Senior Project: Why is Society So Obsessed with Blood and Monsters?

The reason I chose these piece (or really, a fraction of this piece) was because this essay and project have consumed my life for the last year of school. The Senior Project, a graduation requirement at my high school, must be on a question that the student chooses; in my case, I studied violence in the media. The following paragraph is from my 10 page paper, one of my favorite parts, on serial killers and violence in the news media.

Wild Card: An Excerpt from Vampires of Violent Media: Society and its Obsession with Violence

Monsters and blood go hand in hand, and oftentimes monsters are created by the blood they spill. A look at the genre of true crime novels and television (think 48 Hours, Criminal Minds, CSI) proves that American culture might assume that the monsters in human skin are the worst of all. However, our society is not only interested in the exploits of people like monstrous serial killers Dahmer and Ramirez, but even in some cases seems to worship them: Just look at the large demand for Ramirez's prison artwork (Kottler 119). Serial murders are incredibly rare, less than 1% of the homicides in America, but the news coverage of these “human monsters” makes these murders seem 1,000% more common (124). During an interview with Erica DeGarmo, who holds a PhD in social psychology, she made the note that “society finds marginal behavior like serial homicide interesting because it is so abnormal and unusual.” However, it's not only real serial killers that are documented far beyond their actual occurrence: Serial killers both imagined and real became the subjects of mountains of books during the Reagan years and beyond (Poole 149).

Moving beyond serial killers for the moment, if you were to take a look at the 5 o'clock news on any day, the old adage “if it bleeds, it leads” comes immediately to mind. Think back to the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary late last year: That story (and rightfully so) led on all of the news media stations; but as the shock of the tragedy faded, so did the faces of the victims, to be replaced by the face of the killer: Adam Lanza. During a brief interview with A-- Z--, the media studies teacher at L-- L----, she remarked, about the increasingly high levels of portrayal of any type of school violence, “The news make it seem like these random acts of violence are so commonplace, but schools are one of the safest places to be; your children are way more likely to get killed walking down the street or being hit by a car, than to get gunned down in school.” In yet another incidence of the media sensationalizing violence, in the 1980s, after a ill-timed statement by the Justice Department, the media hysterically speculated that more than 4,000 unsolved murder cases a year were caused by serial killers and that the typical American is more than 37% likely to meet a serial killer (Poole 152). In reality, in the excellent wording of Poole, “the typical middle class American had about as much chance of being in an airplane crash over the ocean, surviving it, and then being killed by sharks as falling into the hands of a Ted Bundy”(152). 

If we're talking about the media, nowhere do we see more violence, blood, and gore than in our movies and television shows. Dr. Ritchey remarked over the classical music in the background of Peet's, “Levels of violence weren't so graphic growing up; it was the era of family sitcoms, Ozzie and Harriet on one side, and shoot-'em-out Westerns on the other.” Clearly, that's not the case so much anymore, with shows like The Walking Dead and True Blood (not to mention ones like Fringe or Supernatural) , and movies like Hansel and Gretel: Witchhunters, and Django: Unchained, among others. For example, seven of the ten most popular cable shows, including Criminal Minds and Elementary, showcase intense crime scene violence (Lemire et al.); and to talk about The Walking Dead is to talk about one of the bloodiest shows that I have ever seen in my life—blood sometimes even splatters the camera lens from exploding zombie heads and limbs. And it's not just me watching this gory show: TIME reports that The Walking Dead gets the highest 18-to-49 ratings of any drama on TV. But, as James Poniewozik explains in TIME, “it's not just that there's too much violence on TV, though there probably is...it's that producers have decided that the best way to touch a viewer's heart is to rip it out and show it to him”(50). However, TV isn't only overrun in dumb, over-the-top violence; it's using this extreme violence in intelligent ways, whether it's to show the struggle between morality and survival in The Walking Dead or misogyny in American Horror Story (50), or even the effects of apartheid in District 9 (Kottler 115). Part of this overabundance of violence on TV is to attract the viewers: without viewers, it's a short fall until TV shows are canceled and the network loses the money it spent filming and producing the show. However, the more pressing question is really why does TV feel the need to show us this violent media that used to be called drama? Because we lap it up. Remember, if it bleeds, it leads.