Increasingly, society questions the connection between violence in entertainment and violence in life. Moralists and censors would reply resoundingly that media violence and social violence are directly linked, but others ask the deeper question: Why do people feel the need to create images of violence, and why do audiences continually watch them? In this thought-provoking and insightful study of American violent cinema, author Jake Horsley attempts to answer these questions by tying together the multiple disciplines of psychology, criminology, censorship, and anthropology.

Horsley divides the forty years of his study into two volumes: American Chaos: From Touch of Evil to The Terminator, and Millennial Blues: From Apocalypse Now to The Matrix. These volumes aim to provide both a critical overview of the films themselves and a cultural study of the social and psychological factors relating to the demand for screen violence. By doing so, Horsley raises a new dialogue between scholars and movie buffs to examine the need to portray and the need to watch violent films.