The lurid fascination with the school shooter film

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.