Here's a Bloody Awful Christmas From PETA

Dinner with loved ones doesn't go exactly as planned

Who wants seconds? What, nobody?

In the PSA below, PETA, Grey London and O Positive director David Shane serve an upsetting holiday dinner, though it starts out pretty tame.

In silly festive garb, folks carve their meat and chatter about friends, family, TV faves and home-improvement projects.

At first, the gathering seems harmless, banal. But you’ll soon see red—oh, so much red—as the scenario, which some might find triggering, plays out. Pass the napkins!

“It’s such a strong and simple idea. We’re all complicit, right?” Shane says. “Most of us kind of turn a willful blind eye to how the food we eat at the holidays arrives on our plate.”

“But even though we’re trying to say something fairly serious, it was a ludicrously hilarious shoot.,” he recalls. “And the hardest job fell to our lovely cast who had to try not to laugh when getting sprayed with streams of fake blood.”

Naturally, the messy shoot presented challenges.

“Originally, we wanted the cast to improvise so they wouldn’t know when the blood was coming,” Shane tells Muse. “But the very nice SFX guys who were in charge of spraying the actors were terrified when we asked them to shoot whenever they felt like it. ‘We’re not funny! We have no comic timing!’ they said. We assured them this didn’t matter, but they kept refusing.”

Despite that, the performers defied expectations, keeping cool as geysers of red came their way.

“The actors were remarkable, barely reacting when the blood hit them,” says agency CD Sam Haynes.” We allowed small, instinctive responses, since the characters aren’t fully oblivious to the carnage. They simply choose to willfully ignore it—like many of us do at Christmas” when served beef, ham, turkey, etc.

The film begins breaking this week across U.K. cinemas and digital platforms worldwide.

Not-so-appetizing OOH supports the video in some markets: