints / 4.55 liters. When this trope is in play, for 'pints', read 'gallons.' Or more: all living things can contain several dozen gallons of blood, stored under incredible pressures. As a result, almost any damage by a cutting or piercing weapon will result in explosive jets of gore squirting out like a firehose.

The trope is strong in anime and samurai movies. This may stem from traditional Kabuki Theatre, where the "blood" was really a long red silk scarf thrown in a great big arc. However, the first modern example, from the Akira Kurosawa film Sanjuro, appears to have been an accident. According to the crew, the pump that was meant to make the losing samurai bleed profusely blew a coupling when activated, causing the blood to pump out at full pressure rather than the intended rate. The unexpected force almost knocked over the actor, and it was all he could do to finish the scene, but they ended up using the take anyway — partly because it looked impressive, and partly because it was kind of difficult to have a second take after that much blood had gone all over the set and costumes.

Ironically, this use of blood can have the effect of making the violence less disturbing because of how very obviously unrealistic it can be, especially in high quantities. It is a prime example of Refuge in Audacity. It also helps to mask the wound, so the bone and flesh damage is not shown.

In real life, the carotid arteries and the aorta do have high pressure that can spurt when cut, but that's nowhere near the literal firehoses of blood so common in fiction. They are also located deep in the body (and in the case of the aorta, within the ribcage). Other more accessible blood vessels, not so much (they're limited to 3.3 oz / 100ml at each heartbeat). Fiction is so much more fun than nature!

See Overdrawn at the Blood Bank, for when a character is shown shedding a lot more than five liters of blood. Contrast Bloodless Carnage. See also the Nosebleed effect, where arousal may cause spurts of blood from the nose. If it's used for comedy it's Bloody Hilarious.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A Japanese tea commercial explains that in most cases high blood pressure won't save you. There are exceptions.

Anime & Manga

• Done to a ridiculous extent in Angel Cop, where every time someone is shot it is as if someone just blew up an extra-large can of pasta sauce.
• Attack on Titan manages to avoid this for the most part, except in completely justified instances.
  • When Bertolt Hoover suffers a Slashed Throat, blood sprays out as would be expected from a major artery. He gets a hand over the wound, but blood still sprays out from beneath his palm.
  • The anime uses this for the purpose of drama, with blood splattering dramatically out around his teeth whenever Eren bites his hand.
• In Baccano! Ladd slits a mook's throat to send his blood splashing out like a spray can.
  • Claire/Vino/Rail Tracer spills vast amounts of blood, drenching himself. Ladd is even seen dancing about in a puddle of blood.
• Almost all the deaths in Basilisk: Kouga Ninpu Chuu.
• Berserk:
  • The original manga, although it provides sloshing blood in abundance, tends not to deliver it in pressure jets except in a few specific instances: In volume 3, the Brand of Sacrifice on Guts' neck—which only trickles blood in the presence of a normal demon—squirts out a spray of blood when he tries to approach Femto, a supreme evil being as well the one who caused him to be branded. Guts, completely incapacitated by the pain, is told that the agony from his brand will kill him if he doesn't give up.
  • Berserk (1997) uses copious high-pressure blood as a stylistic flair; In episode 3's duel between Guts and Griffith, for instance, each shallow slashing cut that Griffith opens on Guts' arms and legs shoot out a ribbon of blood perhaps two feet long!
• Anyone cut by a Shinigami's sword in Bleach. The worst example has to be when Renji gets hit by the full force of Byakuya's bankai. Cue massive explosion of blood.
  • What Kenpachi did to Tesla is perhaps more spectacular. By getting his hand cut, Tesla manages to make it look like he just got split in half. He didn't, but you wouldn't know it from all the blood he loses. He also does lose that hand.
  • Turn into Low Pressure Blood by Ulquiorra, who defies all logic when it comes to blood. His arm up to his shoulder gets chopped off, but it only gets a few drops going. And his waist down, an arm, and a wing? Good god, there isn't even a speck anywhere! And this is in the manga.
• Various fights in Blood+ invoke this for dramatic effect. For example, Saya's first encounter with a Chiropteran ended with a severed lower Chiropteran body spilling a fountain of blood around a classroom.
• The anime Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan has any injury involving the main characters causing a volcanic eruption of blood to the point (and intentionally so) of being absurd.
  • In the most extreme example, at the end of the final episode of the first season, the main character has his whole upper body splattered away, then his lower body begins spewing blood at high enough pressure that it starts moving around on the floor. Then flying around the room. Then out a window and into the night sky, landing several blocks away.
• The trope is spoofed in the manga version of Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, where even the most minor injury causes characters to spit up blood. This joke is completely absent from the anime, though.
• In Brave10, the author loves dramatic blood-spray, so every big slash delivered is marked by this.
• In the manga adaptation of Breath of Fire IV, the scene in chapter 19 where Fou-lu decapitates Soniel is an explicit example — Soniel ends up geysering for a good bit afterwards.
• Case Closed at the very first chapter has a scene where a girlfriend cuts off the head of her boyfriend during a dark part of a roller coaster ride. Once the coaster leaves the darkened area, you're greeted with a man who has a fountain of blood for a head. It is so bloody that the anime replaced it with a glaring light, showing where the head once was, but the 2016 TV special retelling shows the fountain in all its glory. Other than that, the series has very realistic blood-spread.
• Ceres, Celestial Legend has this when Wei loses blood after losing his eye.
• In Claymore, which is basically Berserk with girls wielding big swords, one attack from an Awakened One and you will gush blood. Not to mention the effects of those swords used by the warriors.
• In Cowboy Bebop. The "Black Dog Serenade" episode. Udai Taxim slits someone's throat and the blood sprays out like crazy, however, since they're in zero gravity, it's probably justified. What makes this example funny is that there is no wound animated to match the blood — it sprays from the victim's intact neck.
• DARLING in the FRANXX: Klaxosaur cores contain a large amount of blue Alien Blood under high pressure. When Strelitzia blows them up, in results in a blue rain from the sky for several moments. When Argentae later cracks one with her Wolverine Claws only for her co-pilot to stay and gloat instead of getting out of the way, she's comically waterboarded for several seconds when the blue stuff sprays out.
• In DEAD Tube gruesome murders are commonplace and all the victims tend to bleed a lot, some could be fooled into thinking someone dying like that in real life could result in that much blood, however even some mild beatings result in fountains of blood as if everyone is made of bloody piñatas.
• At the end of the Death Note anime, Mikami stabs himself with a pen in grief, resulting in a blood fountain so over the top it's sometimes considered an unwitting source of humor amongst the otherwise dark tone of the scene. That was the only episode to get a TV-MA rating on [adult swim].
• Used in Devil May Cry: The Animated Series. It's particularly noticeable when Dante guns down a four-foot-tall bad guy in the second to last episode and an overhead shot shows a river of blood on the ground.
• Elfen Lied did this quite a few times, especially during the first episode.
• The virus in Emerging uses this as its most dramatic means of infecting new victims. ^note Though not the only means, as it's shown to be transferred through saliva, and is hinted at being airborne.
• Excel♡Saga — The sickly Hyatt is prone to coughing up blood, then dropping dead in a pool of it. In the final episode of the anime, she manages to cough up enough blood to drown the entire world.
• Every character in Fist of the North Star (especially minor villains). The show is probably one of the most graphic, violent anime in all of history, and even the most minor of cuts causes a blood spew of several dozen feet. Of course, when the main character possesses the ability to make anyone he feels like literally explode with a couple well-placed punches, this is generally overlooked. The manga is even more violent...
• At the end of Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin, when Gin decapitates Akakabuto, the blood bursts up like a geyser, pushing the head with it.
• At the end of the Halo Legends episode, "The Duel", The Arbiter, Fal 'Chavamee, gets his chest sliced by Haka's giant metal blade, resulting in a jet of purple blood erupting from his torso.
• Hanaukyō Maid Team season 1 episode 4. Ryuuka runs headfirst into an I-beam Taro is carrying and blood starts spurting out of her forehead like a geyser.
• Expect this at all times during battle scenes in Hellsing, especially when Alucard starts going for an opponent's throat.
• Higurashi: When They Cry, despite being almost as bloody as Elfen Lied on many occasions, actually manages to avoid this. Blood does fly around, but it's spatters from the force of impact (killing is almost always done by bludgeoning; when the weapon is a knife or other bladed object, it's repeated forceful stabbing).
  • Used much more in the sequel, Umineko: When They Cry.
  • Played completely straight in Higurashi Gou/Sotsu, where it's enough to literally paint an entire room red.
• Kill la Kill takes this to ridiculous levels near the end: whenever Ryuko or Nui is injured they spout huge fountains of blood, often two or three times the height of their body.
• Mars of Destruction has a girl getting her head blasted off by a laser beam, resulting in a massive fountain of blood.
• Used in Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team when Norris Packard stabs a guntank through the cockpit. Blood splatters all the way up to his Mobile Suit's head.
  • May be averted. Like Megaman X4, it seems that the liquid was some type of oil, rather than blood. Gundam Extreme Vs even shows the liquid as being more black when it comes out, usually when stabbing a unit in the shoulder.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi usually averts this, which making it much more significant when it does occur. So far it's only happened twice. It happened during a Battle in the Center of the Mind to show the pain that Negi was experiencing. The one that occurred in reality has Negi vomiting several gallons of blood after getting his internal organs more-or-less pulverized by Jack Rakan in the final match of the tournament.
  • Also played for laughs when Kaede is sent flying into a stone wall at about 90 miles an hour. Anya wonders if she's dead, and she immediately clears from the smoke with blood over her forehead and what looks like a water fountain of blood coming out of her skull. She doesn't even acknowledge it.
• An odd one goes out to Neon Genesis Evangelion. Angels get injured? The streets run red with blood.
  • In End of Evangelion this trope is taken to its logical extreme when Giant Naked Rei's head comes off. Of course, she is the product of every single person rolled into one, so it's somewhat justified. The pressure is so high that it shoots blood so far that a line of red appears across the moon. The mark is visible in Rebuild too.
  • In Rebuild of Evangelion, this is even more extreme, as Angels who are defeated explode into a massive cloud of blood and gore. There is an ocean of blood in the middle of Tokyo-3 after the first fight with Sachiel. Shooting Ramiel ends up in the walls being covered in a wave of platelets. It makes sense, seeing as they're hundreds of feet tall, but my God, you could supply the Red Cross endlessly with what one Angel bleeds out in a fight. The blood is enhanced in Rebuild, and there's even rainbows forming in it.
  • Rebuild 2.0 has the absolute record: when Sahaquiel bites the dust, it explodes into a tsunami of blood. Tokyo-3 actually loses a few skyscrapers due to the pressure.
• Ninja Scroll has this trope in its purest form in the last act, albeit using the same scene of brutally slashed ninjas over and over.
• Nyaruko: Crawling with Love! has Nyarko spray blood like a fire hose when Mahiro stabs her with his forks, but only in the novels and the Nyaruani shorts; in the regular TV series, the worst she gets out of it is a Tom and Jerry-style lump.
• In the final of the future arc in Reborn! (2004) Byakuran fights using his blood that rains out of his body in gallons.
  • A few chapters later someone stings himself with a sewing needle by accident and a fountain of blood spurts out.
• Nearly every character in Rurouni Kenshin is a walking blood balloon just waiting to be poked with a sword—it didn't seem so much about volume as it was about pressure and, uh, droplet distribution (half the pages of the manga look like they've had ink sprayed on them with a squirt-bottle).
• Saint Seiya is pretty infamous for this. The fights where one of the contenders (if not both) doesn't lose at least half of his blood are almost rare.
• Str.A.In.: Strategic Armored Infantry has fountains of blood.
• In Street Fighter II V, Vega's claws have this effect on Ken when he impales his feet, toeing the line between horrifying and unintentionally funny.
• The anime version of Violinist of Hameln: One early episode features an old man getting stabbed in the chest and immediately spewing a fountain of the stuff.
• Kiba from Wolf's Rain. Judging by the amount of blood he loses in individual episodes, he seems to have enough for ten people.
• YuYu Hakusho had a spectacular example of this — when Hiei was bitten by a particular demon, he emitted enough blood to power a few high-pressure water cannons.

Comic Books

• Justified in Über; the titular enhanced soldiers have immensely powerful hearts to help fuel their super-strength, and when wounded their blood can spray out dramatically (several miles in the case of the incredibly powerful "battleships").

Fan Works

• The Good Hunter: In Chapter 6, Cyril beheads a mook. Blood sprays through the air, covering and paralysing nearby men and monster women alike.
• The final part of this Mapleshade animation, set to Archive's "You Make Me Feel", ends in Mapleshade walking away after killing her former mate Appledusk. Mortally wounded, she gushes blood out of her neck wound and collapses to the ground.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: Genocide:
  • When Asuka finished Samael off, its core “imploded in a fountain of blood”.
  • When Unit-02 turned Unit-08 into a pincushion, its wounds did this:
    A storm of long, metal spikes rained on Unit-08's body, from its navel to the base of its neck. Blood flowed and splashed through the air like a geyser, gushing from the many deep wounds and the spiked penetrated armor and flesh. It screamed, stumbling backwards. Asuka frowned when she realized that the Eva did not fall.
• It happens a lot in Quicken when Emma fights. It’s justified because she often aims for the arteries.
• In Thousand Shinji, Unit 02 starts bleeding majorly during the battle against the MP-Evas, just before going Bloodthirster.
  Something unpleasant was going on beneath the armour of Unit 02, waterfalls of blood leaking forth from its wounds, turning the ground bellow and the nearby lake vermillion.

Films — Animation

• My Little Pony: The Movie (1986): When Reeka stabs the Phlume's bulb with a pick, its sap starts shooting out from the wound this fashion and sprays out shortly after, with enough force to push back Reeka as she tries to bottle it.
• Zootopia: Done In-Universe in a play at the beginning, where a young Judy throws out a long red streamer to simulate blood when she "dies". She then follows it up by emptying an entire squeeze-bottle of ketchup.

Films — Live-Action

• Lots of killer-animal-on-the-loose films. With a slash of the claws or a chomp of the teeth, blood and organs will fly everywhere. Especially in aquatic beastie films, where a person gets pulled underwater and a huge bubble of red wells up to mark their demise.
• Akira Kurosawa was a pioneer of this trope. It seems like he rather liked it.
  • The Ur-Example of this topic in films can be found in Sanjuro (a 1962 Kurosawa samurai flick), in the final duel, in which the antagonist, when struck, shoots a horrific stream of blood accompanied by a loud discord. As mentioned, this was the result of a technical malfunction with the pump, but between the impressive visual and the difficulty of cleaning the set and clothes for a more realistic second take, Kurosawa decided to just Throw It In!.
  • The ending of his film Ran showcases one of the best cases when General Kurogane beheads the treacherously evil Lady Kaede, for all the nasty acts she pulled throughout the film. The resultant geyser of blood that spurts across the wall behind is a thing of beauty. The view of the actual decapitation, though, is nicely blocked from view .
• 28 Days Later: Mailer. He's not vomiting. He's not bleeding from the mouth. He's literally gushing blood on people. And he never runs out. Unlucky for you, The Virus spreads through contact with membranes of the eyes and mouth as well (and probably the nose, just to be cruel) so... it's like trying to hold your breath while someone aims a firehose at your face. Charming.
• 2LDK: In this low-budget Japanese film, two roommates are also aspiring actresses and up for the same part. They are outwardly polite, but one night the tensions between them explode into violence. It ends with each of them jamming a knife into the other's throat, with blood spraying out from both wounds.
• 300 features very stylized CG blood that sprays out from wounds to suggest the art style of the comic book it was based on.
• A scene in The Addams Family movie where Wednesday and Pugsley are having a duel at a school play; Pugsley loses an arm, and Wednesday gets slashed across her wrist and throat. (Don't worry, the limbs were fake. Don't ask where they got the blood from, though.) By the time Wednesday finishes her fake death scene, the first two or three rows of the audience are drenched in their blood.
• The Xenomorphs of the Alien series are an especially dangerous version. Any damage to their carapace yielded high-pressure spurts of highly acidic blood. It is some kind of evolutionary trait to make it even harder to fight them.
• Done realistically in Black Hawk Down. A soldier is shot in the leg and begins to spray blood from the wound, tipping off the medics that he is hemorrhaging and won't make it through the night.
• In Uwe Boll's ultra cheesy film BloodRayne, this is used a lot with very cheap looking blood spurting effects that look like red paint.
• In the rampaging climax of The Cabin in the Woods, Hadley finally gets to see his merman. As it mauls him, spurting ridiculous amounts of blood from its blowhole.
• Chai Lai Angels: Dangerous Flowers: While angry, Dragon slams his Classy Cane down on Kong's foot hard enough to poke a hole in it. The blood comes out with enough pressure to spray Kong in the face.
• The explosive death of the giant mako in Deep Blue Sea, in which so much blood fountains into the sky and spreads out in a massive circle that it suggests the animal was nothing but a shark-shaped bag of red stuff.
• The Devil's Mirror, a Bloodier and Gorier kung-fu film, is crammed with these. Notably the hero's father who gets skewered by seven swords at the same time as part of his excessively lengthy death... which leads to a literal geyser of blood to the ceiling.
• Played for laughs in Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Midway through, Van Helsing has the hero pound a stake into vampirized Lucy Westenra. At the first blow of the hammer, the hero gets drenched with about 30 gallons of blood rocketing out of the coffin with the force of a fire hose. Van Helsing is safely out of the way, having taken shelter behind a pillar.
  • Also an example of Enforced Method Acting. The actor was not told there would be that much blood and is visibly trying not to laugh.
  • Another example is when Renfield gets a "paper-cut" and an obnoxious fountain of blood shoots out of his finger, much to the delight of Dracula.
• All characters in Evil Dead, with the exception of Ash. Taken to ridiculous extremes in Army of Darkness, where one poor guy is tossed into a pit containing Deadites, resulting in a huge fountain of blood blasting back up to the surface.
• In the Robert Rodriguez vampire movie From Dusk Till Dawn and its various sequels and prequels, blood sprays from the wounded villains and protagonists as though fired from a fire hose.
• Godzilla:
  • Godzilla gets to show off a fantastic example of this trope when Gigan hits his shoulder with his buzzsaw.
  • After getting shot by Mechagodzilla's finger missiles in Terror of Mechagodzilla, Godzilla sprays several jets of high-pressure blood from his neck. In the previous film in the series, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, Godzilla loses enough blood in this way that most of his head and upper body are painted red midway through the initial Curbstomp Battle he suffers against his mechanical counterpart.
• Used constantly in Hobo with a Shotgun, in keeping with the over-the-top nature of the film. Used very prominently, and combined with Overdrawn at the Blood Bank, when Logan has his head ripped off, and a seemingly never-ending spray of blood fountains from his neck; with enough pressure that a girl in a bikini can happily shower in it.
• In Hong Kil Dong, an evil ninja is trying to crawl away under some sand. A good guy promptly spears him through the sand. A jet of blood sprays at least four feet high.
• Several of the victims in Hot Fuzz fall prey to this- though having said that, some of the blood spurts are fake, using ketchup to fake an injury or even death.
• Kill Bill:
  • Dozens of people in the first installment. The effect was achieved with the old-fashioned method of filling condoms with blood and putting them under the actors' clothing.
  • The animated section covering the origin of O-Ren Ishii uses this as well. When her father is stabbed, geysers of blood spray from the wound and spray all over the room. This is done to a satirical extent; a bloodless silhouette of the murderer is left on the ceiling.
  • Possibly Played for Laughs when O-Ren decapitates Boss Tanaka for insulting her, as it results in a ten-foot-tall fountain of blood spouting from his body that looks like something straight out of Monty Python.
• Kingdom of Heaven could be guilty of this. During the caravan ambush scene, when Guy de Lusignian kills a Saracen, blood spurts up into the and and onto his face. And on a downward stroke.
  • In the three-hour Director's Cut, you actually see the brutal damage done by this downward stroke. It cleaves the Saracen from shoulder to opposite hip, presumably slicing through his heart which could potentially explain the spray of blood.
• The Machine Girl: Heroic Bloodshed is a understatement. The amounts of blood these people release is so great they should be dead within seconds. But instead they stand around screaming for minutes — that is, provided their head is in one piece and still attached to their body. One particularly memorable scene has the main character use the headless body of someone as a Super Soaker on a villain.
• Subverted in Mimic, in which a man falls to his death in an alley and his landing splashes a junked mirror with a massive, sloppy spray of ... white paint, because his head landed on and crushed a paint can.
• Used for black comedy in National Lampoon's European Vacation, when the Griswalds' car knock Eric Idle off his bicycle. Dismissing his injuries as Just a Flesh Wound, Idle offers them directions to the next tourist trap, and a thin but continuous stream of blood squirts out from his cut wrist in the direction he's pointing.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Glen is dragged into his bed by Freddy, disappearing into a hole - and a massive geyser of blood comes exploding out. No, this was not in the nightmare; later in the movie, we see cops carrying down buckets from the boy's room. It is implied it's partially Freddy's power as he breaches the barrier between the dream world and the real world, but man, there are a LOT of buckets.
• Sy's dream in One Hour Photo, where he gets a bad case of "red eye."
• The entire team from The Machine Girl worked together on RoboGeisha, in which in addition to the humans and cyborgs who spurt gallons of blood, buildings attacked by the Shiro Robot spurt blood several stories into the air.
• Maria tears the head off a chicken in Scary Movie 5, and the sheer amount of blood, and the speed at which it comes out, allows her to paint a crucifix on the wall.
• Happens quite a bit in Sin City the movie.
• For a non-injury example, in A Sound of Thunder, a protester pops open a champagne bottle filled with what appears to be blood that sprays time tourists celebrating killing a T. rex. One movie reviewer asked where he could get a bottle of carbonated blood.
• The 2007 film of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street uses this frequently. (For the record, this runs against the musical it's an adaptation of, which has prop razors that squirt a tiny amount of stage blood.) It also subverts it for the deaths of Sweeney himself and his wife Lucy. For those two, despite having their throats slashed just like everyone else, the blood flows out gently without spurting.
• The director of Tokyo Gore Police (Yoshihiro Nishimura) had worked on special effects for The Machine Girl and RoboGeisha, so he was sure to include ridiculous amounts of blood spraying everywhere. A character spews enough blood from where his legs used to be that he propels himself through the air.
• The tendency for "realistic" Vietnam War movies to engage in this is parodied in Tropic Thunder; the scene we see from the film within a film has characters shooting jets of blood from their heads and spewing more intestines than would fit inside their bodies, all while the hero is shot a preposterous number of times to little effect.
• Turbo Kid: Parodied. Every injury, no matter how minor or silly, leads to ridiculous torrents of blood (more blood than any human body could contain) that splatter all over the heroes.
• Nishimura also directed Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl, a film about two girls (matching the descriptions in the title) fighting over a guy. For this film, he ups it a notch and has bodies spewing gallons of blood in every other scene.
• The 1961 film adaptation of La Venganza de Don Mendo / Don Mendo's Revenge (a very popular Spanish play) is full of deliberate Stylistic Suck. Every stab wound, of which there are many, produces a powerful and ridiculously thin jet of blood as the character slowly, slowly, slowly bleeds to death. At one point one corpse-to-be falls across another, and the first fountain grows taller.
• Every gore scene in Violent Shit involves copious amounts of blood spraying all over the place. Even the killer getting shot in the shoulder elicits several large squirts.
• This is done a bit excessively in Zatoichi to the point of being Bloody Hilarious, especially in the 2003 Takeshi Kitano film.

Literature

• How NOT to Write a Novel recommends not claiming, even if it is more accurate, that blood leaps out of a cut throat "exactly the way juice squirts out of a juice box when a toddler falls on it".
• The Iliad has some amazing scenes in it. Apparently ancient Greeks had brains that exploded in impact with spears.
• Nansō Satomi Hakkenden: When the young samurai Shino decapitates his dog in chapter 19, it produces a "geyser" of blood some five feet in length; Shino is even able to spot one of the eight Virtue Beads within the stream and grab it before it's stopped flowing. Could be vaguely justified in that the bead was granting Yoshirou greater vitality than a normal dog, but was more likely included simply for Rule of Cool.
• Vanas Heritage: Despite usually playing fights and the resulting injuries relatively realistic, when Nirvy hits a Skjalls throat with her sword, his blood-splattering even reaches her face.
• Beyond all the bloody displays in the Warrior Cats series, the most blatant use of this trope is at the end of Sunset after Brambleclaw stabs Hawkfrost in the throat with a wooden stake. After he removes the stake, blood splashes out of Hawkfrost's wound like there's no tomorrow. Hawkfrost then gets up and proceeds to deliver his Final Speech, which causes blood to flow faster and faster from his wound. By the time he's done, you would expect him to have lost at least three cats' worth of blood; but then he falls into the lake and proceeds to fill it with what little of the red stuff he's got left in him.
  • Tigerstar has some High-Pressure Blood moments, too. Maybe it's genetic? Any time he gets wounded, blood pours out, most notably when he bleeds to death nine times in a row after being wounded by Scourge in The Darkest Hour.

Live-Action TV

• Though most deaths are portrayed realistically, sometimes the blood spray can be over the top in the Spike show 1,000 Ways to Die. Other times, the show inverts this trope and the wounds yield very little blood, if any at all.
• One perp in Bones got caught because he forgot about this trope, and didn't remember to clean the ceiling after slicing a rival's carotid.
• A scene in comedy series Bottom makes use of this trope, when one of the characters attempts to make Christmas Dinner whilst utilising a meat cleaver.
• Downplayed yet justified on CSI with the two victims of the episode Two And A Half Deaths. The murderer killed their victims using blood-thinning drugs which they got into the victim's system using the tampons the victim soaked in vodka to get drunk when she was technically banned from drinking so that, when the first victim gets into even a minor accident their blood wouldn't be able to clot and so the victim would bleed to death instantly. Then we get to see one of the victims actually dying as he cuts himself shaving... only for blood to pour down his body.
• Like most other medical tropes, this is largely averted in ER. If an artery is cut, it's sometimes depicted as a firm squirt of blood that follows a patient's heartbeat. A good example is an amputated leg in the first-season episode "Blizzard".
  Lydia: We've got a pumper!
• Game of Thrones: Gory scenes, particularly those meant to be shocking or horrific, commonly feature this. The slashed throats during the Red Wedding and Oberyn Martell's Your Head Asplode are notable examples.
• Grey's Anatomy: In the two-parter episode "Crash Into Me" a patient's carotid artery (quite literally) blows up. The blood gets everywhere. It's even commented on that the nurse standing next to him looks like Carrie at the prom because she's "wearing, like, half [his] blood."
• Freddie in iCarly pricks his finger to use the blood for a genealogy program online. The program reveals that his family is, among other things, "prone to excessive bleeding". Cue blood squirting from the finger like a water gun.
• In Kamen Rider Den-O, dying Imagin usually just explode like most everything in Toku. However, in the third movie, when Momotaros is badly injured fighting Yu-Ki, he exhibits High-Pressure Sand (since Imagin are time-traveling monsters made of sand) because it's more dramatic that way.
  • And while we're on the subject, way back in the 70s, Kamen Rider Amazon had this, since instead of kicking the monster to make it explode, Amazon would use his arm blades to make the monster bleed out and keel over, and this trope was so very much in effect. The Moral Guardians protested this however, so he went back to the "kick to explode"-style finisher about midway through the show.
  • Kamen Rider Amazons, despite being Bloodier and Gorier than the original Amazon, averts this for the most but The Last Judgement does have an instance where Amazon Alpha cleaves off Amazon Neo Alpha's right arm.
• A Kids in the Hall skit involves a date gone horribly wrong: Dave Foley's character develops a slight ear bleed which escalates alarmingly.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Whenever Orcs get attacked, stabbed or decapitated, they blood spurs out from their wounds like in the 300 movies at time. One such example is when Valandil stabs in the chest an Orc he was fighting, and the blood just sprays out like a geyser from the stab wound.
• Referenced in a Monty Python's Flying Circus skit where a movie director talks about a scene where "the blood comes gushing out, pshhh! in slow motion". Then, of course, there's the "Sam Peckinpah's Salad Days" skit, which applies this to some rather Made of Plasticine people in a picnic scene. And the Black Knight in Holy Grail.
• Done with hydraulic fluid in Robot Combat League. Of course, it is under high pressure, as these are robots, but still, it flies in amounts big enough to completely drench anyone nearby.
• Parodied before the trope became famous in an original-cast Saturday Night Live sketch. Julia Child (as played by Dan Ackroyd) nicks a finger while cutting up some chicken. We don't see anything at first, but soon a drop of blood shows up. The drop becomes a trickle, the trickle becomes a stream... You get the idea.
  • Comes up in a recent sketch where host Kristen Wiig and Aidy Bryant play acupuncture attendants who somehow puncture several blood vessels in patient Jason Sudeikis' back. Cue a massive fountain of blood...
• In Spartacus: Blood and Sand injuries most often result in a jet of CGI blood shooting across the screen. Injuries ranging from limb removal to punches to the face. In particular, a throat-slit is likely to turn into a high-pressure blood fountain.
• In Ultraseven, Gyeron Starbem releases jets of yellow blood once Seven manages to slash his neck with his Eye Slugger, enough to temporarily blind Seven while he's finishing the monster off.
• The gush of blood is often gesticulated on Whose Line Is It Anyway?'s improv games whenever any panelist's actions simulate a blade cutting another panelist's neck—most often Ryan Stiles' neck.

Music

• In a strange example is the band GWAR. Their stage show, which consists of killing famous people and GWAR slaves by ripping off their faces or limbs or head or genitals or combinations of said parts. Removal of parts is always followed by ludicrous amounts of high-pressure blood and always directed at the audience. Oderous also douses the audience in other high-pressure liquids throughout the show.
  "Whoa! His head's been decapitated! Look at all that PSI in his aorta artery! Whoa, is he a gut show or what?"

Pro Wrestling

• The Indie wrestling federation CZW has an annual tournament of death. Within the usual excessive injuries sustained, there was one particular incident during the third tournament. The wrestler Sexxxy Eddie was fighting in his second match, where he had managed to cut through a vein in his arm. Probably caused by the large amount of glass around the ring. At the end of the match, blood was seen to be visibly arching from the wound, which he then proceeded to drink. Thankfully doctors were on-site to patch his arm up with a roll of Duct Tape.

Theater

• People who went to see Evil Dead: The Musical were warned to bring plastic macs if they were sitting in the front three rows. Although some who went to see it wore white t-shirts and kept them afterwards as souvenirs.

Video Games

• Blood Warrior, in an attempt to one-up Mortal Kombat in the gorn department, has the fighters stream jets of blood at every opportunity. Even if they're standing in place in a dizzy stance.
• Breath of Fire IV had a scene where Fou-lu ends up decapitating usurper Soniel with the very Evil Weapon that Soniel backstabbed Fou-lu with. The screen goes to black silhouette, you see Fou-lu's silhouette whip out the sword, and you see Soniel's silhouette suddenly headless and geysering (silhouette) blood. This scene was completely Bowdlerised from non-Japanese versions of the game to the point where the manga adaption turned the scene — including the graphic depiction of Soniel's decapitation and all the PSI in his aorta — in a deliberate Take That!.
• Protagonists in Castlevania tend to spray blood everywhere when they run out of health.
  • They turn red and disintegrate into blood, so the blood is pretty much all that's left.
• Oh, The Conduit. Headshot a human enemy, you get Pretty Little Headshots. Headshot a Drudge alien, and you get a fountain of orange blood gushing from their body, along with their heads exploding.
• In Dead Rising, people apparently turn into water balloons when they become zombies, shedding at least a gallon of the red stuff if anything remotely pointy hits them. The same goes for the living, though not to such an extreme. Interesting that Burt and Paul are able to follow Frank to the maintenance room without assistance even after leaving splatters all over the walls.
  • The best example is that you can get a showerhead and jam it into a zombie's forehead. It will then rain blood for about thirty seconds, though the zombie will continue to shuffle around (and you can take a picture for hilarity's sake), only falling over when the blood stops flowing. That is some high-pressure blood!
• The Succubus from Disgaea 4 has a Magichange attack called "Delusion" in which she strips for the party member wielding her. The resulting nosebleed comes out with such force that it damages enemies in front of said party member.
• Bioware also uses this trope in Dragon Age: Origins, where a decapitation in melee results in a gusher of blood.
  • The Soldier's Peak Downloadable Content gives Warriors a Cast From Hitpoints ability that shoots this from themselves in all directions to damage and push back enemies.
• In Dr. Mal: Practice of Horror you play solitaire to earn enough stars to "diagnose" the various wacky conditions presented by patients, "examining" the brain, liver &etc. The icon for a blood examination depicts a spray of red mist shooting out of the fingertip of a visibly horrified patient.
• Eternal Fighter Zero is a bloodless game with the sole exception of Ikumi Amasawa. Many of her attacks spill lots of high-pressure blood around; she can collect it for use in her special attacks.
• Fable's decapitations cause fountains of blood to gush from the enemies' bodies.
• In the Fallout series there is a perk called "Bloody Mess", which allows the player to unlock death animations that ramp up the gore to intentionally absurd levels.
• Shoot a raven in Fallout: New Vegas and you'll be greeted by an absurdly long animation of blood spraying in every direction, far more than should even be in one bird...from a raven that has long since ceased to exist because you reduced it to a chunky red paste strewn across several square feet of desert sand.
• Being killed with a shot to the head in Gears of War with certain weapons will pretty much cause heads to explode. In the sequel, everything loses what appears to be enough blood to easily knock someone out from the impact of bullets hitting alone. Your character collapses to the ground long after enough losing enough blood to kill a person. Then everyone can shoot your remains for kicks.
• God of War::
  • The cutscenes of God of War often show Kratos killing his enemies. These killings usually involve fountains of blood spilling forth.
  • III turned things up a notch by using the more powerful PS3 system to add even more blood, that goes everywhere, and even covers Kratos (though it vanishes off him pretty quick).
• In the original Halo: Combat Evolved, hitting a dead body of an Elite or Jackal will result in a pool of dark-purple blood bursting out of their body. You can even do this to the point where looking at the massive pool of blood will result in the game lagging.
• I Wanna Be the Guy has your tiny character bursting in a huge explosion of blood should he so much as graze an apple. As well as everything else out to kill him. Repeatedly.
• A finishing move while using a sword style in Jade Empire has your character decapitate the enemy, who falls over with blood fountaining from their exposed neck.
• In the Karoshi games, when you throw yourself against spikes or various other death-inducing interiors your character explodes in a fountain of blood.
• Killer7 has the blood coming by the gallons: enemies killed normally would spray blood for several seconds before vanishing while those hit in their weak spot would explode into a blood mist, and one character's special ability involved spraying blood from her wrist to break barriers. And then there's Cloudman (4:45 for those who don't want any story spoiling).
• In the "Unlucky Charm" sidequest in Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning a thief named Edwin Hoswig is stabbed and left for dead by his partner. If you talk to Hoswig later on in the quest, he spends the entire conversation gushing blood from his neck in ludicrously large and long spurts which in real life would've left him dead before he could finish his first few sentences. Another gratuitous use of blood is several of the animations which take place when you kill an enemy while Fateshifting.
• In the Xbox 360 game Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom, all of the mobs and even the Player Characters have this, especially some of the bosses.
• While the Malice from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is not really blood, the geysers of the stuff that spew out of the Blight Ganons when they are killed has the same visual effect as this.
• Let It Die: Killing a fighter causes their entire body to explode with streams of blood for two seconds, even if all you did was crush their skulls in with your foot. Tuber blood doesn't spill out because it's busy sublimating into a gas as the body disintegrates within seconds. Chimera just explode into guts.
• Side-scrolling shooters Liero and Soldat have copious amounts of blood. Liero's in-game options allow you to have 500% blood amount, although outside game applications can increase this to over 32000%!
• In the opening of Mega Man Zero, La Résistance Reploids were sliced in half by several Golems' lasers, with blood spilling out◊. This was of course edited in the English release.
• Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. Slicing anyone with your HF Blade results in a twenty-foot gout of the red stuff. Makes even less sense when you realize that all those enemies are CYBORGS, who would be more likely to need LESS blood than humans...
• Metal Slug 3 managed to make this into an attack. When you're zombified, you can cough up blood at such high pressure that it instantly kills anything it touches.
• The original Mortal Kombat games earned at least part of their (at the time) legendary notoriety for the sheer amount of blood that spewed off the fighters with each connected punch or kick. The more recent sequels have toned this down, though Mortal Kombat 9 exaggerates this trope. To drive the point home, there is actually an achievement/trophy for spilling 10,000 pints of blood. You will earn it quickly.
• Various enemies in Nanobreaker spewed gallons of "liquid" every time you hit them. Doing this enough would give your character life and energy boosts (a very literal definition of Leaked Experience).
• Whenever one of the fencers die in Nidhogg, they spray a large amount of blood out of the wound, and all over the ground. The blood is the same color as the fencer.
• The first modern Ninja Gaiden title featured simple head decapitations; the sequel ramped it up to Bloodier and Gorier with limb and complete body dismemberments. The last in the trilogy does away with decaps entirely, replacing it with this trope instead.
• No More Heroes uses this to the extreme: often, blood will spurn out wildly and cover anything in a 100-yard radius. Its equivalent of Everything Fades is dead bodies vanishing in a puff of blood — apparently, any non-major character who dies simply explodes into a smoky cloud of blood. Unfortunately, this was only applied to the USA release; the Japanese and European releases replaced the blood with black mist.
• In Persona 5 An all-out attack has a silhouette of your enemy spurting blood like a fountain.
• Samurai Shodown characters finished off by a blade attack can possibly result in the character standing straight as a large stream of blood exits their bodies, before they slump to the ground, dead.
• When you stab the Colossi's weak points in Shadow of the Colossus, lots of blood spurts out. Wander also bleeds like this when Emon's men stab him through the heart.
• Ms. Fortune from Skullgirls is not only an example of this trope, but she also uses it to her advantage. She jettisons blood from her scars for propulsion during her backwards dash, and while her head is severed, she can cause her head to zip along the ground quickly by shooting out a stream of blood from it.
• The Team Fortress 2 short "Meet the Sandvich" includes a (mercifully censored) variant of this, best summed up by the line: "My blood! He-he punched out ALL my blood!".
  • Then there was "Meet the Spy", where the BLU spy's head is utterly obliterated with a thin stream of blood flying out of what's left of his neck.
  • The Eyelander or The Scotsman's Skullcutter. When either score a kill, it severs its victim's head from their neck, accompanied by a veritable geyser of vital fluids.
  • The Garry's Mod joke character "Christian Brutal Sniper" has the odd ability to provoke this in his victims. Even a simple attack will create bursts of blood, and striking them again will make more.
• The defeat of most characters in the original Vandal Hearts game, both allies and enemies, results in a geyser of pixelated blood. Even ghosts and animated skeletons die bloodily. Only stone enemies don't bleed - they explode in a massive shower of small rocks instead.
• Although used a few times in the Whack Your... games, the most infamous example is the scissors death from the original Whack Your Boss, where the player slits the throat of the boss, resulting in a LARGE projectile of blood to escape from the wound as it covers everywhere in the cubicle, except the space behind the protagonist.
• Blowing off a Nazi's head with the upgraded Kar98 in Wolfenstein results in an enormous fountain of blood spewing out of the guy's neck as he slowly slumps to the ground.
• Lost Soul Aside: Gameplay demo shows the monsters spurt one when struck with the swords.

Visual Novels

• School Days:
  • One of the endings features a major character (Sekai) being slit across the throat. After three seconds, two fountains of super high-pressure blood spew like hell for around twenty seconds. The weirdest part is that all the other characters just stand there as if nothing happens. In reality, when the artery in the neck gets cut, bursts of blood like this are not uncommon. The victim is unlikely to remain standing upright though — and it's quite a shocking sight for bystanders.
  • Also: Kotonoha's infamous suicide, in which she throws herself off the building Makoto lives in right after he definitely rejects her — and she hits the ground very bloodily in front of Sekai and Makoto.

Web Animation

• "Blood coming down like rain, showering me..."
• Although it's not high pressure, in Bonus Stage Joel notes that Phil has blood drip from his fingers (or lack thereof) for 6 hours. Joel fits the trope; his neck spurts blood after being punched off by a giant fist. This could be explained by Phil having superhero blood.
• Happy Tree Friends - the cute forest critters hold a lot of blood.
• Played for laughs in the Metal Gear Awesome videos. In the first one, Revolver Ocelot gets his pistol-hand cut off by Grey Fox (after remarking how he held the best gun ever) much like in the game. The main difference being that his arm turns into a non-stop blood cannon, so much that the blood is STILL gushing out at intense speeds during the second video.
• Played for laughs in the Flash cartoon series Rats On Cocaine. Characters regularly have their limbs fly off in bloody geysers and don't notice it at all.

Webcomics

• 8-Bit Theater loves this trope. Really loves it.
• Bob and George:
  • After an accident.
  • This one is a little over the top.
• In Doc Rat, Doc's reaction to a scene that horrifies everyone else is that people don't have an artery there.
• In Lit Brick, this gets used occasionally for comic effect, or to Lampshade the use of this trope in the original source literature. For example, here.
• Shows up a lot in Penny Arcade, including the notorious example used as the page illustration, where Gabe tried to cure Tycho's hiccups by cutting off his hand. In case you're wondering, he still had the hiccups!. And they may have just outdone themselves in the last panel of this strip.
• Accompanied by a "Spurt" here in Sarab.
• Lampshaded in this Sluggy Freelance strip. Also Done several times afterwards.
  • Amusingly, that first example was due to high blood pressure.
• At least two characters have suffered violently explosive nosebleeds after a single punch to the face in Suicide for Hire. The author added a note saying "I don't care if it's unrealistic for one punch, I love that effect."
• Twisted Tropes: After Violet becomes a human ball from the blueberry juice, Willy Wonka pokes her with his staff and instead of the juice she covers him and her father with a fountain of Gorn.

Web Original

• One of Cracked's 31 Life Lessons You Can Only Learn From Video Games is that "a person's volume of blood often exceeds 78 liters."
• Parodied in this Fauxtivational Poster.
• Lampshaded non-comedically in Fine Structure when two hikers view the aftermath of some Soviet scientists releasing the Sealed Evil in a Can.
• Survival of the Fittest is usually realistic about wounds and the like; but there are cases where this occurs, where wounds cause an absurd amount of blood to come out. For example, Jacob Starr bleeds out in about 10 seconds after his throat is slashed. Especially ironic because he had previously been Made of Iron.

Western Animation

• Used on Aqua Teen Hunger Force a number of times. Parodied in one of the opening segments with Dr. Weird, where his latest experiment involves trying to use this as a form of transportation:
  Dr. Weird: Gentlemen! Chop off my head with such velocity that my blood will rocket through my neck and propel my lifeless body all the way to Phoenix!
  Steve: Okay, uh... what's in Phoenix?
  Dr. Weird: Why, it's your momma, Steve! Now get the axe!
• Done comically in The Boondocks episodes "Catcher Freeman" and "The Hunger Strike". Considering the show's anime style, it's to be expected. Also episode "Stinkmeaner 3: The Hateocracy" when someone is decapitated.
• Final Space: In episode 2, when the Lord Commander rips off Gary's left arm, the arm starts squirting blood in much bigger quantities than should be possible.
• In the (second) Grand Finale of Futurama, Fry, similar to the School Days example above, commits suicide by leaping off of a building and, for lack of a better word, exploding as soon as he hits the ground.
  Leela: He sure has a lot of blood for a skinny guy.
• In the Littlest Pet Shop (2012) episode "Bakers and Fakers", the Biskit Twins create a cake modeled after themselves. Unfortunately, because their cake-making skills are sub-par and the cake in question is filled to the brim with red borscht berry filling, this trope ensues when the cakes' heads slide off.
• Lupo the Butcher: Lupo accidentally chops off his thumb while chopping meat. He runs around screaming while a geyser of blood sprays the room.
• Used in The Simpsons after Homer's arm is slashed open by broken glass from trying Percussive Maintenance on a jukebox. Also seen in the episode where Homer and Mr. Burns are throwing coins off a tall building. One penetrates Lenny's skull and blood spurts from the wound when Carl removes it.
• Lampshaded in an episode of South Park:
  Kyle: Dude! How are we gonna move twenty-three calves to your house?
  Stan: I don't know.
  Cartman: I've got it. We could kill Butters, and then float the calves on a river of blood.
  Kyle: Don't be stupid, Cartman! Butters doesn't have that much blood in him!
  Butters: Eh yeah I do too!
• The Venture Brothers, "Dr. Quymn, Medicine Woman":
  Indigenous chief: [Speaking unintelligible native language throughout]
  Dr. Tara Quymn: He says it tore the head off their mightiest warrior... He says it was as if someone shook up a 6-foot can of... blood soda, a-and someone popped the top off.
  Indigenous chief: Whoosh! [gesticulating to invoke a fountain]

Real Life

• Depending on where you are cut, this can happen easily in real life, though the amount of blood is nowhere near the fictional amount. Doctors or nurses who cut into those places either unaware or accidentally can easily get sprayed with spurting blood, which quickly stops shooting so high because of the loss of blood pressure. One such place is the neck, as two hockey incidents demonstrate:
  • Clint Malarchuk getting his carotid artery severed by a skate during a televised game in 1989. Videos of the injury can be found on YouTube, but warning: they are very graphic. Thanks to the efforts of team doctors, and the trainer, Jim Pizzutelli, who pinched the artery, and held on to it until help arrived he managed to survive the injury and was back to practicing four days later.
  • An errant skate blade caught Florida Panthers forward Richard Zednik during a 2008 game. He somehow retained the presence of mind to fly over to the bench before things got out of hand, but even then he left a long red trail on the floor. Commenters compared his incident to Malarchuk's. A slow-motion shot of the hit shows that the blood was already hitting the ground before Zednik had braced himself fully for the fall he took.
• Ironically, small cuts tend to bleed quite a bit more viciously than large ones, as anyone who's gotten a cut to their hands or feet will know. The hands and feet require large amounts of blood, in part due to their role as sense organs, but also because they're one of the main sites for heat exchange. While the blood that leaves fingers and toes that are cut isn't exactly high pressure, it can bleed for a scarily long amount of time before the body stops it, although you're none the worse for wear afterwards.
• The horned lizard of America uses this as a weapon. It has specialized sinuses behind its eyes that shoot high-pressure blood through a tiny opening when it's under stress. The blood contains foul chemicals that drive off large threats and can be shot up to three feet. Oh, and it squirts the blood from its eyes.
• Head injuries usually bleed more than injuries to other body areas, mostly because the vascular spasm, a reflexive constriction of damaged vessels, is weaker or absent there. Given a choice between losing more blood or reducing the flow of oxygen to the brain, bleeding is preferable to brain damage.
• Thomas E. Ketchum, better known under his alias Black Jack, was accidentally decapitated during his execution by hanging (the rope was too long and he had gained weight). According to the 1901 newspaper article about the event, his headless body "pitched forward toward the spectators and blood spurted upon those nearest the scaffold".
• Decapitations in general tend to make brief gore fountains out of people.
• Jumping spiders use pressurized blood which fills their bodies as hydraulic fluid to extend their limbs (as other spiders) and jump instead of muscles. This has been until recently a pain in the ass for neurobiologists who wanted to study their brain activity, as they have a nasty tendence to explode when attempting to use surgical instruments on them.

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