Cross words on screen violence

Ex-soldier, book smuggler and drunk Malachi Thorndike has just killed a man, at least partly in self defence. This prompts him to remember his childhood*:

"When I was thirteen, my father had reluctantly capitulated to my swaggering insistence that I could happily, indeed casually, sit through the television screening of a horror movie which involved hordes of shambling, undead zombies munching on the succulent flesh of uptight young Americans .... The film contained no scene in a hotel bathroom, not as such, but nevertheless, as I sat on the bed and lit a cigarette, I wondered if the two things might not in some way be connected."
Neil Cross, Christendom (Jonathan Cape, 1999), p.156 (UK readers can buy it here).

We should encourage the idea that speculative fiction is a place to explore the link between fictional violence and real-life violence, rather than social policy.
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* Neil Cross's actual childhood memoirs can be purchased here.