How to make entrails

To make entrails takes very few supplies. Your shopping list looks like this.

  • Unlubricated condoms
  • KY Jelly
  • Food coloring
  • Press and Seal wrap
  • Fake blood

supplies

Start by filling the condoms with KY Jelly. You’ll need about one tube of KY per condom. Add a little bit of food coloring, but don’t worry about mixing it evenly.  I use 1 drop green to 3 drops red, personally.  Tie each condom off making a whole bunch of individual of links.

Note: The KY usually makes really impressive farting noises.

I had a student helping me make these and she took some of the supplies home to finish up.  Her boyfriend came in while the room looked like this.

I think he was sad that he hadn’t been invited over earlier.

And you should see the people at the checkout line when you buy 20 boxes of KY jelly. It’s a fun job.

Lay the condoms out on the Press and Seal.  Normally, I don’t get specific about a brand, but this stuff is great for intestines. Because it’s self sticking, it adheres well to itself. The slight pebbly texture and the translucents can pass as viscera.

Notice how the condoms are all different colors. That helps create the illusion of food passing through.

Deckle the edges of wrap so that you eliminate a crisp line. Straight edges almost never occur in nature and certainly not in the human body.  Making the edge uneven also means that you’ll have varying degrees of overlap on the wrap so the opacity will vary.

Dip the entrails into stage blood, most of which has the lovely property of looking wet even when it’s dry.  Do test this and be aware that humidity will slow the drying down and make them sticky.  Once they’ve dried, they’ll look wet and freshly extracted but without all that messy residue.

If you leave them drying in the shower, as I did, I highly recommend that you leave a note so that no one, like say, your husband, is startled upon finding them. Highly, highly recommend this. Highly.

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25 thoughts on “How to make entrails”

  1. Happened to read this, and then Cakewrecks. Has set the _wrong_ kind of creative juices going.

  2. Dear Roomie:

    This is just to say

    I have made up
    some entrials ^H^H^H^H^H^H entrails
    and hung them
    in the shower

    Please do
    not be startled.
    no petroleum
    products were harmed.

    I hope you
    were not
    planning on
    breakfast.

  3. MRK: you are The Best. 🙂

    Bear: that is brilliant (and possibly the best use of that WCW poem ever).

  4. Wowser!

    I think it looks great!
    A bit pricey for the KY, do you think it could be replaced with methyl cellulose and water?

    Do you have a specific brand of stage blood to recommend?

    THanks a lot for taking the time to share this!

  5. Next time, please be sure to take a picture of the look on the store clerk’s face when you buy your supplies.

    1. I’m betting it would be “uncertain, yet rampant, curiosity as spurred on by a runaway imagination”

      Especially if the KY is being bought at the same time as the condoms and the Press and Seal.

      If the fake blood was acquired at the same corner grocery store as the above items, I bet you’d see a tinge of fearful revulsion as well.

      Great post!

      – yeff

  6. Most drugstores have their own, cheaper brands of lubricants similar to KY. I know this because—um…uh…

  7. Yours turned out really well. I had to make intestines once for the Little Shop of Horrors plant feeding scene. I used panty hose, cotton batting, flex glue(Made by Rose Brand if you want to google it), and red paint. Just stuff the pantyhose, intentionally creating some un-even clumps here and there. Use some thread to create some narrower spots. Coat the entire thing in flex glue, seals the pores of the fabric and gives a nice texture. Flex glue looks and works like white elmer’s glue except that once dry it is incredibly flexible. You can tint the glue with yellow or red paint. The hose are a great under coat color. Then accent with red paint for blood.

    1. That’s an excellent intestine technique. These needed to splat and the cotton batting ones tend to be light. Which is part of what makes them great for Little Shop, because it’s easier for the puppeteer to handle.

  8. This seems to be a rather expensive method of doing it. I’d wonder if substituting the condoms for collagen sausage casing and the KY for silicone caulk (clear or white, which can still be dyed) would be a more cost effective alternative. Add dried chunks of black silicone caulk to the mix as a suspension for added texture perhaps?

    Plus, once the silicone dries (2-3 days to dry completely) the collagen sausage casing would not be needed at all, and you could peel it off in spots for added fleshy bits. It would be a lot tougher, too – you could whip it around, chew on it, etc without breaking.

    1. There’s a consistency of the filled condoms that I haven’t seen anywhere else. They stretch and bulge and are generally icky.

      I might try the caulk idea, but I suspect it’s not that much cheaper. Plus the dry time on that amount of silicone would have to be intense.

  9. Thanks Mary.

    For the methyl cellulose, I know from experience that in a palstic container, it doesn’t dry, and I once had a btach that lasted me 7 years without any mold or change in property, besides thickening (slight evaporation, the container was not perfectly air tight). I don,t know if it would react with latex though.

    How long does a prop like those entrails last? Months? Years?
    It is latex after all.
    How would you store them?

  10. An observant cashier might look at the amount of KY Jelly versus the condoms you are buying, and suggest that they don’t quite match up.

  11. The picture with the multi-colored condoms looks a bit like some bizarro gummi candies. Something about the colors and the relative translucence just reminds me of the candies. I hope nobody is eating any of them now while reading this…

    Neat post though. It looks very good. And a little gross. Perfect. 🙂

  12. I am helping shoot a zombie movie and we are literally on our way to the store to buy bulk condoms and KY right now for a green screen shoot we’re doing later today. Thanks for the great idea!!

  13. Try a feed store that sells veterinary products for the KY. It’s usually much cheaper than the human marketed product and comes in larger tubes.

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