A rising trend of ‘murderous verbs’ in movies over 50 years

January 6, 2025

A rising trend of ‘murderous verbs’ in movies over 50 years

Brad Bushman

The amount of murdering and killing in movies has increased overall over the past 50 years, according to a new study that analyzed a massive database of film dialogue.

Researchers used machine learning to search a database of subtitles from more than 160,000 English-language movies produced from 1970 to 2000.  They calculated the amount of dialogue from characters using variations of the words “murder” or “kill” in each of the films.