10 Controversial Movies Everyone Misunderstood

10. Natural Born Killers

Where a movie's potential to incite violence is concerned, there's perhaps no film more controversial than Oliver Stone's 1994 cult crime classic Natural Born Killers.

The film, which had its story conceived by Quentin Tarantino, stars Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis as two lovers murdering their way across the U.S. It sparked a major moral panic in the U.S. and U.K., with plenty of hand-wringing over speculated "copycat" murders in America and France.

Rather ironically, most media reports glibly labelled the film a relentless murder-a-thon while completely ignoring the fact that it's a blackly comic satire of the media itself, whose tireless obsession with the grisly details of murder runs in a feedback loop with our collective morbid curiosity.

The film's central thematic is a sledgehammer-subtle takedown of sensationalist media and the mythic figures they create out of murderous criminals, embodied best by Robert Downey Jr.'s egocentric tabloid journalist Wayne Gale (who, aptly, is gunned down by the couple in the final scene).

A movie as gratuitously violent as Natural Born Killers was always going to rankle people, but much of the ire was bore from a patent misreading of the film's tone and intent.

One suspects that, as with many of these controversies, most of the complainers didn't actually watch the movie.