Conceptualizing Extreme Violence

In 2004, film programmer and critic James Quandt was among the first to identify a new trend in European, specifically French, cinema, which he labelled ‘the New French Extremity’.^[998] According to Quandt, these films, which include Gaspar Noe’s I Stand Alone (Seul contre tous, 1998), Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s Baise-moi (2000), Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001), Marina de Van’s In My Skin (Dans mapeau, 2002), and Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms (2003), marked a new kind of cinema that was ‘suddenly determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of viscera and spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile or gnarled, and subject it to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and defilement’.^[999] The emergence of these films coincided with a number of similarly extreme cinematic trends in other Western countries around the turn of the twenty-first century.

Around this same time the United States saw the emergence of ‘torture porn’, a term coined by film critic David Edelstein^[1000] to describe a cycle of horror films ‘defined by its extensive and graphic depiction of torture’.^[1001] This cycle was exemplified by the Saw series (2004-10) and Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) and Hostel: Part II (2007); a spate of horror remakes of low-budget films from the 1970s and 80s such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974; remade in 2003) and Halloween (1978, remade in 2007); and what Paul Gormley has termed ‘the new brutality film’, a trend in 1990s commercial Hollywood cinema that ‘attempt[ed] to renegotiate and reanimate the immediacy and affective qualities of the cinematic experience’^[1002] and included Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) and David Fincher’s Seven (1995).

For an early twentieth-century viewer, today's film violence would be extreme in a way that he or she probably could not have conceptualised at the time. Technological advances in the motion picture medium itself (higher resolution and larger format celluloid and now digital, the ability to repro­duce a wide spectrum of colour, multichannel surround sound, stereoscopic images) as well as advances in the artistry used to create the illusions of violence (make-up special effects and prosthetics, explosive squibs, and now computer-generated imagery and ‘bullet time’) have greatly enhanced the perception of violence on screen. At this point, filmmakers can represent any form of physical violence they can imagine, leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination except what they choose.

The subjective nature of film violence does not mean, however, that we cannot conceptualize it in its various forms, including extreme violence, according to its fundamental components. Violence in the cinema is the stylised depiction of action that harms or is intended to harm and its subsequent effects. Building on that definition, then, we can say that extreme violence is a depiction of violence that is experienced by the viewer as particularly explicit in comparison to contemporary cinematic norms. Such a definition involves numerous interlocking components, which are worth examining individually in some detail.

Behaviour and Style in Film Violence

In defining film violence as the stylised depiction of an action and its subsequent effects, we must first take into account the fact that we are simultaneously talking about two interrelated concepts that both tend to be labelled violence without any additional terminological distinction.

Stephen Prince has conceptualised the interrelationship of the behavioural and stylistic components via a two-dimensional coordinate system on which film violence can be visually charted.^[1006] On the x-axis, Prince places what he calls ‘the referential component' (the action itself), and on the y-axis he places what he calls ‘the stylistic amplitude' (how the action is depicted). He notes that stylistic amplitude is the function of two elements: (1) graphicness - the amount of explicit visual detail used to depict the violence, as well as the portrayal of suffering and pain; and (2) duration - how long the violence is held on screen. When we describe film violence as extreme, it usually involves an intensification of both graphicness and duration in the depiction of a violent act that is understood to be particularly aberrant.

For example, midway through Hostel: Part II, one of the exemplars of torture porn, there is a six-and-a-half minute sequence in which Lorna (Heather Matarazzo), one of several college-age backpackers who are lured to a Slovakian hostel that serves as a front for an underground business in human slaughter, has been captured, stripped naked and hung upside down in chains in a cavernous warehouse.

At this point it becomes frighteningly clear what will happen - that Lorna is to be the victim in an Elizabeth Bathory-inspired killing - but Roth continues to draw out the tension by having the woman slide the scythe's lengthy blade across Lorna's back and buttocks and face before cutting away the gag so we can fully hear her screams and cries for mercy. It is only then that the woman begins cutting Lorna's back with the scythe and bathing in the blood that rains down on her. The wanton cruelty and sadism of the act is intensified by the manner in which Roth depicts it. The first three times the woman slices Lorna's back, we do not see the cuts, but instead hear the heightened sound of cutting on the soundtrack and see the blood beginning to run down Lorna's neck and face and drop onto the woman lying beneath her. However, Roth then shows us the next three slices (albeit in quick cuts lasting no more than a second or two), as copious amounts of blood begin to pour down and the woman rubs it all over her body. She finally kills Lorna by slicing her throat, which we see in full detail, as Roth cuts into a closer shot as her throat opens and begins spraying arterial blood.

While the graphic violence of the scene lasts just over a minute, it feels interminable, partially because of the deliberately slow build-up in which we learn along with Lorna what her horrific fate is to be; partially because of the shrieking, agitating orchestral strings on the soundtrack; and partially because Roth focuses so intently on Lorna's abject and inescapable suffering.

Changing Cinematic Norms of Violence

Because judging film violence as extreme is reliant upon changing cinematic norms, our understanding of what constitutes such violence is never fully stable. Further complicating matters is the fact that different cultures and nations have different criteria for defining extreme violence and different standards regarding its acceptability as entertainment. And, within those different cultures, the criteria employed are likewise shifting and changing. However, despite the lack of stability in the standards by which film violence is judged extreme, there are broad patterns that can be traced across the history of Western cinema, with specific challenges to those norms marking new developments in how film violence is depicted by filmmakers and understood by audiences.

Take gun violence, for example. For many years the normative mode of depicting someone being shot by a gun was the clutch-and-fall, where the victim, upon being shot, does not react with great pain or distress, but rather gracefully sinks out of frame, often grabbing at a particular part of his or her body (usually the chest) to indicate where the bullet hit. Audiences usually did not see a bullet hole or blood or any visible violation of the body, thus ensuring a kind of visually sanitised death.^[1007] This was acceptable to audiences during Hollywood's classical era, although such a representation today would likely provoke laughter due to its immediately recognisable unreality. As Stephen Prince points out, ‘Once new thresholds of permissibility [are] established', filmmakers cannot return to ‘prior norms'.²³ There are some examples of films rejecting the clutch-and-fall during the classical era, includ­ing George Stevens's Shane (1953), which depicts a character being forcibly blown backward by a shotgun blast to the chest. However, it was in the 1960s that the stylistic amplitude of gun violence started escalating quite rapidly with films like Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), leading us to watch gun violence under a new set of expected norms, which generally involve seeing a bullet hole and a strong, involuntary physical reaction from the victim that reflects the violable nature of the human body.

The visual evolution of the stylistic amplitude of gun violence can be examined in some detail by comparing the aesthetic differences between similar scenes in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959) and Roger Corman's The St Valentine's Day Massacre (1967). Both films include a scene in which a group of men are lined up against a brick wall and shot at close range in the back with tommy guns by three or more men. Some Like It Hot avoids showing any graphic instances of wounding by focusing instead on reaction shots of the two main characters (Jack Lennon and Tony Curtis) grimacing as they witness the event from their hiding place behind a car. The film does show a small amount of blood on one of the victims who is not killed in the first round of gunfire, but it is confined to two patches of dark liquid on his coat (without any corresponding damage to the material) and another dab at the corner of his mouth after he is shot again off-camera. Corman's film, however, shows the violence of the machine gunning in comparatively graphic detail, with squibs used to depict the bullet hits accentuated by a rapid editing style that cuts aggressively among shots of the three men firing machine guns, reverse close-ups of the shocked and agonised victims' faces, some of whom spit blood from their mouths, and medium shots of the men's bodies being pummelled with bullets and falling to the ground.

Genre certainly has some hand in dictating the tone of the violence in each film. Some Like It Hot is a comedy that uses gangland violence as a plot mechanism to explain why its protagonists must dress up like women and hide with a travelling all-girls band, while The St Valentine's Day Massacre is a dramatic film about the real-life organised crime boss Al Capone. However, one cannot discount the fact that the seven years between the two films saw significant evolution and experimentation in on-screen violence. The fact that The St Valentine's Day Massacre is in colour, while Some Like It Hot is in black and white, amplifies the former's violence, as the red of the blood on the men's bodies and faces draws even more visual attention. The duration of the violence is also quite different, with the initial volley of gunfire in Some Like It Hot lasting barely 5 seconds, whereas in The St Valentine's Day Massacre it goes on five times as long, a little more than 26 seconds. Thus, the stylistic amplitude of the violence in Corman's film is decidedly more extreme in comparison to Wilder's film in terms ofboth the graphicness of the violence (the use of squibs and visible blood, as well as focus on the victims' suffering and pain) and duration (taking up five times as much screen time).

The instances of violence in films like The St Valentine’s Day Massacre, Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch were viewed by audiences and critics at the time as extremely graphic because they deviated from the norm. Andrzej Wajda's A Generation (Pokolenie, 1955) is generally considered the first film to employ a squib to create a bloody eruption on the body to simulate a bullet strike. As Wajda put it, ‘nobody had as yet been able to convincingly create the effect of a bullet hitting the human body', so he tasked his assistant director Kazimierz Kutz with developing the effect. Katz assembled a contraption whose ‘main component was a detonator, the kind used in coalmines to set off dynamite. Kutz fixed it with a bandage onto a lead sheet to protect the actor's body. On top of the affixed detonator he attached a condom filled with blood-coloured liquid. Once the detonator's cables were drawn out under the actor's trousers... and connected to a battery, we could have our explosion.'^[1008] However, such graphic visualisations were not at all common prior to the late 1960s, particularly in Hollywood, whose produc­tion practices regarding the depiction of graphic violence were circumscribed by the Production Code, whose stipulation that ‘brutality and possible grue­someness' were to be treated within the careful limits of good taste generally meant not showing it (as in Some Like It Hot, which was produced while the Code was still being enforced, although even The St Valentine’s Day Massacre leaves some violence to the imagination, as Corman chooses not to show the results of the final use of a shotgun at close range on the dead or dying men).

Today, the use of blood squibs is the norm in depicting bullet wounds and, while still recognised as a form of graphic violence, is not considered particularly extreme. Instead, extreme forms of gun violence have evolved into heads being eviscerated by shotgun blasts (e.g., Drive, 2011), appendages being blown off (e.g., RoboCop, 1987), and entire bodies being reduced to bloody shreds by close machine gun fire (e.g., Rambo, 2008). The spurting and sprays of blood that were previously accomplished with physical effects are now augmented or replaced entirely by computer-generated imagery in films such as David Fincher's Zodiac (2007), Zack Snyder's Watchmen (2009), Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables (2010), Matthew Vaughn's Kick-Ass (2010) and Nicholas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives (2013).

These shifts in what is considered extreme can also be charted by how films are handled by various ratings and censorship boards. In the United States, films distributed by the member studios of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) are assigned an age-appropriate rating by the Classification and Ratings Administration (CARA), which was instituted in November 1968 by the MPAA as a replacement for the increasingly outdated Production Code. Kevin S. Sandler has argued that the key to the functionality of the MPAA ratings system is its stability of meaning over time, with each rating category^[1009] being ‘historically stable, but always transitory';^[1010] in other words, the overall meaning of each category must remain relatively the same over time even if the specifics of what content warrants each rating changes. CARA has long been accused of being more lenient towards violence than sex when applying its two age-restrictive ratings - R (no one under 17 admitted without a parent or guardian) and X (no one under 17 admitted), which was replaced in 1990 by NC-17 - which is why people took notice in 1974 when the board, under the leadership of the newly installed chairman Richard Heffner, gave the Japanese martial arts film The Street Fighter (Gekitotsu! Satsujin ken, 1974) an X rating for its violence, something that had never happened before.^[1011] Heffner openly proclaimed that he intended to be stricter than his predecessor in rating violent films, especially violent horror films, which is why so many of them had to return repeatedly to the editing room in order to secure a market-friendly R-rating during his tenure from 1974 to 1994.^[1012] A number of independent producers and directors refused to accept an X rating and instead released their films unrated; these included George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978), William Lustig's Maniac (1980), Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead (1982) and Evil Dead II (1987), and Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator (1985). Yet, viewing these films today, graphi­cally violent as they are, it is difficult to conclude that they are any more so than recently released R-rated films like Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects (2005), Neil Marshall's The Descent (2005), Alexandre Aja's Piranha remake (2010), Fede Alvarez's The Evil Dead remake (2013), and Eli Roth's The Green Inferno (2015), or any given episode of the AMC cable television series The Walking Dead (2011-).^[1013]

In England, films are classified by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), which was founded in 1912 as the British Board of Film Censors. While the board began classifying films in just two categories - U (Universal, suitable for children) and A (Adult, children must be accompanied by an adult) - it has grown and evolved over the years, particularly in the 1980s in response to the growing home video industry and the attendant ‘video nasty' scare, when the country was thrown into a social panic over the easy availability of graphically violent horror films.^[1014] The BBFC now has seven rating categories, ranging from U (Universal, suitable for all) to R18 (Restricted 18, restricted to those aged 18 and older at licensed premises only).^[1015] However, unlike the MPAA rating system, the BBFC can also ban certain films outright from distribution in the UK, a power it has exercised throughout its history, particularly with regard to extremely violent films. The BBFC also employs different standards for certify­ing films on home video versus cinemas, resulting in films that were approved to play theatrically, but had to be edited for home video distribution or were banned outright.

But, just as attitudes and expectations have shifted over the years in the USA, the same has happened in England, and numerous films that were previously banned or edited for their violent content have since been approved for distribution in their original, uncut forms. For example, Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left (1972), which was initially released on home video in the early 1980s when the market was unregulated, was banned by the BBFC for decades once the government required films on home video to be classified under the Video Recordings Act of 1984. The uncut version of the film was eventually approved for home video distribution in 2003 with an 18 certificate.^[1016] Similarly, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, despite having played in London theatres in the early 1970s, was banned from home video distribu­tion until 1999, when it was approved with an 18 certificate.^[1017] Sergio Corbucci's spaghetti western Django (1966) was initially rejected in 1967 by the BBFC due to its ‘excessive and nauseating violence'; another distributor pulled it from consideration in 1974 after the board informed them the film could not be classified without heavy cutting. Yet, it was eventually released uncut on video in 1993 with an 18 certificate, which was then downgraded to a 15 certificate when it was resubmitted in 2004.^[1018] Thus, a film that was deemed so violent in the late 1967 that it couldn't be shown is now considered acceptable viewing for teenagers not yet old enough to legally drive.

Viewer Reaction

Regardless of the rating assigned to a film according to its violence, we are ultimately at the whim of our autonomic nervous systems while watching it. When we see an act of film violence that seems particularly explicit or extreme in comparison to the norms to which we have become accustomed, there will invariably be a strong, visceral reaction - diverting our eyes away from the gruesome imagery, clutching at a person seated nearby, shrinking in our chair, and even feeling physical sensations of nausea, light-headedness and muscle constriction. In fact, one could argue that extreme film violence is the kind that most thoroughly erases the distance between the spectator and the act he or she is witnessing, forcing the physical body to react involunta­rily, which typically marks such violence as an aspect of disreputable ‘low' culture. Linda Williams, writing about the genres of horror, pornography and melodrama, noted that they are considered to be low culture due to the ‘perception that the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involun­tary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen'.^[1019] Paul Gormley defines ‘new-brutality films' in similar physical terms: ‘All these films attempt to assault the body of the viewer and make the body act involuntarily... these films all make the viewer's body act in such a way that it imitates and mimics the actions of the cinematic body, or the bodies that the viewer experiences on the screen.'^[1020]

Interestingly, the idea of a motion picture forcing involuntary reactions from spectators' bodies dates back to the earliest projected images, starting with the accounts of audiences screaming, leaning back in their chairs and even running panicked from the theatre while watching the Lumieres' short documentary The Arrival of a Train (L’arrivee d’un train a La Ciotat, 1896), which depicts a passenger train moving towards and past the camera before stopping at the station. Although the story of extreme audience panic in response to this film is entirely apocryphal,^[1021] it remains a potent origin point for the connection between movies and visceral physical reactions.

Given our innate responses to violence, it is not surprising, then, that such physical reactions became frequently associated with films featuring extreme forms of violence. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (i960) is an instructive example, as it induced in its initial theatrical audiences an intense physical response that Linda Williams describes from personal experience: ‘I vividly remember a Saturday matinee in i960 when two girlfriends and I spent much of the screening with our eyes shut listening to the music and to the audience's screams.'^[1022] The idea that spectators could be literally harmed by the violence in a film was exploited for marketing purposes by low-budget filmmakers like William Castle, who took out insurance policies with Lloyd's of London against death by fright while watching Macabre (1958), and director Herschell Gordon Lewis and producer David Friedman, who passed out white vomit bags for their gory drive-in shocker Blood Feast (1964),^[1023] a gambit that was used decades later by the distributors of the horror film Bite (2015) when it had its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal.^{[1024] [1025]}

In some instances, extreme film violence can and has generated literal revulsion and physical sickness. When unsuspecting audiences were given a sneak preview of The Wild Bunch in Kansas City and Fresno in the summer of 1969, the reaction cards submitted after the screenings provided copious evidence of how strongly affected many of the spectators were, with reports of watching the film with one eye closed from behind one's arms, perspiring and feeling physically nauseous (these ranged from viewers who said ‘It made me want to vomit' and ‘The picture made me want to PUKE', to at least one who wrote ‘I vomited').⁴1 Even today's supposedly jaded, har­dened audiences find themselves reacting uncontrollably to the violence in certain films. In the introduction of their book The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe, Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall note that the reception of the new wave of extreme art-house films coming out of Europe in the early 2000s, ‘whose brutal and visceral images appear designed deliberately to shock or provoke the spectator', were charac­terised by ‘Reports of fainting, vomiting and mass walkouts'.^[1026] After the 2002 Cannes Film Festival screening of Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, which features a graphic 10-minute rape scene, fire wardens administered oxygen to twenty people who fainted;^[1027] the premiere of Bite resulted in two people fainting and one person vomiting, which led to an ambulance being called to the theatre;^[1028] and there were reports of multiple viewers passing out at a screening of Raw at the 2016 Toronto Film Festival.^[1029] Such responses are not always confined to horror films and art-house provocations either; there were numerous reports of viewers fainting or vomiting at screenings of Danny Boyle's 127 Hours (2010) when the protagonist is forced to cut his own hand off with a pocket knife,^[1030] and the premiere screening of Alejandro G. Inarritu's multiple-Oscar-winning The Revenant (2015) was marked by a number of people walking out because they were unable or unwilling to handle the film's starkly realistic violence.^[1031] Thus, the connection between movies and visceral physical responses, symbolically originating with spec­tators fleeing in fear of the image of a train coming towards them, remains powerfully in effect.