Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) is a psychedelic action romance about a psychopathic couple on a murder spree undergoing media glamorization. The budget for this film was $34,000,000. The domestic opening earned $11,166,687 while the total domestic lifetime gross is $50,282,766. The violence consists of physical and sexual violence with heavy firearm usage. Most characters throughout this film are white males who are commandeering and violent. The exception is Mallory, the only violent female character who is white and physically able.
A critical moment in the film occurs when Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis), reunite within the prison while a riot is being livestreamed onto national television. There is a gun standoff between the couple and Jack, a corrupt policeman. He had just sprayed Mallory’s eyes with pepper spray when she had refused sex with him. With use of a low angle, this shot is from Jacks point of view as he lies on the ground in his last seconds of life. This angle makes the viewer feel powerless and the figures much more intimidating. Compositionally, this shot has triangular blocking which further evokes an aggressive feeling.
Mallory is highlighted as a powerful character in her position. She is isolated as the main subject using a shallow depth of field to selectively focus on her and blur the gun and background subjects. Her haircut is short and masculine, speaking on the characters lack of conformity and stripped femininity. Most strikingly are her piercings blue eyes surrounded by raw flesh irritated from Jacks pepper spray. The viewer is forced to reckon with her pain and be the subject of receiving the punishment. This shot is incredibly immersive and speaks on the movie’s themes of psychopathy, trauma, and sexual violence succinctly. This shot is 10 seconds long and unedited with a still camera holding at a medium shot size. The suspense and weight of this moment is emphasized through its simplicity.
In contrast, the minutes succeeding this scene are fast paced. With a mix of long handheld shots and flashing montages of chaos ensuing in the prison, the feeling of frantic and powerless overwhelm is clear. In this 2-minute-long sequence, 22 edits are made. Parallel editing is used a lot to provide information about multiple events happening at once. The mise-en-scene is ever-changing, though consistently disorderly with people running amongst fires and enacting violence in the prison halls. Within these edits there is use of extreme zoom close-ups and generous amounts of Dutch angles. The editing is clear and abrupt with its montage style strengthening the bizarre and dreamlike sequence.
Real life consequences from violent imagery impact media coverage on young crime couples, gun safety ideology, and female victims of sexual violence. Natural Born Killers has been misquoted by media coverage as inspiration for coupled murders, while being denied by the young couple themselves. Further, news coverage emulates this films narrative of striving to “understand the female killer whilst normalizing male violence” as Mickey is stated as a ‘natural born killer’ and Mallory is one created by circumstance. Guns are a common tool of violence in this film and action movies alike. Gun depiction in actions films has been found to impact viewers beliefs around gun use. The more viewers saw guns used in films, the more likely they were to believe that they can use guns adequately, support guns as a means for public safety, and lack support for gun control.
Further, victims of sexual have reported that watching their experiences depicted on screen either causes them to relive their traumatic experiences negatively or are helpful in their processing by knowing that they are not alone in their experiences. Particularly upsetting depictions occur when the offender doesn’t receive punishment. Natural Born Killers provides the most extreme form of punishment to all perpetrators of sexual violence in this film by killing them – often done by Mallory herself. Women have reported to feeling “pleased if the survivor was depicted as getting justice, to know that their personal assault was not their fault, and to feel validated regarding their own reactions to their experience(s).” In this way, Natural Born Killers and action movies with similar themes can create a sense of justice in the explicit depictions of assault and revenge for victims.
This film speaks on media’s romanticism of murderers. It lends a empathic view to Mallory’s trauma-induced violence, while Mickey is self-proclaimed as a ‘natural born killer’. Ironically, the media has taken the surface level image of a crime couple with the term ‘natural born killer’ in media blitz to sensationally describe young murdering couples. Natural Born Killers is chaotically bizarre with a plethora of montage editing, Dutch angles, genre-bending, and immersive sexual and physical violence. While artfully crafted in a complex narrative, it can be triggering, empowering, and concrete harmful beliefs around gun use and victims of trauma in real life.
Notes
“Natural Born Killers – Box Office Mojo”, Box Office Mojo, n.d., https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/
tt0110632/?ref_=bo_se_r_1.
“Natural Born Killers – Box Office Mojo.”
Natural Born Killers, 37:35 to 38:02.
Lucía Cores Sarría, “The Influence of Camera Angle in Film Narrative” (MA thesis., Aarhus University, 2015), 41, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352135520_The_influence_
of_camera_angle_in_film_narratives.
Karen Boyle, “What’s Natural About Killing? Gender, Copycat Violence and Natural Born Killers.” Journal of Gender Studies 10, no. 3 (2001): 313. https://doi.org/10.1080/
09589230120086511.
Boyle, “What’s Natural About Killing”, 313.
Mathew A. Lapierre and Cecilia Sada Garibay, “Shooting Movies: Effects of Gun and Firearm Exposure in Popular Films on Gun Use Self-Efficacy and Gun Attitudes/Beliefs”, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, (2025): 13.
Lapierre and Garibay, “Shooting Movies”, 13.
Kierra Catherine Maika and Angela D. Weaver, “Women’s Perceptions of, and Emotional Responses to, Sexual Violence Depicted in Film or Series.” Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality 31, no. 2 (2022): 288. https://doi.org/10.3138/cjhs.2022-0023.
Maika and Weaver, “Women’s Perceptions”, 288.
Maika and Weaver, “Women’s Perceptions”, 288.
Maika and Weaver, “Women’s Perceptions”, 288.
Bibliography
Boyle, Karen. “What’s Natural About Killing? Gender, Copycat Violence and Natural Born Killers.” Journal of Gender Studies 10, no. 3 (2001): 311–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/
09589230120086511.
Box Office Mojo. “Natural Born Killers – Box Office Mojo,” n.d. https://www.boxofficemojo.
com/title/tt0110632/?ref_=bo_se_r_1.
Lapierre, M. A., & Sada Garibay, C. (2025). “Shooting Movies: Effects of Gun and Firearm Exposure in Popular Films on Gun Use Self-Efficacy and Gun Attitudes/Beliefs.”
Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/
10776990251331624.
Maika, Kierra Catherine, and Angela D. Weaver. “Women’s Perceptions of, and Emotional Responses to, Sexual Violence Depicted in Film or Series.” Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality 31, no. 2 (2022): 280–92. https://doi.org/10.3138/cjhs.2022-0023.
Sarría, Lucía Cores. “The Influence of Camera Angle in Film Narratives.” MA thesis., Aarhus University, 2015. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352135520_The_influence_
of_camera_angle_in_film_narratives.
Stone, Oliver, director. Natural Born Killers. Warner Bros., 1994. 1 hr., 59 min. https://archive.
org/details/natural-born-killer-b/Natural+Born+Killer+B.mpg.
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