Those who have been Conditioned to Accept Horror in Film.
- Downplayed in 12 Years a Slave. We see slaves on the Epps' plantation quietly working together as the screams of fellow slaves being whipped fills the air-there's no delight in hearing such sounds, there's just acceptance, and the knowledge that if any of them so much as move to give water, they'll be next under the lash.
- Child Soldiers in Blood Diamond are mercilessly drilled (and sometimes drugged) in order to teach them how to kill.
- Played for Laughs in Clue, as the guests become less and less concerned for the care of the corpses as the movie goes on and the murders stack up. When the cook dies, they take great care not to aggravate the deadly injury. By they time they get to the singing telegram girl, they simply drop her face-first on the floor from waist-height. And by the time they find Yvette's body, they simply walk into the room, stare for a few seconds at the body, then leave without so much as a word.
- Downfall (2004): After days of fighting the Russians, most of the Berlin defenders treat the death and chaos around them as rote. As Koller and a group of soldiers and staff leave the bunker for good, a man eating his gun in front of everyone gets nothing more than mild exasperation in response.
- Subverted in The Forever Purge. Mexican immigrant Adela claims she's not afraid of the anarchy of the Purge because "there are places back home where every night is like that". But when she actually experiences a Purge, she is indeed horrified.
- The first half of Full Metal Jacket. Some might say that Kubrick depicted this trope a bit too well.
- Hot Fuzz has all the townsfolk of Sanford unfazed by all the grisly deaths going on, treating them all as minor inconveniences. Part of the reason that Sanford citizens are okay with this is that the typical citizen actually doesn't see it. Most deaths are attributed to accidents by the police and the conspiracy arranges the deaths to look they resulted from foibles of the victim or the environment of the town (a town drunk is killed in a gas stove explosion, which was attributed to his midnight snacking, an overly-dramatic citizen was found in a car wreck after he engaged in multiple attempts to bribe the police to ignore his speeding, and another victim was killed by debris falling from a church tower in dis-repair, while the at a feit to specifically raise funds to repair the church tower). Other victims are just people who disappear without the residents really knowing or missing them. Among the cops, only one is in on the conspiracy, and the rest view him as a good boss who encourages a positive work environment and the only cops who suspect a thing are seen as crazy from the tedium of police work in an idyllic community long before they "leave" the force. Given the number of bodies and the various states of decay when the conspiracy's work is revealed, it's implied that they prefer letting their targets look like they left town instead of succumbing to "accidents". It helps that the cops regularly point out that they haven't had a documented murder in 30 years, so the police won't suspect foul play immediately AND all the members of the conspiracy are upstanding and outgoing members of the community who are rather generous with their efforts to help the greater good.
- The Hunted (2003) featured a character who was trained to be proficient in close-quarters knife assault tactics. This type of assassination is very emotionally taxing, and combat training includes with it conditioning to help make close-range murder easier on the psyche. The main conflict in the movie comes when the main character, having gone through this training, is utterly unable to relinquish violence and reintegrate into the world.
- Metropolis: One of the machines in the lower city overheats and releases deadly clouds of boiling-hot steam that kill several workers, but once the chaos is over the survivors stop only to solemnly clear away the dead bodies, while new workers take their place. This is driven home by Freder, who is seeing these horrors for the first time, imagining the machine as a shrine to a God of Evil, where the black-robed workers willingly walk into its fiery jaws (in contrast to a chain of struggling, cowering slaves who are man-handled into the jaws of Moloch).
- Rambo in First Blood is particularly notable in that he realizes he's so conditioned to accept horror that he doesn't actually have any idea what he's supposed to do with his life now that the war's over. The entire premise of the movie is pretty much him demanding an answer to this question and not getting one. Later movies "solved" this problem by tossing Rambo into typical action movie plots against Always Chaotic Evil nemeses. The original book, by contrast, ended with Rambo killed as a result of his inability to adapt.Col. Sam Trautman: "What you choose to call 'hell', he calls 'home'."
- In Soldier the Super-Soldier squad is forced to watch a pack of dogs attacking a wild boar as children during their training, among other things (and it's implied that it's a regular occurrence, not just a one time thing). The main character is then completely unable to exist as anything except a soldier in later life, and has no qualms about killing a hostage to kill an enemy. He rediscovers his humanity when he is ruthlessly "decommissioned" and accepted by a community of castaways, though he remains a soldier first and foremost.
- In Suffragette, the protagonist, Maude, at first refuses to say anything against her boss, stating that he is a good employer. Then, when she has been convinced to just give a statement of what her job is like (as the suffragettes want to prove that women work just as hard as men) she calmly describes the gruesome deaths of colleagues in work accidents, how the chemicals they have to work with decrease their lifespan, and how they put their babies in baskets under the kettles with boiling water, which their employer thinks is completely okay, as he wants them to return to work early. What she does not tell, but is later revealed is that the man also routinely rapes the young teenaged girls who work for him, and it is implied he did this to Maud, too. The reason why Maud has to tell all those things is that the colleague, who originally offered to speak, has been beaten up by her husband and they fear that the men in power will not listen to a woman who isn't pretty. No one thinks this particularly remarkable, nor does anyone suggest to take the fact she's been beaten up so badly as evidence why women need votes.
- Your Neighbour's Son is a documentary on the conversion of Military Police recruits into torturers for the Greek Junta. The recruits are beaten and abused in recruit camp, then they inflict the same as senior recruits on the junior recruits, then they witness torture as guards, then inflict torture under orders, then graduate to torturers themselves.
