George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead arguably remains the greatest zombie movie of all time, no matter its rough technical edges.
Many often point to how silly the film’s blood looks, with its strangely pink hue not even remotely resembling actual human blood. Though it’s been stated that Romero felt the blood contributed to a heightened, comic book-y style, it was absolutely in no way intentional.
The reason for the borderline-fluorescent blood? As revealed by effects maestro Tom Savini himself, it was simply down to Savini’s own inexperience, given that this was only his second movie working as a special effects artist.
Savini used fake blood which, in his own words, “photographed like melted crayons” despite looking just fine in the bottle. With Savini still being a novice makeup artist in the pre-Internet days, he didn’t exactly have a huge pool of resources to draw from.
However, by the time he worked on his next movie, 1980’s Friday the 13th, Oscar-winning makeup artist Dick Smith kindly gave Savini his formula for fake blood – corn syrup mixed with yellow and red food colouring – and things have been just fine ever since.
Though Dawn of the Dead’s pink blood absolutely has its defenders, there’s a clear reason why Savini never used it again: most people (rightly) think it looks horrible.
