ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on specific forms of screen violence, giving preference to dramatic scenes directed at sustained traumatic impact. It presents several conventions that point to the prevalence of immersive intensities over scoring along emotional lines, a shift that complicates tired moralistic discourses about justifiable or gratuitous/empathetic or anempathetic screen violence and points to the necessity of rethinking the ways in which we talk about audiovisual brutality. In simple terms, scholarship on sound and screen violence tends to deem music that invites purposeful empathy with the victim as justifiable, whereas that which encourages emotionally distanced violence or connection to the perpetrator is problematic. Correlations between sound and screen violence have been noted since the origins of sound cinema, but these discussions have become vital in light of increasingly explicit displays of destruction and devastation. In contrast, empathetic music intensifies feelings of empathy, identification, and association with the action portrayed on-screen.
