Chris Vander Kaay
I’m always fascinated by the idea of wanting to be so accurate in the portrayal of a real event that they involve people from the actual event in the reenactment. They did this with United 93 (2006) and more recently with The 15:17 to Paris (2018), but it goes all the way back to Babe Ruth playing himself in the Lou Gehrig biopic Pride of the Yankees (1942) and the Audie Murphy-starring To Hell and Back (1955).
It’s fascinating because the more you involve a person in the recreation of an event, the more likely it is only a story from that individual’s perspective. There were lots of soldiers in Audie Murphy’s experience, many players on Lou Gehrig’s team, and other people on the 15:17 to Paris. However, those films are paeans to the real-life people who appear in them, making it far less likely for the real moments to be captured in all their messy honesty.
This is likely true in almost any true story which hasn’t been captured on security cameras or audio. We invent a narrative to wrap around dramatic events, and the less we know about a moment, the more inclined we are to lean on drama or individual interpretation. In some ways, the “characters” in a biopic or true-life drama are as manufactured as any in a wholly fictional story. That we give them a weight and drama as an audience member is understandable, but we also give them a bit of leeway in terms of accuracy; however, it seems we should be more stringent in those portrayals specifically BECAUSE these are real people we’re using for dramatic impact.
Alyssa Miller
“Violence in Cinema”—this phrase in itself gives me a knee jerk reaction to roll my eyes and scoff. The urge to be violent is part of our primal human nature and is older than time, yet violence in cinema is used as a scapegoat for crimes. As an avid horror fan, Shock Cinema will always have a special place in my heart (right next to my autographed prop hammer from August Underground). However, violence can be used as a tool to portray the extremes in the lives of everyday people.
In the 2008 film Martyrs, Lucie is a survivor. She escapes her captors and lands herself in an orphanage and meets Anna. As Lucie grows older, she believes she is being attacked by an emaciated woman that only she can see. This womanly stalker violently terrorizes Lucie by chasing her and cutting her. And as Lucie cuts her own throat and dies, the woman is not to be seen again.
This woman is not real, but a representation of severe PTSD caused by Lucie’s capture and torture. Explaining PTSD to someone who has never been traumatized is damn near impossible. The gravity is difficult to portray, as it comes with severe anxiety and issues with self harm. The woman is violent towards Lucie because she is a metaphor for the suffering Lucie is facing. The cuts, the blood, the nightly visits Lucie experiences, it is all a metaphor for what her PTSD is doing to her mind.
Not every act of violence is unjustified, and not every act portrayed in film is to be taken in a literal sense. I personally suffer from PTSD, and I can empathize with Lucie and her violent struggle with the “monster” that follows her. The violence in Martyrs is used to portray the gravity of these issues, proving that sometimes, there is meaning behind the gore.
Kelly Warner
While others are talking about real-life violence as depicted or simulated in film, I’m going to go in a slightly different direction and talk about film violence and its relation to the real world. Most specifically, I want to talk about gun violence.
One of the most common talking points after a tragic gun massacre is to question whether violent entertainment is to blame. After Columbine, talking heads pointed their fingers at Marilyn Manson, The Matrix (1999), and the rise of violent first-person-shooter videogames. That discussion went away for a while, but it reared its head again in the wake of Parkland as President Trump sat down with the videogame industry and suggested that movies needed a rating system… which I guess makes him the only person unaware of PG-13 and R ratings? Whatever, I don’t care. This really isn’t about Trump, or the fact that the people who don’t want to see guns as the problem will cycle back to the same old talking points when they see their current defense is growing stale. Other countries get these same movies and videogames without seeing the same bloodshed, which clearly suggests that art is not to blame. However, I do think art has a part to play in our perception of violence in the real world, and it is something that should be taken seriously.
I’ve long been of the opinion that violence in art should be made to appear to hurt, to damage, and to maim. That’s what violence does, and our art should reflect that. Tame shootouts where fifty men die with scarcely any blood so that it can get the more lucrative PG-13 rating does a disservice to the audience. People need to understand that what a gunshot can do to a man. More importantly, our children need to understand. Now, I don’t mean that you should introduce your little kids to Saving Private Ryan (1998) before they’re ready. I mean that their introduction to gun violence in cinema should not be a series of bloodless shoot ’em ups. I suggest that the R rated John Wick (2014), which features nasty and fairly realistic gun violence, is less problematic than the PG-13 Expendables 3 (2014) which features largely bloodless violence, but racks up a body count in the triple digits.
There is a place for beauty and sensationalism in your depiction of violence on screen. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000), The Matrix (1999), The Raid (2011), the works of John Woo, Tony Scott, Johnnie To, and Quentin Tarantino are all examples of the aestheticization of violence. I feel like these films — which feature realistic violence but hyper-stylize it with slow-mo or fancy visuals — may run into some controversy for making death look cool, but they’re still more constructive than toothless violence in search of higher ticket sales.
Earlier I called out The Expendables 3 as an example of what I feel is a problematic action movie. I want to end this by talking about a different recent Sylvester Stallone movie which I feel goes the extreme opposite route. When Stallone revived Rambo in 2008, he created one of the most violent, ugly, difficult to watch mainstream action movies I have ever seen. And, though I watched most the film with a grimace planted firmly on my face, I feel the director/writer/star’s intention deserves some credit. In the commentary, Stallone said something that has stuck with me ever since: “If we can’t be great, let’s be truthful.”
Not everything has to be in-your-face with the nasty details of a bullet wound, but depicting bloodless gun violence does a disservice to your art and to your audience. I don’t believe that any collection of movies or games or music could inspire a normal person to do abnormal things, but I do believe that we run the risk of conditioning ourselves into blurring the lines of our bloodless fantasies and our bloody reality.
Rachel Bolton
Violent movies have been perennially popular. Violence is at the core of most horror and action movies. On occasion, tragedies of real world violence are connected to movies. Whether this is merited or just putting the blame on an easy target is a case by case basis.
But what about depicting real world violence in movies? Again, I think this should be judged as a case by case basis. Films, for better or for worse, are a way for acknowledging events and people who might otherwise be forgotten. It’s my opinion that this should be done in good taste and not in an exploitative manner.
Recently, I watched Pablo Larrain’s 2016 film Jackie about Jackie Kennedy in the immediate aftermath of JFK’s assassination. I’ve been interested in the Kennedy family for a long time, and Natalie Portman is amazing in the titular role. Jackie is probably one of my new favorite movies, but there was one thing about it that really surprised me.
As a Kennedy nerd, I’ve seen a lot of media that involves them. Of course, you can’t talk about that family without depicting the presidential assassination. Most things I’ve watched will just cut away and not show the murder. That is not the case in Jackie. As Jackie Kennedy explains to a priest that she remembers, the audience sees the infamous head shot from her eyelevel.
My first thought when watching was “wow, they actually went there.” While brief, the head shot that killed John F. Kennedy is depicted with all the graphicness that it would warrant in real life. It’s more visceral than the actual footage, and includes several moments of Jackie trying to hold her husband’s brains in.
I found it to be a real gut punch. I was amazed that Larrain decided to include it in the film, considering that it’s a non-fictional incident and that there are numerous members of his family still living. Ultimately, I think that he made the right call. Jackie is about a traumatized woman trying to put her life and sanity back together again, and the moment sells the horror that she lived through.
Paul Farrell
Violence in the real world can be a strange and terrible thing. Baffling, some might say, especially when viewed through the lens of morality. I can’t count how many times I’ve said or heard phrases like “How can someone be capable of that?” or “How do they sleep at night?” when regarding an individual who has committed a heinous act, and I can confidently say that such conversations have never yielded a satisfying answer.
That’s the issue, I suppose: life is not as a narrative. There is no rising action, no climax, no denouement. Which, perhaps, is why I gravitate so closely to horror.
Horror fans are a strange breed. On the one hand, the art they tend to gravitate to most often contains the depraved, the grotesque and the macabre. On the other, these individuals are generally some of the kindest, gentlest and most empathetic souls you might ever encounter. So, why then does the art they love and respect tend to accompany the sort of disturbing violence they wish to have no part of in the real world?
There is no easy answer to this question, nor is there a path of explanation that unites every person who might fit the description of “horror fan”. However, when I think about the meaning behind my own passion for the genre, I often come back to the same idea: the evils of the world are indeed baffling. And maybe those who are baffled by them the most are the ones most interested in seeing a contained narrative explore and, on some level, deal with the horrors that are so elusively inexplicable in the real world. In this way, people can face and digest it, harness the fear that can be so crippling outside of the theater and explore it. Be entertained by it.
Still, entertainment in horror can be defined in many different terms. Horror is not always fun. Horror is disturbing. Unsettling. Drawn from the real world in an effort to create a digestible 90 minutes encapsulating the sort of evil one could spend their whole lifetime being haunted by. And sometimes the horrors of the real world can ignite the most iconic, fascinating fiction imaginable.
Ed Gein, aka The Butcher of Plainfield, was a man who committed horrific atrocities in the 40s and 50s. Exhuming corpses from graveyards near his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin, he made collections out of bones, bits of human skin and constructed masks and a suit of the remains as well. He is known to have murdered several local women and rumored to have killed more. The man’s story is shocking, disturbing and hauntingly mystifying.
That one story caused a nation to have nightmares. Imagination on its own can be frightening enough. Provide it with fodder such as Gein, a man who really lived, really committed these atrocious acts for over a decade without interference, and the imagination transforms to nightmare. In art, however, something awful can lead to something thoughtful- the sickness of our world can be contained and examined, identified and absorbed.
Of course, different filmmakers will approach the same story differently. Gein’s is a tale which sparked countless horror films, each different in approach, pulling from elements of his story in an effort to create a narrative that encapsulates the horrors of real life while making a grander statement about the human condition.
In Psycho (1960), Alfred Hitchcock tells the story of Norman Bates (masterfully aided by an outstanding performance by Anthony Perkins), a solitary, sexually repressed young man struggling to find and maintain his identity. Part unassuming, obedient son, part oppressive matriarch, Norman is a narrative manifestation of one potential explanation as to who Ed Gein might’ve been and why he might’ve been the way he was.
Altering the man to be young and handsome, beaten down by the berating, condescending tones of the memory of his deceased mother, Hitchcock created a story that terrified as well as entertained. Elements of Gein’s desire to wear skin and become someone else, specifically his mother, was adopted into a character who, at the hands of abuse, was fractured and transformed into something new. Iconic in its ability to twist the scenario in an entertaining and unexpected way, while allowing audiences to meet the “monster” face to face and come to terms with the mania that inhabits him.
On the other hand, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) takes the exact same real life event and hones in on the grotesque and macabre reality it represents. Raw and unflinching, this landmark piece of horror cinema posits that there are ways of life in the world, in our own backyards, that we cannot fathom, understand, or control. In point of fact, our society relies on the blind eye so that the middle class can go about their lives believing that such nightmare is merely fantasy.
A reflection of the 1970s, Tobe Hooper’s take on the Gein story expands the man into a family, creating an eerie parallel to the cultural familial expectations of the middle class. Loyalty and respect begetting the strong foundation that binds the Sawyers together, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre forced audiences to face the skin wearing, bone collecting murderers as they were. People who did not face the moral dilemma of taking a life. People who were simply living as they believed they should.
Cold and callous, the film offers a window into something the average person would never get to see. Still, a window can be closed. Compartmentalized. And a film has the ability to become a part of the tapestry that comprises a person’s belief system. An ethical way in which to show, explore and, again, digest the horror that might have previously been incomprehensible.
Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) is yet another entirely different take on Gein’s story, extracting the character and proclivities of Gein and placing them into a police procedural. Thrusting the terrifying evils of Gein into the character of a serial killer on the loose, showcasing his sickness and desire to transform his body by way of the physicality he strips from others, is certainly in line with the aforementioned films. However, tonally this film focuses more on the careful drama of those in search of the man committing the horror.
Gein then is used as a catalyst to explore those altruistic individuals attempting to stop such horrors from occurring in the real world. The journey of which is telling, revealing much about the sort of person who would concern themselves with such a hunt. More interesting is the relationship that forms between Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling and Anthony Hopkin’s Hannibal Lecter. Again, by way of Gein, the story infuses a trapped serial killer to help catch a free one, which allows for a distilled window into the antipathy of such a person as well as their own capacity to feel.
All of this combines to create a narrative that does not solve the query of how to digest the capability mankind contains for atrocity, rather presents yet another window to hopefully consider its impact and how to navigate its existence.
Violence in the real world is strange, yes, terrible too. Sickening at times. Especially, I would argue, to horror fans.
There is no easy answer as to how to explain what some are capable of. Ed Gein did awful things. Things the bulk of us could never conceive of doing. His very existence, therefore, seems to stand against everything we know and believe in through an ethical, moral and, ultimately, human lens.
Still, horror cinema provides a method to begin to understand such a person. The narrative of horror, the artfully raw capability of the genre to uncover and reveal what is otherwise deemed as unwholesome or inappropriate, is an important service to the human condition. Sometimes, we need to face the realities of the violence in our world if we are going to be able to maneuver them. Maybe that’s why countless films have come about in the wake of Ed Gein’s crimes (so many more than I mentioned here) and why they will continue to: it is our way of coming to terms with that which we do not understand.
I know I come from a strange breed. A group of people who despise the violence of the world around us, but consume what is primarily a violent outlet: horror cinema. Still, perhaps it is we who know how to accept and move past such horrors without fear or repression, with open hearts and, at times, emotional acceptance. Perhaps it is those who turn away from horror, provide it with spite instead of respect, who are truly afraid.
I would wager a guess that were you to ask a person like that what they thought of Ed Gein, they’d simply shake their head and espouse a “How can someone be capable of that?” or a “How do they sleep at night?” before changing the subject. You see, the narrative of their world doesn’t allow for Ed Gein, and while I might have said similar things in the past, I recognize that the conversation cannot stop there.
There is no place in the world for evil that is only partially faced. There is no room for horror without first accepting that horror exists. Such an answer may not be altogether satisfying, but its the truth. And the truth is a narrative, it may be shocking to learn, that horror fans can really rally behind.
Eric Eghigian
Without getting too Hobbesian about it, people are pretty violent. Sadly, we always have and, probably, always will live violent lives. Ergo, the fiction and stories we create have a great degree of violence to them. It’s really only natural given that our stories are a reflection of how we feel, as well as our ideals. In some cases, these stories are even a way of dealing with tragedy or hardships taken from the pages of real life.
Fictionalizing real-world violence is, obviously, a bit of a touchy subject. Whether it’s something like Steven Spielberg’s passion piece Schindler’s List (1993) depicting the horrors of the holocaust or something a little less nuanced like The Helter Skelter Murders (1971) recreating the grizzly Manson Family killings, reality can be a bitter pill to swallow, even when it’s glammed up and projected onto a screen. So when is it necessary, or even okay, to portray these real-world horrors?
Probably the most important deciding factor in this is authorial intent. Were the filmmakers or creators trying their hand at a respectful reenactment, or were they simply trying to get a handful of blood money from some quick, exploitative cash cow? Unfortunately, the line between good intentions and genuine exploitation isn’t absolute and can blur from time to time.
Take the 2006 film United 93 for example. Here’s a movie that not only has the tragic deaths of a plane’s worth of innocent civilians to try to handle, but also the racial and political discussions brought up as a result of the event. Is it a cathartic exercise for Western viewers, showing how raw the emotions might’ve been for those on the plane, or is it softballed American propaganda painting a tragedy as melodramatic heroism? It’s both and it’s neither. This is a film that’s barely five years removed from the event it’s fictionalizing, so the wounds had little time to heal. It was probably all too raw to elicit an honest, objective reaction from general audiences.
However, the time between the piece and the event it’s based on isn’t the only factor to consider. Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) was one of the first films to really showcase the Vietnam war after it had ended, and though intense and hard-hitting, especially for the time, people accepted it. Accepted it enough that it won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Maybe that’s because the film is very realistic fiction set within a historical conflict rather than detailing an actual happening. The violence and emotions shown are true-to-life, but the story is not. The characters and the film itself take no explicit political views of situation, beyond perhaps the old adage ‘war is hell.’
So when is or isn’t it okay to politicize these events? Why is it respectful for Spielberg (again) to show the most graphic Omaha Beach scene ever filmed in Saving Private Ryan (1998) while something as patriotically meat-headed as Michael Bay’s 13 Hours (2016) comes across as so much more classless when showing what is technically, less violence? There are literally too many factors to consider. The time between the event and the adaptation, the personal politics of the filmmakers (or studio), and the actual situation being depicted are just a few to consider. But ultimately when something is off you can really just feel it.
When all is said and done, as long as the real world violence being depicted is for a (somewhat apolitical) purpose and with an understanding of and respect for the gravity of the events in question, there should be no harm done. There’ll always be exceptions and people who are offended or disturbed by biographical horrors put to screen, and that’s entirely understandable. But, in order to move forward or see atrocities through a new light, it can be a healthy and even necessary experience.
