As We Need To Talk About Kevin turns 15 and audiences still argue over The Drama, an assessment of a North American cultural phenomenon.
It’s an image as terrifying as it is familiar: a white male teenager cradling a military-style weapon as he stalks the locker-lined hallways of a school, classmates scattered in fear. We’ve seen it so many times now in both real and fictional media that it instantly conjures an archetype. This is the school shooter, a figure so morbid it still feels taboo to discuss, and one that instantly evokes our most troubling modern phenomena: the rot of youth alienation, dark corners of the internet, and the fatal consequences of a politically dysfunctional nation.
The 1999 Columbine High School massacre remains the defining school shooting of our era. In the 27 years since it happened, school shootings have continued to serve as grim inspiration in the world of film. From polemic documentaries like 2002’s Bowling for Columbine to 2026’s buzzy dark comedy The Drama, filmmakers have brought school shootings to the screen across almost every genre, from every perspective. We aren’t any closer to understanding the root of this senseless violence, but tracing back the three decades of films about the subject indicates shifting cultural attitudes towards collectively processing these tragedies.
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Among the most well-known mass shooting films is Lynne Ramsey’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, which turns 15 this year, adapted from Lionel Shriver’s 2003 novel of the same name. Despite the meme-like legacy of the film’s title – an internet joke divorced from the film’s dark subject matter – Kevin is a psychological horror film about every parent’s worst nightmare. In it, a tormented Tilda Swinton plays Eva Khatchadourian, the mother of a school shooter (though Kevin uses a bow and arrows rather than a gun) reflecting back on the murderer she raised. She’s a reluctant parent both in pregnancy and after giving birth, where postpartum depression haunts her as she tries to connect with her inscrutable child and his never-ending cries and demands. The film explores the nature versus nurture question of evil, implying that both the mother’s coldness created the monster child and that the child’s monstrosity created the cold mother. The camera lingers on Swinton as she rinses off the red paint thrown on her house from angry neighbors; one of several scenes showing her washing both metaphorical and literal blood from her hands.
The titular Kevin, played in a broad, almost comically sinister performance by Ezra Miller, glares archly at his mother and even locks eyes with her when she catches him masturbating; the film offers little explanation or pathos behind the teen’s murderous motives. Watching it now, the performance feels singular and loaded, not only because of the accusations of abuse that would later surface about Miller, but because it’s one of the few films about a fictional school shooter to declare the character is simply evil.
Other films instead approach the subject with more ambiguity, even perverse fascination. Films like Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003) insinuate near-universal teenage experience of social alienation helps to explain some of the animating forces behind such grisly actions. In Elephant, Van Sant deploys his signature thematic palate of wayward youth and unsentimental realism as the film’s teenagers ride bikes around at night, navigate school cliques and bullying, and play violent video games. The film avoids pointing fingers, but nonetheless portrays its school shooters as outcasts, so lonely they even experiment sexually with each other the night before the massacre to avoid dying virgins.
Van Sant cast non-actors, shot in a real school, and eschewed a script in order to unsentimentally capture a raw teen experience. This method was also used in Matt Johnson’s The Dirties, which used hidden cameras in an actual high school to film students reacting to stunt-like set ups. Johnson, who’s also one of the creators of cult series Nirvanna The Band The Show, uses his signature raucous, guerilla-style approach to depict a violent psychopath born out of a bullied film bro who can’t distinguish reality from the crime movies he loves, eventually resulting in a stunning act of violence. The film tricks viewers into feeling like they are on these teen boys’ sides, lulling audiences into a feeling of complicity as they watch these inventive, creative budding filmmakers slowly devolve into monsters.
Denis Villeneuve’s Polytechnique similarly lingers on its villain. A chilling, thriller-style portrayal of a real life college shooting in Montréal, the film opens with the reading of a school shooter manifesto. The young man addresses his anti-feminist screed to his own mother as he methodically prepares his guns. Villeneuve’s knack for riveting action sequences is distressingly deployed in Polytechnique, the camera tracking the shooter’s hardened gaze as he navigates the school hallways, preying on women victims. Shot in a cinematic black and white with the falling snow of cold Montréal peeking through the school windows, the film has a somber, airless tone.
All of these films devote much of their screen time to the traumatic experiences of victims and bystanders, but they nonetheless dwell on the psychological darkness of the shooters themselves, implying that the culture these troubled young men are steeped in is at least partly to blame for their actions. Whether a socially oppressive high school, violent movies, or rapidly changing gender norms, these films suggest school shooters are animated by a sense of victimhood derived from society.
This is one of the prevailing school shooting narratives that has proliferated in the years since Columbine. In the 90s, deep in the era of 24/7 cable news, the Columbine shooters quickly became objects of media fascination. The media clamored for information on them and dissected their possible motives, calling on everything from goth culture and Marilyn Manson’s music to the Trenchcoat Mafia clique as the culprits. The idea that the pair were bullied, isolated teens taking revenge against the school jocks emerged as a predominant theory – classmates described the boys being taunted with homophobic slurs and sprayed with ketchup packets in the halls in the years leading up to the massacre.
It remains a salient narrative. The “Columbine effect” is a well documented phenomenon, in which a certain reverence for the shooters and the idea that these social outcasts were acting out of retribution against cruel bullying continues to inspire even more school shootings. Researchers have largely refuted the narrative. Depression, suicidal thoughts, and sociopathic tendencies emerge as the likeliest reasons, and by many accounts, the Columbine shooters had friends, engaged in school activities, and were themselves often perpetrators of bullying rather than the reverse.
Yet that hasn’t stopped Columbine’s copycats. Multiple school shooters have directly cited the Columbine boys as inspiration: the 2007 Virginia Tech shooter called them “martyrs”, the 2017 Eaton Township Weis Markets shooter called them “heroes”, and many others directly referenced the shooting in their uniforms or manifestos. Then there’s the disturbing Columbiner fandom, a fringe but enduring subculture who idolize the aesthetic, ideology, and media surrounding the 1999 shooting on fan platforms like Tumblr.
That teenagers across all eras have felt isolated, picked on, and angry is no surprise; perhaps this helps to explain why a small but dedicated fanbase see these figures as icons of teen alienation. In many ways, this notoriety is precisely what the Columbine shooters were going for in their crafted aesthetic and left-behind home movies and journals spotlighting their incoherent ramblings. “They had this grandiose fantasy that they would be remembered,” forensic psychologist Kris Mohandie told Mother Jones. “What’s perverted about the whole thing is that, in a way, they got what they wanted.”
This lasting idolization of the Columbine shooters as bullied antiheroes is profoundly depressing and absurd. So absurd, it’s almost funny. Several recent movies have attempted to tackle the subject with a morbid sense of humor. In The Drama, an engaged couple is put to the test when the bride (played by former Disney Kid Zendaya) admits that she planned and almost executed a mass shooting as a teenager. In flashbacks, she wears cartoonishly “edgy” make-up and keeps facing technical hiccups while recording her school shooter manifesto video. “It was the aesthetics,” she insists to her fiancé, illustrating the comic perversity that such an online subculture even exists.
Meanwhile, in Oscar Boyson’s Our Hero, Balthazar, a teenage boy becomes an online anti-gun crusader in order to win the affection of his activist crush (a plan devised, naturally, during a school shooting drill). When an internet troll threatens to commit a mass shooting, Balthazar travels to Texas to attempt to stop him, and an unlikely friendship develops between the two. The film’s wannabe school shooter Solomon is played as a boisterous, cartoon-loving incel caricature by Asa Butterfield, who infuses the role with pitifulness.
Both of these films grasp at a kind of gallows humor that comes from living in a country that can’t seem to organize to stop the regular massacring of children. This approach is not without its critics – look at the backlash to The Drama, some of it voiced by survivors of mass shootings themselves – but one that nonetheless attempts to offer humorous respite from our demoralizing reality while maybe taking some power away from these reverent, extremist corners of the internet.
The risk of contagion is often cited by advocates and mass media experts concerned about our cultural preoccupation with school shooters. Frameworks like the “Don’t Name Them” movement seek to remove sensationalism and push media away from examining the identities and motivations of the shooters themselves and towards highlighting the experiences of families and victims. In a retrospective on the film Elephant 20 years after it came out, one of its then-teen actors admitted to sometimes wondering if, after decades of continual mass shootings, it was even responsible to have made the film at all. As Kevin Khatchadourian articulates in a session with a psychologist after he commits his massacre, “…it’s got so bad that half the time the people on TV, inside the TV, they’re watching TV. And what are all these people watching? People like me.”
It’s hard not to feel nihilistic. In the United States, where lax gun laws push the limits of a notoriously berserk nation’s sense of sanity, nearly 400 mass shootings have occurred since Columbine. At least 200 students have been killed, with a further 360,000 more exposed to some form of gun violence. That’s an astonishing number, painful to even conceive of in its staggering impact in homes across the nation.
Over the years, each school shooting has inspired its own flurry of activism, political rallies, and movements calling for stricter gun measures and mental health resources. Some incremental successes have certainly cropped up, but the frequency of these shootings suggests that swells of political action have evaded real impact. Schools now regularly engage in mass shooter drills; a billion dollar industry of anti-school shooting security and infrastructure has sprung up. New school buildings are built with curved hallways to obstruct the sightline of a shooter. This is the reality that parents and children must contend with every day that they get up and enter learning institutions across America.
Perhaps that’s why it’s the films that focus on what happens after the violent spectacle, after the news cameras leave, that emerge as the most emotionally resonant. In the recent Oscar-winning documentary short All the Empty Rooms, camera crews visit the untouched, frozen-in-time childhood bedrooms of children killed in mass shootings. It’s a breathtaking physical manifestation of the scope of suffering experienced by families over the last several decades.
Even the cinematic gun violence of Polytechnique or Kevin’s most grotesque scenes involving feces and gerbils aren’t anywhere near as upsetting as Mass, a film that consists of only four people talking in a room. Fran Kranz’s chamber film takes place in a church where the parents of a school shooter and one of his victims have gathered to engage in a mediated healing circle. Two hours of two sets of parents trying to make sense of the events that led to them burying their children arises as the most distressing, most heartbreaking mass shooting film yet.
Many of these films dip into genres like horror, action thriller, or comedy. Maybe this stylization has a distancing effect on the audience, offering a way to process these grisly massacres as familiar stories on a screen rather than real-life events too horrible to think about. But Mass eschews any such cinematic tropes, focusing solely on the quiet despair that follows in the years after the violence. In searing dialogue, the parents discuss the inherent unknowability of their children’s motivations, if there was anything they could have done to stop it, and the fruitlessness of the activism they have taken on in the aftermath of their children’s death.
As Gail, the mother of the boy slain in the massacre, says about her struggles to process the murder of her son, “I promised him that his life would mean something. That it wouldn’t be in vain. That because of him, all of them, there would be change. But nothing has changed. The only difference is that they’re gone.”
Gail represents thousands of people left grieving in rooms across the country, left adrift in the aftermath of senseless tragedy. That pain, and the lives cut short by a split second of violence, deserve to be shared, even if these films can’t provide us with any answers.
