Ever since the early days of cinema and the 1903 short film The Great Train Robbery, filmmakers have had a fascination with violence. As production codes and the surrounding censorship relaxed over the passing decades, more movies began to emerge which pushed the boundaries of on-screen violence. Throughout the twentieth century movies have unleashed all manner of carnage on the silver screen: from the slow motion shoot outs of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Arthur Penn's Bonnie And Clyde through to the horror excesses of the 1970s and onwards - when the term "video nasties" emerged as a perfect summary of an era of gory cinematic oneupmanship - violence at the movies went from one extreme to the next. The turn of the twenty-first century certainly hasn't seen an about turn either in the lengths filmmakers will go to shock or the desire for such thrills from movie lovers - indeed, a quick perusal of some of the violent movies released since the year 2000 reveal some of the most bloody and transgressive films in the history of the medium. The following list covers 20 of the most outrageously violent movies made since 2000 - watch them if you dare and try not to wince.
