Psycho (1960) (1998)

Ah, the shower scene. It's interesting to me how you never see the knife entering flesh -- instead, the sound and the blood resulting from the apparent wounds tell the story.

There's no splatter on impact, like we might see in movies today -- nothing cascading on the walls when he stabs her. The blood and water combination puddling at her feet is most important, here (starting about 0:59 into the clip). Apparently, the blood was created using chocolate syrup as it shows up quite well on black and white film. You can see how the syrup reacted with the water at the first shot at 0:59. It ends up clumping in bits around her feet, but by the second shot down at the water at 1:02, we can see a diluted, fairly consistent texture.

At ~1:40, the stream of blood running toward the drain is quite affective although subtle. You can see pulses of clouds of blood instead of a consistent texture -- I wonder how precisely this was accomplished.


Now, check out the 1998 Van Sant remake.


This is a "shot by shot" remake, but it fails, even in this scene alone. Did you catch that smear on the wall around 2:40? Yeah. And the color of the blood is a complete failure here. It's bright red, almost magenta. And at ~2:50, at the overhead shot, we see too much blood, including the stab wounds on her back. In this version, the blood seems secondary even though there is more of it. It's more about Heche's (bad) acting and her limp body dangling over the tub. Van Sant does, however, capture the original cloudiness of the blood running down the drain.