Already mired in controversy long before its release, disowned by original screenwriter Quentin Tarantino, and hitting cinemas just as the O.J. Simpson murder case shocked the country, Natural Born Killers made a bloody splash in the summer of 1994. Oliver Stone’s tale of serial-killing lovebirds Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) Knox instantly sparked a classic 1980 and ’90s-style moral panic, as media figures blasted it for glamorizing violence and predicted a rash of killings inspired by the film.
But despite the moral hysteria, the picture was a pure satire — albeit one soaked in blood and psychedelics, shot and cut for maximum impact. Although Tarantino’s original script differed vastly from Stone’s final product, reading it makes clear that Natural Born Killers was always intended as a send-up of America’s culture of celebrity worship and the then-burgeoning true crime media ecosystem. And the film hit at just the right time to strike a very raw nerve with the public, given that it premiered shortly after the Jeffrey Dahmer case, the acquittal of the police tried for beating Rodney King and the subsequent L.A. riots, and at the height of tabloid television’s dominance.
Why Was ‘Natural Born Killers’ So Controversial?
Considered one of the most controversial films in history, Natural Born Killers is derided even to this day not only for its violence, but for crimes carried out by its fans, as well as Stone’s admittedly broad-brush approach to satire. And the criticism of the film’s approach began before it was released: it was immediately slapped with an NC-17 by the MPAA, who required that four minutes of violence be cut to achieve an R-rating. And even after that, the famously mercurial film board gave one of their most feverish warnings ever regarding the rating: “For extreme violence and graphic carnage, for shocking images, and for strong language and sexuality.”
Seen today, it’s easy to find the MPAA’s thinking a bit laughable (one can easily see much more graphic violence in contemporary network dramas), but it was clearly Stone and cinematographer Robert Richardson’s (Pulp Fiction) aggressive stylization that made every killing hit so hard. Writing at the time, Janet Maslin of the New York Times acknowledged the film’s technical qualities, but thought Stone himself was “enamored” by the psychopathic Mickey and Mallory and said the film’s point was ultimately “banal” and buried by Stone’s cinematic tricks.
More serious, however, are several alleged copycat crimes linked to the film over the past few decades. Several teen shooters have been self-professed superfans, including Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. One pair of teens in Oklahoma watched the film repeatedly on LSD, then went out to re-enact it, killing one man and rendering a woman paraplegic. Fourteen-year-old killer Barry Loukaitis shot two students and a teacher dead in his Washington state high school while allegedly dressed as Mickey. Multiple lawsuits have ground through the system over the years targeting Stone and the film’s producers and distributors, though all have ultimately wound up dismissed.
The dust has long settled over Natural Born Killers as a cultural lightning rod, but it offers the same dubious pleasures today as in 1994, and in some ways its bite has even sharpened. While its targets at the time were shows like Hard Copy and Larry King Live, the overriding message still rings true in our era of true crime entertainment.
Stone’s film remains an overpowering cinematic experience. Everything is turned up to 11 using mixed media, multiple film stocks, canted angles, music ranging from Nine Inch Nails to Edith Piaf, and over 3,000 cuts.Harrelson and Lewis embody their bloodthirsty yet hippie-esque murderers to an eerie degree, while Tom Sizemore plays one of the most repellent corrupt cops in film history. Tommy Lee Jones plays to the rafters as a psychotic prison warden whose head ends up on a pike and Rodney Dangerfield oozes hatefulness as Lewis’s sexually abusive father in an extended sequence filmed like a hallucinatory sitcom. It’s a lot to take in and still one of the definitive films of the 1990s.
And it may be even more relevant today. True crime content has never been more popular — or more lurid. According to Edison Research, some 84 percent of Americans consume some form of true crime media, with podcasts examining particular serial killers and grisly family annihilations reaching 19 million regular listeners. On top of that, social media allows true crime fanatics to air their every thought and theory, up to and including crushes on notorious killers. In fact, Robert Downey Jr.‘s manic Aussie tabloid host in Natural Born Killers can seem downright quaint when compared to today’s true crime obsessives and slew of stylish, bloody miniseries recreating famous killing sprees. So maybe it’s not that Natural Born Killers was ever “too much”…only that it arrived too soon.
- Release Date
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August 26, 1994
- Runtime
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118 minutes
- Director
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Oliver Stone
