Sunset Boulevard - Violence in Film

A lot of people, probably a lot of you, have very strong opinions about this subject – which is perhaps why it continues to be hotly debated in places in and outside of the media and film worlds.

Mike White, whose movie Year of the Dog is out in theaters now and who is famous for movies like Chuck and Buck and The Good Girl (one of my favorite movies), wrote an op-ed in the New York Times this week about violence in movies and the Virginia Tech shooting. In it, he talks comfortably about his childhood watching and making gruesome scary movies, and how in our society it has become common place. No longer is such subject matter truly questioned – it’s just taken for granted that children and adolescents at some point will be exposed to such images.

Of course there is the counter argument that violence in media/entertainment is nothing new, and, indeed, pieces of great literature are often as violent or more than cheesy horror movies. But White argues that these two types of violence are not comparable. He writes:

To defend mindless exercises in sadism like “The Hills Have Eyes II” by citing “Macbeth” is almost like using “Romeo and Juliet” to justify child pornography.

There is a line there, although I couldn’t presume to know where exactly to place it, it’s definitely somewhere in the space between Macbeth and The Hills Have Eyes. He continues:

The notion that “movies don’t kill people, lunatics kill people” is liberating to us screenwriters because it permits us to give life to our most demented fantasies and put them up on the big screen without any anxious hand-wringing. We all know there’s a lot of money to be made trafficking in blood and guts. Young males — the golden demographic movie-makers ceaselessly pursue — eat that gore up. What a relief to be told that how we earn that money may be in poor taste, but it’s not irresponsible. The average American teenage boy knows the difference between right and wrong and no twisted, sadistic movie is going to influence him.

I think that paragraph sums up the real argument. It’s not high art versus low art. It’s money versus….well…not as much money. If you look at horror films from a purely bottom line, business perspective – it’s insane. Because of the notably, but irrelevant, low production values and generally unknown casts, horror films take almost no money to make. Then, once released, they hit homeruns at the box office time after time. Profit margins on horror films verge on surreal.

Let’s take The Hills Have Eyes as an example – the movie cost $15 million to make, and brought back $41 million in domestic box office returns. Or, for a more extreme example look at the resounding success of the Saw franchise. The first Saw cost a measly $1.2 million and brought in $55 million in domestic gross. Worldwide, the figure is $103 million.  Contrast that to a movie like Oscar-nominated Syriana – a movie with a relatively modest budget of $50 million but which only brought in $93 million worldwide. Only $50 million domestic – which means they only just barely made back their initial investment. With numbers like that, it doesn’t make sense not to make a horror movie.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that astronomical success is reserved only for horror films. Little Miss Sunshine had a budget of $8 million and a worldwide gross of $98 million. Not quite Saw but pretty close. The difference is that horror films are more reliably high-grossing. Still, wouldn’t it be great if every production company challenged themselves to make the next Little Miss Sunshine instead of taking the easy way out and making Saw 10?

Anyway, I still haven’t even dug beneath the surface of this argument – and to be honest, I’m not sure how deep I can go without myself becoming torn between the two extremes. On the one hand – people should be able to make and watch violence if they want to. And not everyone becomes a Seung-Hui Cho the same way that not every girl that watches Leave it to Beaver became a content housewife. Ultimately, movies to do not make our moral compass, but they may be one of many influences which help shape it, and I think as filmmakers, it deserves at least a moment of contemplation.

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Alex M., Movie Correspondent

Alex's column, Sunset Boulevard, published every Friday to Gather Essentials: Movies, is a weekly summary of the movie industry's biggest stories.

Alex is a film school grad working at a production company in Hollywood. She's been passionate about movies since she knew what they were and always has an opinion (for better or worse).

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