Essay/Term paper: Blood, violence and gore as entertainment

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Culture

Blood, Violence and Gore As Entertainment


The Texas Chainsaw massacre, Braineaters from outer space and Bloodfeast
are all films were the title can speak for itself. The are films were violence,
blood and gore play an important role. It is obvious that someone has to action,
but who?

Since the dawn of man people have used violence for entertainment. In
Rome they had the Colluseum, nowadays we have the cinema. Violent films are
being produced all the time, no one seems to care. Even though there aren't many
people who are harmed from these films, there are a lot of children who do. It
is a question of separating reality and fiction, and that is a problem for many
children. After the Superman films in the 1980's, there were a series of
children jumping off tall buildings, because they though they were Superman. As
you grow older, this doesn't seem to be a problem any longer, even though there
have been incidents were adults have started to kill people after watching a
violent film. An example of this is the controversial film Natural Born Killers.
Over twenty people lost their lives because of this film. In this film murder
and violence are justified, and it is these films that affect children the most.

Computer violence is a quite new phenomenon. It was introduced with the
launch of Wolfenstein in 1990. In «Wolfenstein» you are trapped in a maze among
an army of nazis. You'll have to kill your way out. This kind of violence
probably has a deeper influence on children, because they do the killings
themselves. It is interactive violence. In several countries the follow-up game,
Doom, was banned. The software company claimed that it didn't have a negative
affect on children, because they killed mutants, not humans. But is cutting up a
mutant with a chainsaw good entertainment?

There is no question about it, some children and adults suffer serious
damage from watching films and playing computer games with extreme violence. The
government should take immediate action and stop the distribution of these films
and computer games. Parents must also try to gain control over their children.
That is the only way we can stop the development.