Columbine High School massacre in popular culture

Part of a series of articles on the
Columbine massacre
People involved
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold Rachel Scott Cassie Bernall Austin Eubanks
Other articles
A Mother's Reckoning I'm Not Ashamed Columbine Bowling for Columbine Legacy In popular culture

The following is a list of cultural references to the 1999 Columbine High School massacre and its perpetrators, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

Music

References to the shootings have appeared many times in popular music.

• The entire 2000 album Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death) by the band Marilyn Manson was written as a reaction and rebuttal against the allegation made by politicians, religious and civic leaders and news media that the group inspired the perpetrators to commit the school shooting.
• The Anatomy of a School Shooting by Ill Bill, featured in album What's Wrong with Bill? (2004), is a straightforward reference to Columbine massacre. Lyrics are written like the story was told from Eric Harris perspective.
• A song called "Leave Me Alone" by goth band The Crüxshadows was remixed as the "Leave Me Alone (Shaft 20/20 Mix)" to incorporate audio clips from the anti-goth segment of the ABC news magazine show 20/20 that aired the day after the shooting.
• Columbine students Jonathan and Stephen Cohen wrote a song called "Friend Of Mine (Columbine)", which briefly received airplay in the US after being performed at a memorial service broadcast on nationwide television. The song was pressed to CD, with the proceeds benefiting families affected by the shooting, and over 10,000 copies were ordered. Shortly following the release of the CD single, the song was also featured on the Lullaby for Columbine CD.
• Amanda Palmer, one half of The Dresden Dolls, performed "Strength Through Music" during the 2007 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It is a song about Columbine. She stated it was written some time earlier, though she did not clarify the time frame. "Strength Through Music" is on her first solo CD Who Killed Amanda Palmer, and she also did a music video version of it filmed in Lexington High School, Massachusetts, her alma mater. The video has a spoken mode-setting preface.
• Rapper Tyler, the Creator made a reference to the shooting in his song "Yonkers". He also has a song entitled "Pigs" which he stated in a tweet was inspired by the two shooters.
• Rapper Violent J of the hip-hop supergroup Dark Lotus mentioned the Columbine High School shooting on the Dark Lotus' debut album, Tales from the Lotus Pod, on the 10th track of the album, "Bad Rep".
• Rapper Bones released an album about the shooting on February 25, 2014 titled TeenWitch. The songs go inside the minds of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold leading up to and throughout the shooting.
• Rapper Eminem references the shooting multiple times throughout his discography. Most famously, "I'm Back" off of The Marshall Mathers LP (2000) contained a line about Columbine that was censored. He references this censorship in "Rap God" (The Marshall Mathers LP 2, 2013) and repeats the line, saying it will not be censored this time because he is not as famous as when "I'm Back" was released. "Remember Me?" and "The Way I Am" (The Marshall Mathers LP) also reference the shooting, and the music video for "White America" includes a reference to school shootings during the first chorus.
• Foster the People's "Pumped Up Kicks" was inspired by the shooting.
• "Broccoli" by DRAM mentions the shooting.
• Childish Gambino's song "The Real" from his mixtape I Am Just a Rapper 2 briefly references Columbine.
• Fred Durst references the Columbine shooting in the Limp Bizkit song "Head for the Barricade", which is on the 2003 album Results May Vary, and the reference wasn't censored on the explicit or edited versions of the album.
• Ghostemane's song "Trench Coat" from his 2018 LP album N / O / I / S / E references the shooting.
• Rapper Kota The Friend mentions the shooting on his 2020 album, Everything, on the song "Always".
• The song "Columbine" by SKYND and Bill $aber is about the shooting.
• Rapper The Game references the shooting in "Eazy".

Stage

• Columbinus is a 2005 is a play written by Stephen Karam and PJ Paparelli, with contributions by Josh Barrett, Sean McNall, Karl Miller, Michael Milligan and Will Rogers, created by the United States Theatre Project. The play looks at issues of alienation, hostility and social pressure in high schools and was suggested by the April 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado. The play premiered in Silver Spring, Maryland in 2005 and then Off-Broadway in 2006.
• In 2014 a stage play The Library premiered at The Public Theater in New York City. The play was written by Scott Z. Burns and directed by Steven Soderbergh, and starred Chloë Grace Moretz. The play was loosely based on Dave Cullen's book Columbine about the massacre.
• In 2021, casting began for 4/20/99 written by Autumn Marie Cazier. “‘4/20/99: A Story of Columbine’, follows the before, during, and aftermath events regarding the 1999 Columbine High School Massacre. One of the deadliest acts of domestic terrorism in modern-day American history. Featuring the music of George Michael, Green Day and Berlin. Court statements, ‘The Basement Tapes’, journal entries, The Columbine Memorial, lesser known perspectives, and never before told information, of how an hour long act of terror at a suburban high school, changed the world forever. Join us for an artistic and memorialized experience as we tell the stories of those involved, help to provide a better understanding around the subject matter, and shed light on the school shooting epidemic that we are currently experiencing. Complete with an immersive experience within sound, interactive with the audience, realistic costuming, and 75% historical accuracy.”

Screen

Television

• In a TV Guide interview, Mike Judge told the story of a letter he received regarding the King of the Hill episode "Wings of the Dope", in which a protagonist's deceased boyfriend visits her in the form of an angel. The episode premiered on May 4, 1999, two weeks after the shooting, and the fan who wrote to Judge had been inside the school during it; she credited the episode with helping her allow herself to grieve a friend of hers she was in love with and, during the shooting, decided to finally tell only to find out later that he was one of the shooters (because of this she had been pressured to repress her feelings).
• Two episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer were postponed after they were to air soon after the shootings. The first was the episode "Earshot". Though the episode had to do with school violence, there is a scene reminiscent of the University of Texas at Austin's shooting. Also "Graduation Day, Part Two" was delayed by almost two months after the shootings because of the scene where the students are wielding weapons. It was only aired after The WB received "thousands of letters demanding that the finale be aired".
• In the American Horror Story episode "Halloween (Part 2)", the ghost of a victim of Tate's high school shooting, which he does not recollect, asks him, "Do you believe in God?". When he is surprised by the question, she says, "You asked me if I believe in God and you put a gun to my head." In the following episode "Piggy Piggy", a sequence in which Tate shoots several victims in a library is depicted, and it is much like the library massacre in the Columbine shooting.
• An episode of the Discovery Channel show Zero Hour documents the events of the massacre, and includes a detailed reenactment.
• In the Family Guy episode "Brian & Stewie", Stewie Griffin mentions that Brian Griffin cried after Columbine. Which Brian responds because it was a national tragedy, which Stewie then responded it was more of a regional tragedy. In another Family Guy episode, "Trading Places", Peter Griffin is wearing a black trench coat, similar to what Harris and Klebold wore in the massacre and pulls out a shotgun and says it was time to make the popular kids pay for ignoring him.
• Columbine is briefly mentioned in the Cold Case episode "Rampage". In fact the writers based the episode on the attack.

Film

• Reunion, an acclaimed short film about the 13 victims murdered in the Columbine tragedy and what their lives might have been like had they not been cut short.
• The production of the 2000 DC Animated Universe film, Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker was heavily impacted by the massacre. This resulted in many violent scenes such as Joker's death and certain dialogue considered bad for children being censored and edited.
• In 2003, a mockumentary called Zero Day was released that detailed the events leading up to a school shooting. This was heavily based on Columbine.
• Bowling for Columbine, a documentary by filmmaker Michael Moore, explores the massacre within the context of American culture at the time.
• Freddy vs. Jason Mentioned by Kia and saying that the police were acting like some kind of Columbine thing.
• I'm Not Ashamed which was released on October 21, 2016. It was commissioned by Rachel Scott's family to honor their daughter, who was the first victim of Columbine.
• Elephant is a 2003 American drama by Gus Van Sant. Set in fictional Watt High School, it is based in part on the Columbine massacre. The film began as a documentary that Van Sant initially intended to make about Columbine.

Video games

• The 1999 flash game Pico's School was released. The game features two school students, Pico and Cassandra, the latter being a school shooter that was directly inspired by Eric Harris. Columbine was credited as a key influence in the game's thematics.
• A 2005 video game titled Super Columbine Massacre RPG! was independently made by Danny Ledonne. In the game, players take control of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and act out the massacre, while going through flashbacks of the pair's experiences. Following the massacre, the player takes control of Harris and Klebold in a fictional adventure in perdition. The game received huge controversy, as people believed it was glorifying the massacre and could be used by potential future killers as inspiration.

Literature

• Brooks Brown, a survivor who was targeted by law enforcement and students after the massacre due to his lifelong friendship with Dylan Klebold, reacted to the shooting and its aftermath in his 2002 memoir No Easy Answers: The Truth Behind Death at Columbine.
• The 2009 Jeff Kass book Columbine: A True Crime Story is a book in which the author explains the events that lead to the tragedy using research.
• Shooter Dylan Klebold's mother, Susan Klebold, published an essay about the aftermath of the massacre in a 2009 issue of O Magazine. She has also written a memoir titled A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy, released February 15, 2016.
• Dave Cullen's book Columbine, released in 2009, includes an analysis of the massacre and the shooters.
• In Theory of Bloom, Tiqqun reveals the revolutionary potential of school shootings. Tiqqun writes "Often, the Spectacle uses this [the shootings for no reason] as a pretext to speak of gratuitous acts [...], when these gestures are not deprived of either hatred or reason. To convince yourself of this, you just have to watch the five tapes that the "Littleton monsters" filmed in anticipation of their operation. Their program appears there without mystery: "We are going to start a revolution, a revolution of the dispossessed." Here, hatred itself is undifferentiated, free from any personality. Death enters into the universal just as it leaves the universal, and it is without anger. Our business is not to lend any revolutionary significance to such acts, and hardly to give them an exemplary character. Rather, it is a question of understanding what they express the fatality and of seizing it to probe the depths of Bloom."
• An unpublished issue of Hellblazer by Warren Ellis (writer) and Phil Jimenez (artist) depicted a study of a series of fictional school shootings. The series is monthly and it would have been the September 1999 (#141) issue, however, the August 1999 (#140) was followed by the October 1999 (#141) issue.
• The satirical newspaper The Onion discussed the massacre in its article "Columbine Jocks Safely Resume Bullying".
• Stephen King has cited the massacre as a major reason that he has allowed an early novel to fall out of print: Rage, written under the Richard Bachman pen name, which deals with a high school gunman. (However, certain themes in the book were developed into the story of Carrie.) King actually referred to Carrie as the "female version of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold."

See also

• Columbine High School
• Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold
• School shooting

References

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