Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg's latest film, opened today (to very fine reviews), and its steam bath sequence is garnering a lot of press. For one thing, Viggo Mortensen is naked save for his copious tattoos. For another, Cronenberg has a specific method and intent (apparent also in A History of Violence) regarding bloodshed on film. He spoke with Terry Gross on NPR's "Fresh Air" yesterday: "I want the audience to see everything and feel everything as it really happens or as close as you can get...I don't want to skip over anything, no jump cutting, no slow motion."

Cronenberg also talked about the amount of thought that goes into each detail, what the onscreen blood looks like, for instance: "The human body contains quite a lot of blood, and there are different colors of it because there's oxygenated blood that goes through your arteries that's really shockingly bright red, and if you really shot it the way it looked people would think it was fake. And then there's venous blood which goes through your veins which has not been oxygenated and that's much darker and almost brown...(Y)ou're playing with people's understandings of blood and their expectations and what they've 'seen in other movies...there were long discussions with Stephan Dupuis, who's a special effects man and makeup man who I've worked with, well, he won an Oscar with me for The Fly...and we always end up with a discussion of, do you like the color?...It's a movie reality, rather than a real reality. I like it to be fairly red and dark. Not too bright."

Earlier in the interview, Cronenberg called the steam bath sequence "our shower scene from Psycho. Weirdly enough I think some of the dynamics are the same. That is to say, how vulnerable can you ever be and if, when you're wet and naked, and people are coming at you with knives, that seems to be kind of the bottom line for vulnerability."

In  Psycho though, Hitchcock used chocolate syrup for Janet Leigh's blood, because it reads well in black and white. If there were discussions about an ideal color for the syrup, I can't find any evidence of them.