The Blood Poets: A Cinema of Savagery, 1958-1999: Millennial Blues, from "Apocalypse Now" to "The Edge" v. 2

by Jake Horsley

Increasingly, society questions the connection between violence in entertainment and violence in life. Moralists and censors would reply resoundingly that media violence and social violence are directly linked, but others ask the deeper question: Why do people feel the need to create images of violence, and why do audiences continually watch them? In this thought-provoking and insightful study of American violent cinema, author Jake Horsley attempts to answer these questions by tying together the multiple disciplines of psychology, criminology, censorship, and anthropology. Horsley divides the forty years of his study into two volumes: American Chaos: From Touch of Evil to The Terminator, and Millennial Blues: From Apocalypse Now to The Matrix. These volumes aim to provide both a critical overview of the films themselves and a cultural study of the social and psychological factors relating to the demand for screen violence. By doing so, Horsley raises a new dialogue between scholars and movie buffs to examine the need to portray and the need to watch violent films.

512 pages, Paperback

First published November 3, 1999

About the author

a/k/a Jasun Horsley.

Reviews

[Hilary · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really liked it at the beginning, because the author's young and exuberant personality shows through in his subjective reviews and endless footnoting asides, but isn't it said that the thing that attracted you in the first place is the thing that drives you away? That is so true with this book. I finally just wanted him to shut up and make sense. Dip in and out of these books, and don't try to read straight through.