empathize with Wong’s female victims and find him deplorable. Which, after reading the Prince chapter, I think perhaps was to some extent the point, with how much vulgarity is happening by Wong and the cops there’s nowhere for the audience to really align themselves with. The grotesque treatment of Wong while he is in custody is disturbing and frightening and makes me despise the police characters even more, paired with Wong’s constant screaming about police brutality and the sympathy that he gets from one of the inmates. Yet we still know that he is a terrible person who does deserve punishment for his actions, so we are kind of left with nowhere to go and our stomach thoroughly turned. This movie was also based on a real event which does add to the horror of it because we realize that something this awful happened in real life. I think this brings up the question of how much film is just reflecting back on what is happening in the world and how much it influences people’s actions. I think with incredibly violent movies that are especially gory and really diving into the special effects and aspects of cinematography that Prince talked about it is creating an emotional/visceral world rather than the naturalistic world that the audience inhabits. The cinematic, visceral world in some ways becomes more real because it is a reflection of how we feel about horribly violent actions. I think about this a lot when I notice the grotesque sounds of gore, when watching a film these sounds are not usually localized (visual cues will definitely let us know where its coming from though) but rather are immersive in the soundscape which makes it way more intense while watching but furthers it from reality. This aestheticizing of violence makes it seem more romantic or cool and so beyond what a lot of viewers know and so then it can seem desirable to experience something like what we see on screen. If the audience member, in the examples Prince has where they did act violently because of a film, relates in some way to the ostracizing of a villain or the mythos created around a cool killer in a film then the glorification of what their life could be would be enticing. Although, then I wonder about the queer/feminine monsters that we’ve been talking about with the other films. With the violence in these films it is still aestheticized but seems less glorified, Nosferatu and Leatherface are defeated by another character while Wong is defeated on his own terms and remains the main character through the whole film while being a villain and a victim. The Untold Story is violently heterosexual throughout and I wonder if a cishet male dominated film like this idealizes and justifies violence a lot more (especially in the case of the officer’s violence).