Violent acts in real life are sad and horrible, but then why do a great many people find them so entertaining in the movies and on TV?

Attraction to violence was always there. It has increased with such shows / games played by kids these days. It is also being reflected in real life sadly.

People respond favorably to the increased adrenalin they experience by watching and reading about violence, and it is a safe way to have that feeling. It also works well with being spectator at sporting events. You don’t have to do anything but sit there to have the “high”.

Do you not find them entertaining? If you do, why do you? Different people find different violent stories entertaining in different ways. Different people also form different theories when asked to explain it.

I don’t know what “Banshee” or “Strike Back” are, since I have so little hope that modern offerings will be interesting to me, that I rarely even look to see what they are.

I find Game of Thrones interesting in several ways: As a fantasy setting and story and its relation to game worlds I’ve created and played in. As a study in power politics and intrigue and folly and nasty scenarios. As a contrast between the more detailed and sense-making books and the well-done-but-less-sense-making TV version. Etc. The violence I find both interesting and sometimes emotionally moving in various ways: cringe, catharsis, tactically, situationally, choreographically, and just for the fun & excitement.

Fun & excitement? Sure, I’m a boy, and fighting & war games have almost always been interesting & fun for me.

As for sad & horrible? That too! Even as a young kid, I saw that actual violence was sad & horrible, and what gives drama and importance to violence.

As for why a “great many people” are drawn to violent fiction & spectacles – well for many reasons, but besides all the ones I mentioned, also I think because of the lack of access to primal and archetypal things that are central to the human psyche, in our vapid commercial modern culture. Most people are disconnected from their humanity in many ways, and things such as violence, using deadly force, and death itself are prohibited, taboo, feared, avoided, ignored, and so on. People also get numbed in their own comfortable unconscious states. Violence and drama and heroic stories and other extreme situations can stimulate people a bit in those areas.

Many people live quiet, boring, desperate lives. They go to work, come from work, eat dinner, sleep, and it just repeats day after day. Bland and unexciting.

Something happens – the Orlando attacks, or the Paris attacks – doesn’t matter. The bored people feel safe; they aren’t threatened. But they love watching something that takes them out of their boring cyclical life.

They don’t like blood and guts BECAUSE it is blood and guts, they like it because it takes them from their dull meaningless lives.

Because, unlike cats, it’s socially unacceptable for us to toy with mice until they are dead.

Have you heard of the Latin phrase “panem et circenses”? For the first time, it was used by Juvenal, the Roman writer living in the late 1st and early 2nd century AD, in one of his satirical work. If to translate it into English, this expression means “bread and circuses”, and if to detach it from the political context of the poem, it presents the idea that all people are truly and constantly interested in is food and extravagant entertainment. From this time, nothing has greatly changed.

Great question.

I actually watch Game of Thrones and hated how violent it was when I first started watching. I do think it’s a little less vicious and gory than its first season, but still fairly bad. I would enjoy it more if it was less demonstratively violent.

I saw an add for the sequel to Independence Day, and the trailer liked more sinister than the first movie. It turned me off. The first movie had some very funny lines and overall didn’t seem scary or real, but more lighthearted. That’s what I liked about it.

My husband doesn’t mind watching violence at all, he enjoys the action, and it bothers me he can be so disconnected from the violence. I know it’s just a movie, but it still bothers me. I never “enjoy” watching violence. I tolerate it as part of the story.

Entertainment is a form of art. Art is defined by the eye of the beholder. Different types of entertainment entertain people in different ways. Much like a painting might trigger different types of responses from different people for different reasons. For instance, in a violent movie. Some might like the fight scenes. Others may enjoy a revenge aspect of the same story. Some may relate to the bad guys, or good guys.
Violence is a good way to illicit an emotional response from an audience. ie If a character in a movie has something violent happen to them, the audience might gain sympathy for the character.Making the storyline more interesting. In the same line maybe making the audience hate a bad guy character whom committed the act of violence. Again, getting the intended observer ‘involved ’ in the plot.

For better or worse, a story with violence is more ‘exciting’ than one without.

Movie violence is often comic book unrealistic. Very few are upsetting to me.

Man by his nature is greedy, corrupt, selfish and vile, civility has to be beaten into him from a young age, often not because it is the right thing to do but because there is an eventual overall pay out for such behavior. It is one of those two-faced issues like sex, it would be pleasurable to grease some people one feel are lowlife or unworthy as themselves, but to do so in the real would lend server detriments that would make the high short-lived and not equal the pain to themselves (not the family of the victims). You get to see the hero give these thugs their what for, and you can pretend they are doing it for you or that you are that hero doing it, all without consequence. Why 1st shooter is games so popular? Because you are shooting someone, the power of terminating their life, however, in real life you can’t do it without forfeiting your life in the long run. Imagine of natural selection ran as it should, anyone who was an opposition would be eliminated and there would be no feeling sorry for them. No one feels sorry for the being they kill during a 1st shooter game. In part because they can say even though I see the chunks of flesh fly off and the explosions of blood, there is no real suffering. Violence is fun and entertaining only society tries best to keep in contained to fiction and not the real because of the fact that it helps out everyone not to have them acting on their craving.

Did you ever watch any movies from the 40s? They were all about rich people and cops and private investigators. In the 50s they were always about rich people and cops and swashbuckling pirates. In the 60s they broadened a bit: they were always about rich people and cops and spies. All fiction is escapist: people want stories about something exciting, some sort of life, something beyond the ordinary. Nobody wants to watch a flick about a chemical genius who spends his days sniffing armpits and mixing deodorants.