From Tarantino to Kubrick: Why Hollywood has always been fascinated by violence

Violence runs through Quentin Tarantino’s new book, ‘Cinema Speculation’, just as it does through his movies. Geoffrey Macnab looks at other expert practitioners of cinematic brutality, and wonders why so many of us share a morbid fascination with it

Michael Madsen as Mr Blonde in Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Reservoir Dogs’ in 1992 – he slices off a cop’s ear (Miramax)

We’ve all experienced it at the cinema – the “Surely they’re not going to do that” moment, when the violence on screen makes us squirm in our seats and avert our gaze. In Luis Buñuel’s 1929 surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou, a man casually smoking a cigarette sharpens a razor and takes it to a woman’s eye. As he slits away, out spills blood and yolky fluid.

Don Siegel’s vigilante Clint Eastwood cop movie Dirty Harry (1971) begins with a killer on a skyscraper roof, looking through the viewfinder of his rifle at a young woman swimming in a pool below him. It’s the casual, detached way in which the killing is done; there hadn’t been many scenes like that before in Hollywood. She is hit in the back and the water in the pool turns red.

Then, there is the “Stuck in the Middle with You” scene in Quentin Tarantino’s debut feature, Reservoir Dogs (1992), in which the friendly gangster Mr Blonde, played by Michael Madsen, dances around a hostage cop before slicing off his ear. It’s a moment of wanton, bloodcurdling sadism, made all the more appalling by the upbeat Stealers Wheel music playing in the background.