10 Unique Tricks Every Movie Started To Rip-Off

The Trick

The so-called "psychic nosebleed" typically occurs whenever a character exhibits psychic or telekinetic powers, serving as visual shorthand to signify the strain such activities place on the human body.

The trick was popularised in David Cronenberg's legendary 1981 sci-fi horror film Scanners, where telepath "scanner" Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) is shown having a nose bleed after putting his psychic powers to use.

It's an elegantly simple signifier, yet at the time of Scanners' release, was a low-key ingenious trick to underline the physical toll of psychic abilities.

The Rip-Offs

Pretty much every sci-fi or fantasy movie over the last 40 years featuring a psychic event will at some point feature the perpetrator leaking blood from their nose - The Fifth Element, The Butterfly Effect, Chronicle, and Pacific Rim, to name just a few of the dozens, if not hundreds.

It's such a commonplace, wildly overused trope that it pretty much just garners a chuckle these days, even if back in 1981 it was actually, dare one say, original.