Murder and mayhem at the movies

Politicians and the public alike blame an array of social problems on movies, which they claim are increasingly violent and graphically violent. In this paper, we analyze the five top-grossing films in a one year period in each of the past four decades (i.e., 1964, 1974, 1984, and 1994). Our analysis, which is based on a careful coding of these films, focuses on acts of violence, graphic violence, and death. We find that violence, graphic violence, and death increases across the four decades, although not in a perfectly linear trend. We also find that the violence is limited to particular genres.