Violence is a common theme in most genres of film.  Violence of varying intensity crops up in physical comedies, dramatizes love stories, drives action films and draws screams in horror flicks.   While not all representations of violence lead to a dystopic message in film, films that are recognized as dystopic generally draw on their violent content to communicate their message.  Using a series of films with an identifiable dystopic theme as a sample, comparison of the specific nature of their depictions of violence will yield a system of classification for the nature of dystopic violence.

The films focused on include movies from a variety of periods, artistic movements and critical success, including Fritz Lang’s Metropolis(1926), Osamu Tezuka’s Metropolis (2001), Alpha-Ville (1965), Bladerunner (1982, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), Akira (1988), Salvador Dali’s Le Chien Andalou (1929), Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1972), Black Cat (1934) and Frank Miller’s Sin City (2005). Analyzing the use of violence in these films, three typologies emerge, all of which use degrees of realism and arbitrariness to take their violence to a profoundly dystopic level.