Mark "Markiplier" Fischbach says his horror film Iron Lung used 79,800 gallons of blood on camera, a figure he says breaks the cinematic record for blood volume. The number, if independently confirmed, would put the $3 million film in a class of its own.
That is why the movie is drawing attention now. Iron Lung has already earned $51.2 million, and the blood count adds a strange kind of scale to a project built around a one-man submarine, a distant planet and an ocean that is entirely full of blood.
Fischbach said he arrived at the total by working backward from the way the blood-flooding scenes were shot near the end of filming. Over the course of a week, he said, the pumps ran for eight hours in total, and he used seven hours, or 420 minutes, as the basis for the math. From there, he said, he multiplied 190 gallons per minute to reach 79,800 gallons.
He said the setup used two Honda WH20s pumps, each pumping at 119 gallons per minute. To avoid treating the full rated output as a perfect real-world figure, he said he discounted the rate to 80% and treated the combined flow as 190 gallons per minute. He also said he had behind-the-scenes footage of each basin being filled and drained, letting him calculate the volume from time and repetition rather than from one single pour.
The catch is that the record is being framed through his estimate, not through an outside audit. That matters because the comparison point is not a small one: the previous estimated holder was Fede Álvarez's 2013 film Evil Dead. On that standard, 79,800 gallons would clear the old mark by a wide margin, but only if the calculation stands up as more than a production recollection.
Iron Lung is based on the video game by David Szymanski and centers on a half-mad convict named Simon aboard a submarine sealed into a blood-filled sea. The film’s unusual premise already gave it a cult appeal; the blood figure turns that appeal into a hard number, and one that now sits between a bragging right and a verified record. What happens next is simple: if the estimate is backed up, Fischbach owns a piece of horror history. If it is not, the movie still has its box-office run, but the record claim stays provisional.
