Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Andrew Sanford | News | September 4, 2025
A rain-soaked Heath Ledger with smeared, greasy makeup grabs Michael Jai White by the back of the head and forces a knife in his mouth. After spouting a frightening anecdote about his scarred face, he yanks the knife through White’s cheek, similarly slicing him, and swiftly ending his life in a brutal, bloody fashion. Presumably. We never really see it.
That isn’t the only instance of extreme yet bloodless violence in The Dark Knight. Later on, Ledger’s Joker fires a shotgun directly into a police officer, and the results are similarly bloodless. That’s the case for most superhero movies, but it feels especially notable in a film as grim and gritty as Christopher Nolan’s stellar film about the caped crusader.
If a superhero movie or show is going to contain blood, it’s often part of the marketing. Deadpool and The Boys lead with their hyper violence. However, they are also not meant for children. That being said, some of the superhero movies that are touted as being for kids actually are not. It’s a strange aspect of a genre of entertainment that needs to appeal to adolescents of all ages.
Someone who knows a bit about blood in movies, and is no fan of the lack of it in otherwise very violent superhero outings, is the Master of Horror himself, Stephen King. The Maximum Overdrive director recently gave an interview with The Times U.K. to promote an adaptation of his book, The Long Walk. While lamenting the consequenceless violence of superhero films, he celebrated his new dystopian movie.
“If you look at these superhero movies, you’ll see…some supervillain who’s destroying whole city blocks, but you never see any blood,” King explained. “And man, that’s wrong. It’s almost, like, pornographic.” Look, I’m sure someone will get to this in the comments as well, but Stephen King calling anyone else’s take on violence pornographic is the pot calling the kettle black on steroids. But I get what he means.
What is the point of showing such violence if there are no visual consequences? King may sound more like Marge Simpson standing up against Itchy & Scratchy than the man who wrote IT, but he raises a good point. He also went on to explain that director Francis Lawrence and screenwriter J.T. Mollner took his advice, noting, “I said, if you’re not going to show it, don’t bother. And so they made a pretty brutal movie.”
If Stephen King is calling the movie brutal, you can rest assured that it’s pretty intense. I’m more fascinated by the idea that two dystopian movies based on books written by King under the pseudonym Richard Bachman are being released within two months of each other, but, if you’re like my wife, you’re tired of hearing me talk about that.
