In TV and movies, sometimes a character needs to draw their own blood. “We need a drop of your blood to:” (test for xyz, cast a spell, become blood brothers) etc etc.
Almost without fail, the character will grab a large knife and make a very deep cut across their palm (seemingly to the bone!) The show Supernatural is especially bad about this but you will see it in a ton of other places.
Is it done this way for the convenience of the makeup crew? Something about the way the prop knife works?
Or is it just more dramatic than pricking yourself with the knife tip or a needle like any sane person would do?
I had hoped TVTropes would have an entry, but no luck.
Heh, my daughter and I wonder this all the time! Why the palm? Especially on a show where you are absolutely going to be in a fight for your life in a matter of minutes. You’re going to NEED THAT HAND!!!
I’ve never seen it done when blood was required for a test, that always involves a syringe and a wince. With blood brothers, it’s done so they can clasp hands. if they cut anywhere else, you wouldn’t get that symbolic gesture. Same with magic, you either cut your palm and smear it on a wall or drip into a bowl. I agree that in the real world you wouldn’t want to incapacitate yourself, but they’d look awkward holding their arm over a bowl. When the choice is between practicality and looking cool, Hollywood and TV land always choose the latter.
Incidentally, in the real world blood brothers often sealed their pact by dripping their shared blood into a cup. I don’t know if they ever did the palm cutting thing.
totally true. having done that to myself in real life (paring knife + slice through palm = ouch)
:eek: i can say for absolute certainty that it hurts like a mo’fo. i wasn’t using that hand for much of *anything *for weeks afterward.
I have definitely seen it before where the test was an impromptu thing not in a lab environment. I want to say they drew blood this way for the heated wire test in The Thing (1980) but I can’t remember for sure.
I watched The Thing a few weeks ago. During the blood testing scene Kurt Russel used a scalpel on digits and collected the blood in what I think were petri dishes.
When only a small amount is needed (a blood sugar test, or an iron test) it’s more often a pinprick to a finger (often using a spring-loaded pin), squeezed into a droplet sitting on the skin, and collected into a slide or pipette. If you didn’t have the right equipment, a scalpel might be a reasonable substitute, though I’m not sure why you would use the thumb instead of some other finger.
It does bring up the question: Does ANYONE actually THINK anything through? I mean, we have cars exploding with a huge whuuuzzh if they fall six feet, bullets ricocheting with loud piiinnngs off grass, swords making metallic swaaaannnngs as they slide out of leather scabbards, tires squeeeeling on dirt roads… Do they think we’re stupi…
I can accept that the movieland magic ritual or the blood brother ceremony requires blood from the palm. But seeing someone make that big slash takes me right out of the movie. I always wonder why they didn’t make a more modest cut and then I remember that I’m watching a movie.
See, here’s the thing–most of that is not stuff that most of us have actually encountered on any kind of regular basis. I’ve never been in a gun fight or a sword fight or been around an exploding car.
But we’ve all had cuts on our hands. Cuts on the bendy parts hurt! And take a longer time to heal. And get infected more easily because the hands are exposed to more dirt. And bandages get wet and fall off more easily. I assume most of us have had a cut on a bendy part bad enough that it’s seriously impaired our dexterity for a while.
So we may have a more visceral reaction to the ridiculousness of the big slice across the palm than to the ridiculousness of those other things because of our personal experience with such injuries.
While we might be willing to cut our own palms for a very good reason, there’s no way we’d cut them more deeply or widely than we have to.
There was a Narn character on Babylon 5 with a sword, and his warrior code required that if the sword was ever out of its scabbard, it had to draw blood. One time he had the sword out and realized he couldn’t kill who he wanted to, so he carefully slit his own palm before putting the sword back in its scabbard.
This query prompted me to think of counterexamples. The only one I can recall is The Craft (they pricked their fingers with a needle).
Oh and Without a Paddle, though that part is talked about in retrospect and not shown onscreen, but the paper that had the terms of their pact did not look like it was smeared with palm wounds.
And Tom and Huck: Huck insisted they sign their names in blood and it would be hard to write your name with your palm.
They use needles in medical contexts many times of course.
A related question - why, on TV, when people need to write down a phone number but don’t have a pice of paper, do they always write the number on their palm instead of the back of the hand? The palm *always *smudges.
They did that on True Blood, when the witch was going to conjure up a spell to maybe get rid of Arlene’s Evil Fetus. The witch said, ‘now I need a drop of your blood’. Why?
‘Sacrifice, hon. There’s got to be a sacrifice.’
