In movies, when people are shot or whatever and are killed, oftentimes they then have blood pour from their mouths. What brings this up is that even in movies/tv shows that are supposed to be pretty realistic (like the most recent episode of “The Pacific”), I see it happen.
Does this happen in real life? And if so, why?
Nope. See also psychic nosebleed.
It does happen in real life if the injury is something like chest wounds, crushing, etc. Basically, internal bleeding in the lungs, stomach, guts… anything that’s connected to the mouth and is bleeding will cause blood to appear in your mouth. Also, getting seriously injured could well cause you to bite your tongue, for instance…
However, it’s totally overdone in movies, and often unrealistic in that it’ll happen to people who are “dying” from something that doesn’t cause bleeding into the mouth. In movies, it’s just a visual cue for “this guy’s dying”.
Here’s graphic YouTube footage of Neda Agha-Soltan being shot during street protests in Iran last summer. Her chest wound led quickly to bleeding from the mouth and nose. Link broken to prevent accidental clicking:
As with many phenomena, “it depends.”
Bleeding from the mouth after death is probably not going to happen much, as the heart has stopped pumping blood and after death the head would have to be lower than the body so that it would drain.
However, a wound to the lungs will result in some blood being brought up with breath, (tuberculosis sufferers can cough up blood, as well).
Similarly, a wound to the stomach is liable to cause vomiting in which the blood from the wound is going to be the primary ejected matter.
Now, the strength and volume of such blood flowing is liable to be seriously misrepresented by movies and TV, but it does happen.
I witnessed a particulary spectacular version of this a few years ago; I was passing through the ICU one night when a patient (not mine, fortunately) had a catastrophic hemorrhage of some sort. I don’t know what the specifics were - whether it was a primary pulmonary hemorrhage, or something else like a carotid or aortic fistula- but the endotracheal tube suddenly filled up with blood, which then poured into the ventilator circuit like water coming out of a garden hose. The ICU team tried to ventilate the patient with a hand-squeezed bag, but they couldn’t suction blood out of the ET tube fast enough to be effective. The whole thing was over inside of two or three minutes; the patient basically exsanguinated. It’s not the sort of thing that you forget.
Game animals often have a trickle of blood - sometimes quite substantial - down the corner of the mouth when found after being hit. Can’t imagine humans being any different, as the above replies suggest.
I guess it makes sense in the most recent episode of The Pacific, since the person in question took a couple of machine gun rounds to the chest.
One really far-fetched/fan-wanking explanation would be perhaps each of the characters who were killed were heavy alcoholics and had esophageal varices that ruptured during the shock/trauma of the attack, and thus caused an outpouring of blood? That’s usually what I think of if I see the massive flows of blood usually reserved for horror movies and B-rated Action movies where you have the unrealistic outpouring of massive amounts of blood coming out.
A young family friend was observed to have blood pour from his mouth as he died after a motorcycle accident. Aortic rupture, we were told.
It’s worth noting that, generally speaking, there is far less blood in movies than you would see in a real-life situation with equivalent injury. This sounds counterintuitive, because blood immediately gets our attention, even in movies, and it feels like there’s a lot of it. But if you watch, scenes in which someone gets an arm or a head cut off show some blood cover some small, decorous area.
I’ve been pretty sheltered, and even I’ve seen real-life injuries produce great quantities of blood, even not-very-serious injuries. I saw someone cut his arm on a window and his buddy applied direct pressure in seconds, stopping the bleeding, and despite being nonfatal and quickly stopped, it still left a rich red puddle in the atrium the size of an area rug. In movies, you see fallen soldiers stained with blood and some blood on the ground in front of them; in history books, eyewitnesses describe sheets of blood pouring into rivers and turning them red.
Hollywood underemphasizes blood because, as a poetry teacher of mine once warned, blood is a very powerful image, that drives other concerns out of our minds; in the case of movies, showing realistic quantities of blood would overpower the plotline and send nauseated patrons staggering for the restrooms.
I’m sure that one reason Hollywood indulges in the blood-from-the-mouth meme is because it’s very easy to do (and sufficiently unusual to be striking). All you need are blood capsules. It’s the same reason they do that weird – spurting-up-a-little-bit-of-sputum “throwing up” – it’s easy to do, with just a little bit of stuff in the mouth. The actor or actress starts to dribble or spout a little as they go running from the scene, and you’re sure that they’re really heaving up off-camera. Except that never in my life did I actually see anyone throw up that way.
One movie where they got it right was The Sting, where Robert Redford has rivulets of blood coming from the corners of his mouth when the FBI men turn him over.
of course, it’s from the cackle-bladder that we saw him fitting into his mouth a few scenes earlier, if we were paying attention. The fake blood-from-the-mouth “sold” the illusion that he’d really been shot, when he was only acting. Such devices had been used long before the movies, as this scene accurately shows.
Not quite. There will likely be more blood from an injury in real life, but far less blood from a quick death like a soldier being shot. Blood stays in vessels, after all, unless there’s a hole while the heart is beating. Then the blood pressure will cause blood to squirt (or seep) out, until the blood pressure is so decreased from the volume loss that the heart stops beating.
A small hole, a hole pressed shut because you fell on top of it, or a heart that stops beating fairly quickly will result in a surprisingly small amount of blood lost under a dead body, especially to eyes trained by Hollywood’s pools of blood.
But I think the “blood from the mouth” thing is indeed Hollywood custom and short hand, the same way “vomiting” = pregnancy and “blood on the tissue of a cougher” = consumption (tb). Truth is, a rough cough can break small blood vessels and result in blood while coughing without signaling death in 30 minutes to a swelling score.