At the beginning of this month, Acting Army Secretary Adam R. Telle signed an order arranging the execution of Nidal Hasan, a former Army major convicted of killing 13 people in the 2009 shooting at Fort Hood, Texas. Two days later, self-appointed Secretary of War Pete Hegseth made a shocking announcement. “We’re going to make sure that people can watch it and that it’s public,” Hegseth told the conservative Real America News Network, to a raised eyebrow from the interviewer. The War Department’s official “Rapid Response” Twitter account immediately promoted the video.
It was clear that Hegseth’s plan was not going to come to fruition. A firing squad execution scheduled for Dec. 3 at Fort Hood was canceled by President Donald Trump on Thursday amid an outcry over its brutality and visuals. “I believe that having the execution livestreamed for all to see could be a powerful deterrent to the world witnessing how the United States deals with terrorists and scum like Hassan, but many very good and well-intentioned people would rather not watch his death via livestreaming or any other visual device,” Trump posted on his social media site.
Some news outlets, such as the New York Times, dismissed the planned killings as an aberration, claiming that “there is little precedent for such a broadcast, and the release of videos of executions is often associated with extremist militant groups such as the Islamic State.” However, this narrative ignores a forgotten cultural history in America in which executions on film transformed government killings into spectacle.
The practice of filming executions in the United States is actually as old as movies themselves.
In 1897, a few years after the first movie began showing in the United States, a Missouri farmhand named William Carr was convicted of the murder of his daughter and sentenced to hang. Filmmaker Frederick Guth of American Records, who had previously recorded Carr’s prison interviews, also chose to film the execution – marking a grim milestone in history as the first execution to be filmed on film. The resulting film, The Hanging of William Carr (1897), was shown first in Kansas City and St. Louis and then throughout the country.
The following year, “The Hanging” premiered nationally, also known as “The Execution of a Negro in the Jail of Jacksonville County, Florida” (1898). It shows the hanging of Edward Heinson, who was convicted and sentenced to death for criminally assaulting a 14-year-old white girl. In a catalog, the film’s production companies, American Mutscope and Biograph, illustrate the racist views that have long influenced the U.S. criminal legal system and the death penalty, deriding the film for depicting “a very scary but very interesting subject.”
When these early films were released nationwide, they generated interest and outcry. Gramophone magazine at the time described Carr’s execution as “revolting,” while the Cleveland Leader warned that the film could have a “cruel effect” on audiences. Some newspapers even claimed that during the hanging of Carl, Gus hired people to rush to the gallows and create even greater chaos.
Soon, the booming film industry began to take a different approach to the growing number of execution films. Filmmakers began to blend reality with fiction, combining clips recorded at actual execution sites with fictional reenactments of the killings themselves.
For example, after Thomas Edison’s Edison Studios failed to obtain permission from authorities to film the actual electrocution of President William McKinley, the filmmakers combined exterior footage from the day of the killing with footage of a mannequin to depict the actual death in The Panoramic Execution of Zolgosz at Auburn Penitentiary (1901).
Edison was no stranger to this format: he had previously produced many historical execution reenactments, such as “The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots” (1895) and “The Execution of Joan of Arc” (1895). His studio also dabbled in animal cruelty entertainment, producing films that showed real-life animal deaths, such as Electrocute the Elephant (1903), which tells the story of an elephant named Topsy who was executed for killing an audience member who singed the elephant’s trunk with a cigar.
In 1905, American Mutscope reused the title “The Hanging” from its earlier film, this time depicting the hanging of Mary Rogers, who had been convicted of killing her husband (alternative title “The Execution of the Murderer”). In addition to the obviously authentic on-location filming, American Mutscope also incorporates re-enactments of moments of death. The film was released as part of a trilogy that included “The Sentence of Death” and “A Reprieve from the Gallows,” with the third film presenting an alternate fictional ending in which Rogers was not killed.
Other films from the turn of the century used similar techniques to conflate reality with fiction, and the film catalog emphasizes the horrific nature of these images. The description of “The Beheading of the Chinese Prisoner” (1900) in the Rubin Production Company’s catalog is as follows: “The executioner displays the head to the audience as a warning to the evildoers, which is very exciting.” Lubin had earlier produced another execution reenactment in “The Execution of the Spanish Spy” (1898).
Many films focus on executions carried out by mobs rather than governments. Among them are “The Edison Lynching Scene,” also known as “The Lynching of the Horse Thieves,” more coyly known as “The Frontier Scene” (1898), and International Pictures’ “Lynching Scene: The Real Lynching Scene,” also known as “The Lynching Scene in Paris, Texas” (1897), and “The 504 Hounds at Cripple Creek,” known as The Lynching Dog Track (1994).
Of course, the movie camera wasn’t the only new technology changing popular perceptions of execution at the time. In 1890, William Kemmler was killed in New York’s first electric chair execution, and the American press heralded a “new era of capital punishment.” Witnessing new death techniques, even in the form of reenactments, has fascinated moviegoers for years.
“Death by the Electric Chair” (1902) is the final installment in Mutscope’s five-part “Criminal Life” series in the United States. It was described in the company’s 1902 catalog as “an accurate and thrilling representation of the execution of the electric chair.”
As the novelty of the new methods of execution wore off, their popularity in movies began to wane, although in the 1920s and 1930s, film promoters occasionally used the electric chair as a prop outside movie theaters to attract moviegoers. Meanwhile, as the practice of public hangings faded away in the United States and executions moved indoors, authorities began restricting access to death chambers to certain groups of family members, relatives of victims, officials and certain media. This practice continues to this day, preventing public recording of the actual executions.
However, with the emergence of grindhouse exploitation films in the 1970s and the home video craze in the 1980s, the American entertainment industry once again found ways to attract audiences through depictions of executions.
Films like The Electric Chair (1976) continued the mantle of films that blended real footage with re-enactments of execution scenes, with theatrical promotional materials prominently displaying the eponymous chair and touting “the scenes in this picture were filmed in a real death house. What you are about to see is real.” The infamous documentary Faces of Death (1978), for its marketing scenes, emphasized the real-life scenes of the deaths of real faces, emphasizing its impact.
The gore of Death Faces was followed by a seemingly never-ending collection of direct-to-video deaths from the late 1970s to the mid-2010s, which made death something that could be consumed privately in the home rather than as a theatrical spectacle. The films, titled Dying: The Last Seconds of Life (1988) and Execution 2001 (2001), spliced together footage of executions with other atrocities.
“Death Watch” is from the late 90s or 00s A typical entry for the genre, released on VHS in the early 1990s, sums it up well: “Unedited death, vivisection, autopsy, cremation, suicide, torture, beheading, state and government executions, devouring of humans by animals, and removal of human body parts.” “First-hand footage of The New Electric Chair.” It features an electric chair on its cover, along with “The Electric Chair” (1976) and “Death in the New Electric Chair.”
When Saddam Hussein was hanged on December 30, 2006, a security guard recorded the execution on his mobile phone. The film of the phone call was soon released on DVD in the United States under the title “Sad Damn! Who’s sane?” Although the DVD is still available on online retailers like Amazon, it’s now long out of print, like turn-of-the-century execution films.
The proposal to live stream Hassan’s firing squad execution marks something of a major change of course. The killing would be the first known execution documented and disseminated by a government rather than a movie studio. Critics blasted Hegseth’s plan as violent propaganda that could lead to similar atrocities against American prisoners abroad. Trump himself has reportedly expressed hesitation about the images, fearing footage of US troops killing Hassan could lead to him being celebrated as a martyr. Hassan uses a wheelchair after being injured in the Fort Hood shooting.