Natural Born Killers

Natural Born Killers (1994) tells the story of a pair of serial killers, but what it is attacking is the news media. Mickey and Mallory take to the road and leave bodies behind. The press follows, a television presenter interviews them, and the two become famous across the country. The film's claim is that the fame is manufactured not by the killers but by the people watching. The form is deliberately hostile. Stone kept switching between 35mm, 16mm, Super 8, video and animation; the colour drops to black and white mid scene, other images are projected onto the backgrounds. The aim is to make watching uncomfortable and it works. The story is Quentin Tarantino's. Stone rewrote the screenplay from end to end and Tarantino disowned the film; only a story credit remains. It was cut repeatedly to obtain an R rating. The most serious thing that happened to it was in court. Patsy Byers, shot in a Louisiana store in 1995 and left paralysed, sued Stone and the production company claiming her attackers had been inspired by the film. It was dismissed on First Amendment grounds, revived on appeal, and finally thrown out in 2001 on the finding that there was no intent to incite violence. So the film spent years as a legal test case. It runs 118 minutes. Good for: the nineties, media criticism, and formal experiment. Less good for: the violence is intense, the image never settles, and the film is deliberately exhausting.