I started watching Mr. Brooks with Kevin Costner—a story of a respectable man who kills for sport. The movie has a decent rating, over seven on IMDb, which means enough people watched it, liked it, maybe even recommended it. And yet, as I sat there, I found myself disgusted. A man killing strangers for the thrill of it? That isn’t entertainment to me. It’s pathology.
But the film industry disagrees. Look at what fills our screens: comedies for shallow laughter, thrillers where murder is the central hook, horror films where slaughter is the entire plot. Even adventure stories, stripped down, often turn into “try not to get killed” scenarios. Violence is not an occasional theme; it’s the bloodstream of cinema.
The question is—why? On the surface, we live in civilized societies. We work jobs, pay bills, walk our children to school, talk about the weather. Yet the moment we sit down in a darkened theater, we want blood. Murders, vampires, psychopaths. A safe spectacle of death.
It isn’t new. The Romans filled amphitheaters with gladiators and beasts. The medieval crowds gathered for executions. Today, we no longer stand in the square; we watch it through a screen. Technology changes, appetite remains. Perhaps Freud was right: civilization is only a thin crust over our instincts. We don’t burn witches or behead criminals anymore, so instead we consume simulated violence.
But then we have to ask: if we want to see this, if we enjoy watching blood spill—even in fiction—how dangerous are we really?
H.G. Wells gave us two futures in The Time Machine: the Eloi, gentle and childlike, living on the surface; and the Morlocks, pale predators, lurking underground. We like to think we are Eloi, that civilization makes us harmless. But the truth looks closer to the Morlocks. We shove our violence underground, hide it in movies, games, and fantasies, and then laugh when the victim screams on screen. Ha ha, another one killed. That laughter is not innocent. It is the sound of our shadow.
And this isn’t confined to movies. Look at how we treat animals. At home, I have a cat, and she is tender, alive, a companion. But then I walk into the supermarket and see neat rows of meat. The packaging makes it clean, presentable. But behind that clean surface lies a hidden cruelty—creatures bred, confined, slaughtered, all so we can live without confronting what it costs. In daily life, we are Eloi; in the supermarket, we are Morlocks.
This is serious. Our fantasies and our habits both point to the same conclusion: beneath the surface, humans remain deeply cruel. Civilization is not the cure. It is the mask.