The central aim of this study is to inquire into the experiences of youth viewing film violence in order to enrich understanding of adolescent film spectatorship as it is currently conceived in curricular discussions among English educators.

Six focus group interviews in a sample of ethnically diverse teenagers from two urban high schools were used to provoke the discursive interpretations of participants' experiences of cinematic violence as well as their interpretations, from prose narrative responses to an elaborate and lengthy questionnaire.

These participant interpretations were analyzed by a recursive series of readings aimed at discovering recurring themes and identifying types of language used to articulate them. This analysis identified seven major areas concerning teenagers' experiences of film violence: Audiencehood, Choice, Memory, Description, Paradox, Dispositions, and Tensions.

These themes were then considered in terms a conceptual frame of reader-response theory as defined by Norman Holland's psychoanalytic response theory and Wolfgang Iser's phenomenological reception theory.

Based on these findings, conclusions are drawn suggesting a pedagogy teachers might adopt to inform curriculum design addressing the fact of violence in movies rather than avoiding it. Such research and the understanding it affords contribute to a revision in the way secondary schools deal with the matter. Pedagogical and curricular implications useful to practicing educators are developed with the goal of whether or not teachers should be assisting teenagers to achieve greater self-awareness in their processing of screen violence.