Vigilante Film
The vigilante film is a film genre in which the protagonist or protagonists engage in vigilante behavior, taking the law into their own hands.
Vigilante films are usually revenge films in which the legal system fails protagonists, leading them to become vigilantes. The vigilante film has in recent years often crossed over with the superhero genre, due to character origin stories frequently involving an injustice having been committed against them.
History
In United States cinema, vigilante films gained prominence during the 1970s with "touchstones" like Death Wish and Dirty Harry, both of which received multiple sequels. The 1974 film Death Wish has been described as officially starting the genre, causing many cheap imitations and knockoffs such as Vigilante and Vigilante Force, with the most financially successful being 1980's The Exterminator.
The Los Angeles Times reported, "Vigilante vengeance was the cinematic theme of the [1970s], flourishing in the more respectable precincts of the new American cinema even as it fueled numerous exploitation flicks," referring to Taxi Driver as a respectable example of the genre. It reported in 2009 that such films were making a comeback after "the comparatively prosperous and peaceable 1990s", with examples like Walking Tall (2004), Death Sentence (2007) and Law Abiding Citizen (2009).
List of films
Pre-1965 vigilante films
| Film | Year | Ref. |
|---|---|---|
| Tracked by Bloodhounds; or, A Lynching at Cripple Creek | 1904 | |
| The White Caps | 1905 | |
| The Birth of a Nation | 1915 | |
| Judex | 1916 | |
| The Adventures of Robin Hood | 1938 | |
| The Mark of Zorro | 1940 | |
| The Ox-Bow Incident | 1943 | |
| The Big Heat | 1953 | |
| The Bravados | 1958 | |
| The Virgin Spring | 1960 | |
| Treasure of the Silver Lake | 1962 | |
| Youth of the Beast | 1963 |
Late 60s-mid 80s vigilante film wave
Late 1980s to the present
See also
References
- Hoppenstand, Gary (1993). "Lethal weapons: The gun as icon in the popular urban vigilante film". In Loukides, Paul; Fuller, Linda K. (eds.). Beyond the Stars 3: The Material World in American Popular Film. Popular Press. ISBN 978-0-87972-623-2.
- Novak, Glenn D. (November 1987). "Social Ills and the One-Man Solution: Depictions of Evil in the Vigilante Film". International Conference on the Expressions of Evil in Literature and the Visual Arts.
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