User:Evelynanstanford/Tate–LaBianca murders

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Sociocultural impact[edit]
''The Tate–LaBianca murders "profoundly shook America's perception of itself" and "effectively sounded the death knell of '60s counterculture". Additionally, the ritualistic nature of the murders laid a foundation for the rise of Satanic Panic.''

Culturally, it led to the proliferation of "darkly psychosexual, conspiracy-laced cultural exploration of America's seedy underbelly" by the movie industry, including films such as A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Dirty Harry (1971). Erik Morse, a freelance journalist and film critic, writes that the rapid recognition of Sharon Tate’s murder and, soon after, the idolization of her murder, brought about a dark period of film in Hollywood, revealing a genre of “ultraviolence, gore, satanism and freakouts." Morse cites Ian Cooper’s book, “The Manson Family on Film and Television,” where Cooper keys the term “Mansonsploitation” defined as the violent, disturbing genre that Hollywood grew fascinated in shortly following the Tate-LaBianca murders.

Reid Anderson, a film scholar and contributor to Film Matters, the peer-reviewed film magazine, describes how, through other films that have attempted to recreate the Manson family murders, Sharon Tate’s image has been substituted by “hyperreal” depictions of her at her death. Aligning with Morse’s description of the sudden emergence of gory film following the Manson family murders, Anderson claims that it was the "circulation of disingenuous information following the events of August 9th and their reading as authentically representative of Tate and the other victims’ final moments, which triggered the long-run media phenomena of Mansonsploitation." Altogether, it was the spread of misinformation directly following Sharon Tate’s murder, Hollywood’s near immediate obsession with the details of her murder, and reimagined versions of Sharon Tate in Mansonsploitation films that resulted in the alteration of Sharon Tate’s likeness among her audience as they tried to process the reality of her murder by searching for the most authentic version of her last moments.