Since the dawn of cinema, violence has played a role in American film. In the early years of Hollywood, it was primarily Westerns where characters took justice into their own hands to enforce their views of fairness. Starting in the late 1960s, feature films emerged that transferred the American experience of popular justice to other genres and began to explicitly define vigilantism as a contrast to state legality for the first time. With the end of self-censorship under the Production Code, directors and producers of New Hollywood from the late 1960s onward were able to incorporate not only more violence but also clear social criticism into their films. At the same time, the quintessential American film genre of the Western was undergoing a crisis of meaning. Concurrently, the intense sociocultural upheavals and a consistent...