Well, we're clearly not going to agree on this so I'll make this my last post on the subject. I find it very hard to consider something - movie, image, book, whatever - as violent when I know that it cannot be real, or when it is clearly 'comic book action' material of the kind you see in most movies. Movies with monsters, aliens, ridiculously pretentious serial killers - these don't disturb me because they're not real. For me (and I should say that my life has been as peaceful as yours from the sound of it) disturbing violence occurs when there is a clear attempt either to reproduce accurately scenes that have happened in real life, or when the movie maker/artist or whoever attempts to make the scene as realistic as possible.

For example, to my way of thinking Schindler's List was violent. The first 15 minutes of Saving Private Ryan - that is disturbingly violent IMO, redeemed by the fact that real men went through that appalling episode and I feel that we should, perhaps, have some idea what it was like.

But I just can't get upset about images etc. that are patently unreal, and given the popularity of such movies (and that hasn't changed since the days of the original Universal horror movies in the 1930s) I'm far from the only one. But we are all different and images will affect us all in different ways.

Steve