Vox Populi:

This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, Killers of the Flower Moon wouldn’t exist.

American history is filled with greedy people committing heinous crimes to protect their way of life. It’s a tale as old as time and it continues into the present. As such, there’s a deep fascination in society about the depth of evil that people can hold within themselves. Perhaps that comes from the fact that we’re all human. We have a morbid curiosity about how someone who has the same genetic make-up as us could carry out such horrific acts. We see it in the current true-crime obsession that’s sweeping the podcast airwaves, streaming services, and now the silver screen, with Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.

By no stretch of the imagination is Killers of the Flower Moon the first or only example of a true-crime blockbuster. The film is adapted from a 2017 book of the same name by David Grann, and it chronicles the murders of Osage people in the 1920s. In the 19th century, the United States government forcibly moved into Indian Territory (what is now known as Oklahoma). It’s on this land that oil was discovered at the turn of the twentieth century, and many Osage people became wealthy. This influx of money led to what is called the Reign of Terror, where a cattleman, William “King” Hale (Robert DeNiro), orchestrated a murder plot to gain access to the oil rights of the Osage Tribe. Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), William’s nephew, was a key conspirator and married Mollie Brown (Lily Gladstone), a wealthy Osage woman with oil connections.

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