Why the Andhra chainsaw attack started a conversation on violence in movies

A man walks into a room full of teenaged girls and boys, singles out one of them, and cuts her with a chainsaw — the scene might read straight out of a slasher film, but it is not. This is what unfolded when 21-year-old Hemanth walked into a class 10 room of the Zilla Parishad High School in Rapthadu in Andhra Pradesh on October 31.

The buzz of his electric chainsaw disrupted 15-year-old Gopika’s maths class. The teacher and her classmates looked on in shock and helplessness as he allegedly cut her face, neck, back, and arm. Doctors would later say that a flap of her cheek had fallen off her face, and her right hand was almost severed.

The gore reminded some people of a classroom scene from Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Animal. Ranbir Kapoor playing Ranvijay Singh, an angsty teenager longing for his father’s love, walks into a college classroom with an assault rifle and fires multiple rounds into the floor to intimidate students into revealing the names of men who sexually harassed his sister. 

On the surface, the scene is not that similar to what happened in Andhra Pradesh. Ranvijay’s violence is directed at men, and when pulled up for it, he insists angrily that he would do anything to keep his sister safe. But there are obvious reasons people are upset with movies like Animal, KGF, Marco, Pushpa, and Jailer after the attack on Gopika, and not The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. 

Popular cinema in India, more so in Tollywood, has been mainstreaming gore for a while now, constantly splattering blood at the audience. And unlike gore horror, where a terrifying monster kills victims we feel for, the violence in films like Animal is a spectacle designed to display the hero’s aggressive masculinity — the same hero who generally seems unable to fully humanise any woman, even his mother, sister, or wife. 

There is no evidence that just watching a violent film can turn someone violent. But there is a more complicated question to ask about contemporary cinema, especially Telugu. What happens when violence is presented not as horrifying, but as an expression of male anger, power, and love?

That distinction matters in Telugu cinema, where film heroes have a powerful presence beyond the screen. Political slogans are born out of their dialogues, and young men aspire to the masculinity modelled by heroes.  

The depiction of violence and gore in films in itself is not the concern. It is whether on screen aggression is further desensitising an already violent society. 

Do violent films make people violent? 

Sandeep Reddy Vanga, who calls his male lead actors and their characters ‘alpha male’, has come to be seen as a flagbearer of a modern hypermasculinity in our films. Long before he made Animal, Sandeep’s Hindi film Kabir Singh was explicitly linked to another crime where a man killed a woman who rejected him. 

In 2019, a man in Uttar Pradesh, Ashwin Kashyap, killed Nikita Sharma, a woman whom he was obsessed with and who was about to marry someone else. He also killed two other men and later took his own life. The killer’s social media accounts had photographs of the actor Shahid Kapoor from Kabir Singh. He had posted a video on TikTok saying, “Jo mera nahi ho sakta, use kisi aur ka hone ka mauka nahi doonga.” (I will not let someone who cannot be mine become someone else’s either).

Sandeep’s reaction was that his films never endorsed murder. “As filmmakers, we are responsible for our craft and need to consider the repercussions, but never have my films [endorsed] killing anyone. Kabir Singh or even Arjun Reddy never [supported] murder,” he said.

Men have been violent towards women even before alpha male movies were made, and there’s no evident correlation between the two things. A chilling crime similar to the chainsaw attack on Gopika happened 22 years back in Vijayawada. In 2004, Masters’ student Yelchuri Manohar hacked his classmate Ravuri Srilakshmi to death with a knife in a college classroom, while she was waiting for her turn in a viva exam. She had refused to go out with him. 

Violence against women by stalkers, exes, or partners are common in Andhra Pradesh, like elsewhere. In Gopika’s case, we still don’t know much about the accused Hemanth and his motive. Even if he is a film buff, it would be simplistic to draw a direct cause-and-effect link between people watching violence in movies and committing real crimes. 

Research on whether media violence causes aggression is ambiguous in the West and scarce in India. Many studies find that while media violence could be a minor contributing factor in aggressive behaviour, other influences like the family setting, peer environment, psychological traits, cultural and social context, all have a role. 

But research does often find that repeated exposure to violence can make us desensitised to it and even reduce our capacity for empathy. A US study in 1995 found that men who were repeatedly shown sexually violent slasher films showed less sympathy for domestic violence victims and downplayed their injuries. 

So even if violent movies don’t directly cause violence, they are probably desensitising us to brutality. 

There’s also the context in which the violence in recent Telugu and Hindi films is shown. 

Violent horror or gore movies can be a way for viewers to experience fear or disgust in a safe setting, and to build emotional resilience. Some may even see on-screen violence as cathartic, in rape revenge movies, for instance. It can have a narrative purpose or just be intended as entertainment. In most cases, the violence invokes fear and our sympathies are with the victim. 

But in movies such as Animal, KGF, and Pushpa that are being blamed for a culture shift, the violence is mainly a display of the hero’s hypermasculinity. There is little space for any catharsis or reflection. 

Recent films like The Paradise and Ranabaali were criticised for showing graphic violence on women and children. The Paradise shows a heavily pregnant woman being electrocuted with clamps attached to her belly till she delivers a stillborn and a healthy baby, who grows to be the hero Jadal (Nani). In Ranabaali, a pregnant woman’s abdomen is cut open without anesthesia to deliver a baby. A child is thrown into a pot of boiling water, one of the many atrocities shown to have been committed by the British during colonial rule. 

Even when the bad guys assault helpless victims, we are meant to sympathise with them, the violence is really meant to justify the intensity of the hero’s anger. Everything is about him. These scenes of oppression seem to prompt the audience to revel in the gory, blood-soaked revenge the hero will eventually take.

Tollywood and its fans

When violence by young men in the US, Europe, or other countries is blamed on video games, it is usually seen as a reductive explanation because of weak evidence. In the case of Telugu film viewers, in the absence of such work in audience studies, we only have anecdotes and cultural observations to go by. 

Telugu film viewers, especially men, seem to have really strong parasocial relationships with star heroes, both online and offline. Fans often even place their expectations of respectability and upholding family honour on the women of their star heroes’ families. 

In Andhra’s villages and towns, whose fan you are is part of your sense of self and how you express your identity. It is displayed on cycles and cars, ringtones and phone covers, clothes, in everyday language. Most men visibly aspire to enact masculinity like film heroes. 

Telugu politicians keep quoting movie dialogues in political speeches, in the state Assembly, and even in the Parliament. Then there is Deputy Chief Minister Pawan Kalyan, an actor-politician, whose political messaging and the roles he plays have been converging in his last few films. 

Last year, a YSRCP worker was arrested for holding a placard with a dialogue from Pushpa 2 during a party rally. The line is a threat from Pushpa (Allu Arjun) to his rivals where he says, “I will chop off your heads like they behead animals sacrificed during the Gangamma temple festival.” Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu and his Telugu Desam Party have used the phrase ‘Rappa Rappa’ from the dialogue as shorthand to say YSRCP displays criminal, aggressive behaviour. YSRCP supporters have made remixes out of party chief YS Jagan Mohan Reddy repeating the dialogue to ask why it warranted arrest. Movies and their models of masculinity are part of everyone’s lives. 

As we try to understand the harms of online incel culture and the manosphere world over, and their influence on gendered violence, the closest cultural equivalent of incel content for Telugu speakers are the ‘alpha male’ movies like Animal and KGF. 

Violence and misogyny are not new in Telugu cinema. But now more than ever, bloodshed is shown as a legitimate reaction when a man is angry, a reasonable way to deal with uncomfortable emotions. Often, he is shown getting away with no legal consequences. 

In the classroom rifle scene from Animal, Ranvijay (Ranbir Kapoor) is angry because someone harassed his sister. But he has his violent outburst while his sister is pleading with him not to do anything. We are never shown him offering comfort to his sister. All he wants is confirmation that someone “touched” her before he fires off his gun. He later crashes his car into the culprits, with his sister crying next to him saying that she regrets telling him about the harassment at all. 

As punishment, Ranvijay is simply sent off to boarding school by his rich father. He never stops feeling righteous, that he acted out of love for his sister. All the intensified violence that follows in the film is also meant to be an act of love for his father. 

In Pushpa 2, when the villain strips his niece, Pushpa (Allu Arjun) jumping at him and biting the flesh off his neck because his hands are tied, is presented as a valid crashout. As is Jadal (Nani) in Paradise shoving one of the bad guys’ head into a bucket, slicing his neck so his blood fills the bucket, and then kicking him so he flies in the air and the bucketful of blood splatters onto the crowd cheering him on. And then going on to throw another bad guy into a jaggery crusher and watching his blood gush out like sugarcane juice. 

Both Animal and The Paradise are rated A, and Pushpa 2 has a U/A 16+ rating. They are all available to watch for people of all ages on OTT platforms, as are most of the other films with similar levels of gore. 

Flagging concerns about on-screen violence isn’t a call for censorship, or asking for characters to have clear and perfect moralities, or to never make audiences feel uncomfortable. 

When there was online backlash against Peddi for the way the film sexualised Janhvi Kapoor, and for scenes that trivialised the hero Peddi (Ram Charan) violating her character Achiyamma’s consent, the makers’ response was to simply delete the scenes. There was no meaningful reflection or engagement with the criticism in public from director Bucchi Babu Sana or lead actor Ram Charan, beyond a cursory statement. 

When the Telugu film Baby got misogynist reactions from theatre audiences, director Sai Rajesh said he didn’t anticipate it. Viewers cheered when one of the male leads Anand (Anand Deverakonda) calls his girlfriend Vaishnavi (Vaishnavi Chaitanya) a whore for cheating on him with her classmate Viraj (Viraj Ashwin). The movie shows Viraj later holding Vaishnavi by the throat. Anand tries to murder her in her sleep but stops at the last moment. 

Some viewers said they would have preferred if the movie ended with Vaishnavi dying. Many of them said they were glad the film showed how women supposedly use men for money or attention and later dispose of them.

Telugu male audiences have been seen cheering in theatres for scenes where a hero slaps a heroine. Artists can’t control how their work is perceived, but not anticipating such obvious misogynist interpretations reflects a poor understanding of the audience and their cultural mood. 

After the Kabir Singh fan in Uttar Pradesh killed a woman who rejected him, Sandeep Vanga himself said that filmmakers must consider the repercussions of their work. He then went on to make the murderous Animal rage-baiting his critics, and has repeatedly responded to feminist analysis of his works with derision and dismissal. 

The Swathi murder case in 2016, where her stalker P Ramkumar murdered Swathi in a crowded railway station in Chennai, sparked a public discussion about how heroes stalking heroines is shown as romance in Tamil films. Police said Ramkumar seemed to have been carried away by such movies. A Madras High Court judge also blamed movies for glorifying stalking. A campaign was started urging filmmakers to stop glorifying stalking.

A year after Swathi was killed, a research paper titled ‘Celluloid to soulmates: A study on the impact of films on the perception of romantic love among the youth’ by academic Shakti Swaminathan surveyed 500 youngsters across south India. The study found that youngsters’ ideas of romance were influenced by movies, that they believed in most romantic tropes shown in movies. 

Members of the Tamil film industry didn’t explicitly respond to the concerns raised after Swathi’s death. But mainstream Tamil cinema has turned away from the disturbing norm of romanticising stalking in the past few years anyway, though it’s hard to say if it was a result of the aftermath of Swathi’s murder. 

Movies, like any art, are meant to move us, make us think and feel things, access our emotions and challenge our worldviews. Maybe Telugu filmmakers could finally engage with all the criticism coming up after Hemanth’s brutal attack on Gopika, introspect how and why they want to portray violence in their films, and think through the cultural climate in which their films are watched. 

Read our two-part series on the manosphere

Andrew Tate and more: Inside the manosphere luring young Indian men and boys 

Misogyny, manosphere, and the making of India’s religious extremists