84 pages of archival material collected from years of research including newly translated Japanese promotional ephemera, liner notes by Dean Brandum and Chris Desjardins, ad mats, press clippings, reviews, international home video art and more.
The Killing of America (1981) is a brutal, unflinching documentary that charts the rise of violence in the United States from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. Built almost entirely from real news footage, police recordings, and crime-scene clips, it drops you straight into the country’s darkest moments—assassinations, riots, mass shootings, serial killers, and everyday acts of mayhem—without narration that softens the blow.
The film argues that America entered a kind of national psychological breakdown: political optimism shattered, social trust eroded, guns flooded the culture, and violence became both more common and more spectacular. It connects events like the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK to later eruptions such as the Texas Tower shooting, the rise of cultic violence, and the celebrity-like fixation on serial killers. The tone is grim, direct, almost clinical—designed to leave you stunned rather than entertained.
Often compared to Faces of Death but rooted in journalism rather than shock-fiction, the documentary still hits like a punch today: a portrait of a country spiraling, using its own real imagery as evidence.
