‘Murderous Verbs’ and a Movie Mayhem Surge

While the U.S. homicide rate has fallen far from that a half-century ago, you wouldn’t know it from the movies. Silver screen violence has soared over that time, according to a new study that analyzed a massive database of film dialogue.

Researchers at the University of Maryland, the Ohio State University, Penn State University and Iran’s Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences used machine learning to search a database of subtitles of English-language movies produced from 1970 to 2020. They calculated the amount of dialogue from characters using variations of the words “murder” or “kill” in each of the films.

While the total use of these “murderous verbs” varied widely from year to year, there was a clear increasing trend over the five-decade period, according to a study published Dec. 30 in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

“Our findings suggest that references to killing and murder in movie dialogue not only occur far more frequently than in real life but are also increasing over time,” said lead author Babak Fotouhi, an adjunct assistant research professor in the College of Information. “This is more evidence that violence is a bigger part of the movies we watch than ever before.”

The increase has happened despite what the researchers called “ample scientific evidence” that media violence can influence aggressive behavior and the mental health of adults and children alike, including reducing empathy, and fostering the “mean world syndrome”—seeing the world as a vicious and unforgiving place.

The rise wasn’t just in crime movies, where violence might be expected, said Brad Bushman, corresponding author of the study and professor of communication at The Ohio State University.

“Characters in non-crime movies are also talking more about killing and murdering today than they did 50 years ago,” Bushman said. “Not as much as characters in crime movies, and the increase hasn’t been as steep. But it is still happening. We found increases in violence cross all genres.”

For the study, the researchers used movie subtitles from opensubtitles.org to extract dialogue referring to actions committed by characters in 166,534 movies.

The researchers computed the percentage of what they called murderous verbs—the number of verbs from the roots “kill” and “murder”—divided by the total number of verbs in the dialogue, and tracked changes year by year. Overall, about 7% of movies had murderous verbs.

The study counted only murderous verbs used in active constructions, i.e., “She killed X,” not passive constructions like “He was killed by X,” negations such as “She didn’t kill X,” or questions: “Did she murder X?”

“We designed this to be a conservative estimate,” Fotouhi said. “It is likely there was more violence in the movies than what we calculated in terms of the dialogue.”

While other research shown increases in movie violence—like a 2013 study that found gun violence depictions had more than doubled since 1950 and tripled since the PG-13 rating debuted in 1985—the value of this analysis was the huge dataset, the team said. No other study has examined such a large number of films.

What’s not clear is how long the trend of increasing violence will continue, Bushman said.

“The evidence suggests that it is highly unlikely we’ve reached a tipping point,” he said.

Added Fotouhi: “Movies are trying to compete for the audience’s attention, and research shows that violence is one of the elements that most effectively hooks audiences.”

That means we need to promote “mindful consumption and media literacy to protect vulnerable populations, especially children,” the researchers wrote in the study.

This article was based on an article by Jeff Grabmeier of Ohio State News.