Since the Columbine massacre in 1999, movies about school shootings have proliferated.
They range from the blatantly exploitative Duck! The Carbine High Massacre, a low budget direct-to-video “spoof ” thrown together mere weeks after the massacre (but although the film is in extraordinarily bad taste, I’ve seen no evidence to support its tagline’s assertion that the controversy surrounding the movie “landed its filmmakers in jail!”) and Gus Van Sant’s elliptical and crushing Elephant (2003) to Lynne Ramsay’s flawed but unsettling We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011). And you can see why filmmakers seem drawn to the material; technology has made it possible for children to kill with high efficacy.
