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Natural Born Killer Symbolism Analysis

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There is a combination of colour and black and white images which feature rapidly throughout the film (Hersey, 2002). The colour images which represent a perfectly normal and happier environment rapidly move to black and white, which is usually associated to threating events, highlighting the bleakness of the expected outcome of the scene (lburgess3, 2013 and Natural Born Killers, 1994). There is animalistic reference with the rattle snake symbolising poison and death and the wolf symbolising the hunt for prey, both symbolising the outcomes of the subjects within the scene. There is also a man holding a newspaper with the headline “666 Death” before he dissolves away from the scene and for most of the scene being black and white because of the murders that are committed by Mickey and Mallory. The end of the scene is in colour with the pair celebrating their victory in dance and a projector displaying fireworks in the background …show more content…

Natural Born Killers uses a bricolage of generic convention such as the gangster film, comedy and the horror (Etherington-Wright and Doughty, 2011: 118). The gangster element is shown through the murders that the pair commits, the horror is through the brutal nature of these murders and graphic imagery shown (i.e. the blood spatters) and the comedy is when Mallory laughs about the crimes and serves as entertainment to the pair before embracing each other in a dance, the ability to merge humour and the romantic (Natural Born Killers, 1994). This then links to how the different generic conventions also speak to the identities of the pair. The characters of Mickey and Mallory are multiple and fractured as they first present themselves as “normal” individuals who can do no harm but soon change into the psychopaths that they truly are, distinguishing the bad (the murders) as good and the good (morally acceptable behaviour) as bad (Etherington-Wright and Doughty, 2011:

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