The teacher and her classmates looked on in shock and helplessness as he allegedly cut her face, neck, back, and arm.
There is no evidence that just watching a violent film can turn someone violent.
What happens when violence is presented not as horrifying, but as an expression of male anger, power, and love?
The depiction of violence and gore in films in itself is not the concern.
Do violent films make people violent?
A man walks into a room full of teenaged girls and boys, singles out one of them, and cuts her with a chainsaw — the scene might read straight out of a slasher film, but it is not. This is what unfolded when 21-year-old Hemanth walked into a class 10 room of the Zilla Parishad High School in Rapthadu in Andhra Pradesh on October 31.
The buzz of his electric chainsaw disrupted 15-year-old Gopika’s maths class. The teacher and her classmates looked on in shock and helplessness as he allegedly cut her face, neck, back, and arm. Doctors would later say that a flap of her cheek had fallen off her face, and her right hand was almost severed.
The gore reminded some people of a classroom scene from Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Animal. Ranbir Kapoor playing Ranvijay Singh, an angsty teenager longing for his father’s love, walks into a college classroom with an assault rifle and fires multiple rounds into the floor to intimidate students into revealing the names of men who sexually harassed his sister.
On the surface, the scene is not that similar to what happened in Andhra Pradesh. Ranvijay’s violence is directed at men, and when pulled up for it, he insists angrily that he would do anything to keep his sister safe. But there are obvious reasons people are upset with movies like Animal, KGF, Marco, Pushpa, and Jailer after the attack on Gopika, and not The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Popular cinema in India, more so in Tollywood, has been mainstreaming gore for a while now, constantly splattering blood at the audience. And unlike gore horror, where a terrifying monster kills victims we feel for, the violence in films like Animal is a spectacle designed to display the hero’s aggressive masculinity — the same hero who generally seems unable to fully humanise any woman, even his mother, sister, or wife.
There is no evidence that just watching a violent film can turn someone violent. But there is a more complicated question to ask about contemporary cinema, especially Telugu. What happens when violence is presented not as horrifying, but as an expression of male anger, power, and love?
That distinction matters in Telugu cinema, where film heroes have a powerful presence beyond the screen. Political slogans are born out of their dialogues, and young men aspire to the masculinity modelled by heroes.
The depiction of violence and gore in films in itself is not the concern. It is whether on screen aggression is further desensitising an already violent society.
Do violent films make people violent?
Sandeep Reddy Vanga, who calls his male lead actors and their characters ‘alpha male’, has come to be seen as a flagbearer of a modern hypermasculinity in our films. Long before he made Animal, Sandeep’s Hindi film Kabir Singh was explicitly linked to another crime where a man killed a woman who rejected him.
In 2019, a man in Uttar Pradesh, Ashwin Kashyap, killed Nikita Sharma, a woman whom he was obsessed with and who was about to marry someone else. He also killed two other men and later took his own life. The killer’s social media accounts had photographs of the actor Shahid Kapoor from Kabir Singh. He had posted a video on TikTok saying, “Jo mera nahi ho sakta, use kisi aur ka hone ka mauka nahi doonga.” (I will not let someone who cannot be mine become someone else’s either).
Sandeep’s reaction was that his films never endorsed murder. “As filmmakers, we are responsible for our craft and need to consider the repercussions, but never have my films [endorsed] killing anyone. Kabir Singh or even Arjun Reddy never [supported] murder,” he said.
