Analysis of 160,000 movies reveals that “murderous words” have increased since 1970

The amount of murder and homicide in movies has increased overall over the past 50 years, according to a study that analyzed a vast database of movie dialogue.

Researchers used machine learning to search a database of subtitles for more than 160,000 English-language films produced between 1970 and 2000. They calculated the amount of character dialogue using variations of the word “murder” or “murder” in each movie.

Although the total usage of these “murder verbs” varies widely from year to year, there has been a clear upward trend over the past 50 years, said Brad Bushman, a communications professor at Ohio State University and corresponding author of the study.

It’s not just crime movies where violence is expected.

“Even characters in non-crime movies talk about murder and murder more today than they did 50 years ago,” Bushman said.

“It’s not as high as in crime movies, and it’s not increasing as rapidly, but it’s still increasing. We’re seeing an increase in violence across all genres.”

The study was published online as a research letter in JAMA Pediatrics on December 30, 2024.

Another notable finding was an increase in violent language for both male and female characters, said Babak Fotouhi, lead author of the study and adjunct assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Information. Ta.

Although women generally had less violent conversations than men, violent conversations also increased over time.

“Our findings suggest that murder and references to killing in movie dialogue not only occur much more frequently than in real life, but also increase over time.” Fotouhy said.

“This is further evidence that violence is a bigger part of the movies we watch than ever before.”

In the study, researchers used movie subtitles from opensubtitles.org to extract dialogue mentioning actions committed by characters in 166,534 movies.

The researchers calculated the percentage of so-called murder verbs (the number of verbs derived from the roots “kill” and “murder”) divided by the total number of verbs in the dialogue. They tracked year-to-year changes. Overall, during the study period, approximately 7% of movies included murderous verbs in their dialogue.

In this study, we only counted murder verbs used in active constructions (e.g., “She killed X”). Passive constructions (“He was killed by X.”), negations (“She didn’t kill X.”), and questions (“Did she kill X?”) were not counted. .

“We designed this to be a conservative estimate,” Fotouhi said. “Maybe there was more violence in the movie than we calculated from a dialogue standpoint.”

One reason this is considered a conservative estimate is the study’s narrow focus, said co-author Amir Tohidi, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

“We focused only on murderous verbs in our analysis to set a reporting floor,” Tohidi said. “The total number of violence would be even higher if we included less extreme forms of violence.”

While other studies have shown an increase in movie violence, the value of this analysis is the large data set, the researchers said. No other study has examined such a huge number of films.

What’s not clear is how long the trend toward increased violence will continue, Bushman said.

“The evidence suggests that we are very unlikely to have reached a tipping point,” he said.

Fotouhi added: “Movies compete for the audience’s attention, and research shows that violence is one of the most effective factors in attracting audiences.”

That means we need to promote “conscious consumption and media literacy to protect vulnerable populations, especially children,” the researchers said in the study.

Rouzbe Tuselkani of the Institute of Basic Sciences in Tehran, Iran, is also a co-author.