Kids are watching a 2002 indie film about school shooters
'Zero Day' is about two students who plot a school shooting. More than a million people, including the most recent real-life teenage school shooters, watched it on YouTube.
Why do school shooting threats, manifestos, TCC memes, and social media posts glorifying mass shootings reference "Zero Day"? Just search the hashtag #zeroday on social media sites and you will see thousands of posts about school shootings.
Only three years after Columbine, the aftermath of our nation’s worst school shooting met the 'Blair Witch Project' in a $20k budget indie film about two kids plotting a school shooting. Zero Day (2002) was a box office bomb with only $8,466 in ticket sales. Two decades later, some free and open access versions posted on YouTube have more than 1,000,000 views. When it was released on VHS back in 2003, both the Japanese and British governments blocked full versions from being sold in their countries.
Today the film has has a 7.2 rating on IMDB with 5.6k reviews including at 10/10 review saying:
Zero Day leads you to think, even re-think why two boys/young men would do what they did - commit mutual suicide via slaughtering their classmates. It captures what must be beyond a bizarre mode of being for two humans who have decided to withdraw from common civility in order to define their own/mutual world via coupled destruction. It is not a perfect movie but given what money/time the filmmaker and actors had - it is a remarkable product.
Zero Day was way ahead of its time before the “school shooter” genre was so easily recognizable. The post-Columbine era of both villainizing and romanticizing mass shooters has created a culture template for how these monsters look, dress, talk, and perform acts of violence. It feels so unsettling to watch this film because the characters are more recognizable in retrospect, almost like the warning signs that get missed before real world attacks happen.
The premise is two suburban high school students, Andre and Cal, use a home video camera to record months of video diaries (vlogs in today’s smartphone world) as they prepare for “Zero Day” when they will commit a school shooting. There’s no orchestral score, no stylized violence or special effects, and no omniscient adult perspective or narrator imposed on the narrative. The movie is just two kids, a shaky camera, and a long build-up showing the mundane process and teen banter as they plan that attack.
That mundanity of the POV footage is the point. Most films (and real world media coverage of school shootings) collapse violence into spectacle but Zero Day lingers on the months of preparation before it happens.
Andre and Cal aren’t the cartoon sociopaths that the mainstream media has made into the mass shooter archetype. These kids are awkward, alienated, performative, and even philosophical. Just like a real school shooter, their grievances are scattered and largely incoherent (see more: Rise of purposeless, non-ideological gun violence by young American men). Yet the documentary framing draws you into the way they script their own myth, as if they’re narrating themselves into some kind of greater significance.
The last 10 minutes of the movie will make you say, “how was this ever released in US movie theaters and why does YouTube allow millions of kids to watch it”. Well…social media companies got rid of their trust/safety teams so this is the online hellscape we are left with.
When the attack finally happens, they leave their video camera on the dashboard of their car as they walk into the building. That could be the end, but it gets so much worse.
Just like the iconic images from Columbine, the film switches to security footage for the last 10 minutes. You hear screams and gunshots as they walk around the school laughing and making jokes about the victims. Small details do most of the work like seeing crowds of fleeing students before the sound of the gunshots. Like a video game where NPCs fall and then fade away after being killed, there is no blood and gore.
There is an eerie lack of dramatic punctuation because the real graphic violence we are accustom to seeing in Hollywood movies never happens. The most graphic scene is saved for the last few frames when the pair commit suicide. While Hollywood is fine with blood, guts, and explosions, seeing two teens slump over after firing shots at themselves is something a studio film rarely shows.
Aside from the death of the main characters, the film ends without explanation or moral resolution. They planned to kill themselves and the audience watches it happen on the black and white security camera. I think this film has so much lasting impact on vulnerable teens who are drawn to mass violence because Zero Day never tells you why the boys did it. It just shows you how they wanted to be seen and how powerful that act of performance becomes once the shooting starts. When there is no real plot, character arc, or purpose, a teen who is lost and looking for self-identity can put themselves into the center of the story.
Zero Day wasn’t a fringe snuff flip that only ran at B-theaters with sticky seats. It was accepted into 6 major film festivals, and the director was even part of a panel with Michael Moore, director of Bowling for Columbine. More than a million people watching this online is a reminder that this violent content that radicalizes teens and glorifies violence isn't buried on the dark web. One of the most insane school shootings themed movies ever made is right there on YouTube for the algorithm to recommend and auto-play between episodes of Mr. Beast and Bluey.
The real-world violence related to this movie still haunts us. The last seven school shooters were all connected with the same online True Crime Community (TCC) group that shares violent gore content, fan art idolizing prior school shooters, and encourages members to commit real-world violence. 'ZeroDay' is one of the common hashtags on these posts.
If you hear teens discussing Zero Day or posting #ZeroDay on social media, this is what they are talking about. It’s a messed-up film that never should have been made, but when it’s in our cultural canon and available to anyone online, adults need to recognize that it exists and deal with the aftermath.
Learn more about online radicalization:
Rise of purposeless, non-ideological gun violence by young American men
112 TCC-radicalized students identified by police in Jakarta, Indonesia
Ep 60. Inside the True Crime Community (TCC) that grooms teens into school shooters
Ep 57. TCC, gore videos, groypers, and online radicalization
Meme culture, Groypers, school shooters, and ‘Anomie Extremism’
Discord Platform: What schools and parents need to know to prevent a school shooting
David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my podcast—Riedman Report: Risk, AI, Education & Security—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.