BANG BANG! You're Dead!

06-20-2025

So, the genre of what I guess you can call “school shooter films” is not that big, and often not that good. Shit like Duck! The Carbine High Massacre (1999), which came out only months after the real world school shooting of Columbine, doesn't really handle the subject very well, and oftentimes it's the bad films that get the most attention. But if I’m being honest, when done right, I think the genre can send a really good message, or even just be an amazing work of art. Films like Zero Day and Elephant, both coming out the same year, give their own unique view into mostly the perpetrators of these attacks, but also the victims in the case of Elephant. Documentaries, on the other hand, like Zero Hour: Massacre at Columbine High (2004) and American Tragedy (2019) (which was made by Dylan Klebold’s ever-grieving mother, Sue Klebold and honestly does somewhat warp people’s view on the Columbine massacre by selling the “Eric-bad-Dylan-good” narrative) or even Bowling for Columbine (2002) which doesn’t really focus on Columbine, moreso on the fact that those boys got firearms like they were just picking up candy at a gas station in 90’s America, they don’t often get everything right. And neither do films! I’m not defending either here, I’m simply discussing. And the film I really want to discuss today is Guy Ferland’s Bang Bang You’re Dead (2002).

This movie is very- very interesting to me. Specifically for what it’s based off of: a play. But more importantly, the play is based on the 1998 Thurston High School Shooting. A quick recap on this mostly unknown attack: 15 year old Kipland Kinkel shoots his mother and father following a suspension due to having a gun found in his locked before driving himself to school and subsequently shooting and killing 2 people and injuring 25 others before being tackled to the ground by an injured student as he cried, begging to be killed. In the interrogation tapes, Kip cries throughout almost the entirety of his confession to killing his mom and dad, along with confessing to having been hearing voices in his head from a very young age telling him to do awful things to the people he loves. Kip was subsequently sentenced to 111 years in jail and is now in his 40s. With his sister and on his own, he has spoken up about his shame and regret and self-hatred for what he had done, and how he eventually got help for his severe paranoid schizophrenia. A very intriguing interview with them both can be found here.

But onto what I wanted to discuss about this film. It intrigues me because of what it’s based on. All those films I had previously mentioned in the opening, they’re all based on Columbine. I can only really think of one other film based on another shooting, but that’s besides the point. It's always Columbine! The play this film is based on (by the same name) is about a kid who, after killing his parents and several students at his school, is sent to jail and must face the “ghosts” of the classmates he killed. And the main character Trevor also plays the main character of that same play in the movie! Should’ve called it “Bang Bang Bang Bang Bang Bang You’re Dead” instead XD!

Point is, this film feels a whole lot more grounded than the rest. I feel like not just to me, but to all Americans and even the whole world, Columbine feels almost- fantastical. It feels like a dream, unreal. It sounds like a story someone made up about how bad shootings are in the USA and how shitty our gun laws are that they could allow such a thing to happen, but it didn’t happen and the victims never died and Eric went off to join the Marines and Dylan went to study at ASU! Happy ending, right? But I mean- that’s not what happened. All those kids are dead. It feels so unreal. But Thurston feels so raw and so BOOM! In your face, like a shotgun barrel. And like I said, so does this movie.

I think I have a real soft spot for this film. The feel of it, the look of it, the writing, I just love it. I think my love and soft spot for it comes from how I relate to the main character. God, I hated high school. Those were the worst 4 years of my life. I couldn’t stand it, going to school, being surrounded by people who hate me even if they never said it. I used to cry in the bathroom and hit myself and pull at my hair in frustration. I talked about it with my dad a while ago, I told him about how I barely had any friends until junior year, when I made the few I still have now, he never knew until then. Things like that, clueless parents and lonely days where I’d eat by myself because my one friend was with her big group of friends, nights spent crying over how excruciatingly lonely I felt and crying over how bad I wished it’d just all be over and I would never have to worry about it ever again. And after getting put through something similar to him, minus the whole ending bit where his buddies decide to really do it, I felt like that connected me to Trevor. He felt real and raw. Knowing what Bang Bang You’re Dead is based on, that too is what gives me a soft spot for it. I won’t go on talking about my thoughts on Kip Kinkel, that’d take me a whole other 2 pages on Docs, but the fact this is about a pre-Columbine incident and the play was written also pre-Columbine, it all makes it less unbelievable, makes it just a bit realer to sit through and watch.

Reading this over, I’ll probably end this entry here. It’s past midnight by the time I publish this, and I realized I wrote mostly just the same bullshit over and over again. Ending it off with a pretty bow, I say this: I adore this film. Similarly to how I feel about Zero Day (2003), it is a deeply personal thing to me, and by GOD do I desperately want my own DVD copy of them both. I think both the film and the play deserve more recognition and I really hope they both receive it as I love them both, and the Thurston High case is one of the most intriguing to me by far in everything I’ve researched. I have never loved another film in the way I love Bang Bang You’re Dead.