Hollywood had no place for the school shooter when Ben Coccio’s Zero Day shocked the film festival circuit in 2002, under the shadow of the Columbine High School massacre. It follows Cal Gabriel and Andre Kreigman–two misanthropic teenage boys, not unlike Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold–as they plot to kill their classmates.
A grimy found-footage film, Zero Day climaxes in a harrowing, yet now depressingly familiar scene. Glossy, locker-lined hallways, at once full then empty. Students run as screams tear through the building. They go to the library, and hide under the tables as the shooters mock them and aim fire.
Now, more than twenty years later, the school shooting movie as a genre has, itself, become somewhat of a phenomenon. This follows the release of A24’s The Drama, a romantic-comedy featuring Zendaya as Emma, a would-be shooter. The film, co-starring Robert Pattinson, has attracted ongoing discourse and division, despite its commercial success.
For Coccio, the fact that the school shooting is now considered legible subject matter in Hollywood–to the point it is played for laughs–is perplexing. But not unsurprising.
When asked how the industry even got to this point, he says, “Hollywood’s always looking for a younger audience, right? And the audience that is young now has never known a time when there weren’t regular school shootings.”
A shooting is not an unthinkable horror for young Americans, but an eerily normal part of everyday life.
“I would never presume to speak over actual survivors,” he caveats, “but the fact people treat mass shootings in a way that’s colloquial and jokey is unavoidable, because there’s so many mass shootings. I don’t see how you can do anything about that.”
Columbine was “so egregious and horrifying that my assumption was that it would be a capper on this kind of thing, as opposed to becoming a cultural trend.”
Speaking on Sandy Hook, he says, “We had an entire elementary school get slaughtered. There were a lot of ways that policy could have intervened to keep that kid from getting a gun, and none of them were exercised before that happened, and really none since.
If that wasn’t going to shock the political consensus of America into actually doing something about guns through policy, nothing will.
To tell a kid, look, if somebody decides to walk into school with a gun, you should go hide here. That is not an easy thing to ask somebody to digest, and it’s gonna leave a mark. That’s what art is for. People process things by making art.”
He continues, “The concern that I got from people back then was that I depicted that it happened. Not that it happened, that I depicted it. Why? It happened, we all know it happened.
What I get now a little bit is the concern of endorsement. It’s sort of a subconscious admission of the power of art. There’s this fear of incantation: that were you to manifest it through performance or through word, you are inviting the demons in.”
Coccio’s fears are not unfounded. Zero Day’s Andre gloats, “I want these tapes to go on CNN.” Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold speculated that Columbine would become an ongoing moment, and in many ways, they were right, inspiring myriad copycats and ongoing infamy.
In fact, he knows this too well.
“There used to be a site called Newgrounds. And on Newgrounds, on your homepage, you could put your favourite this and your favourite that.
This one kid who went on to do the shooting in Red Lake, Minnesota, his Newgrounds page had Elephant and Zero Day tied first for his favourite movie. And I was like, well, you know, that sort of goes against my whole thesis.”
Earlier this year, Florida teenagers Isabelle Valdez, 15, and Lois Lippert, 14, were arrested for allegedly plotting to murder a classmate they believe resembled Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter. The pair held that murdering the boy would resurrect the killer.
Lois Lippert, it turns out, was a popular fanartist in the online Zero Day fandom.
Coccio says, “if you’re already in the frame of mind where, you know, you’re considering such a radical action, like trying to resurrect Adam Lanza, yeah, you’ll put things through that lens.
That’s not hard with a movie about a school shooting where the two kids doing the shooting are the main characters.
That being said, you could really put anything through that lens. The guy that killed John Lennon, his whole thing was Catcher in the Rye.
One of the things that’s really fascinating about the internet is that you can have emergent radicalisation spaces that are sort of looking for not top-down directing. It’s weird as hell.”
Self-admittedly, Coccio doesn’t feel much strangeness about the Zero Day fandom, nor their identification with Cal, Andre and/or the film at large. He says, “there’s socially acceptable ways of doing that, and less socially acceptable ways of doing that.
My other biggest credit would be Place Beyond the Pines. The love for that movie is off the charts. People love it, and they identify with it, and of course the avatars in that are movie stars. So they love Ryan Gosling, even though Ryan Gosling is a fucking asshole in that movie.
So, that’s socially acceptable. To be romantic and engaged and fantasising about that.
I think it’s a very similar thing. It’s just because we have decades of the internet now, we get to see these tiny little niches, and they seem bigger than they are, because the internet makes everything look bigger than it is.”
Zero Day is popular within an online group called the True Crime Community. The TCC, not to be confused with general fans of true crime, centres the perpetrators of mass violence, particularly mass shooters, in a way that is comparable to fangirls of a band, a movie, or a show.
This year’s CNN coverage has questioned the link between TCC membership and potential violence, featuring would-be shooter Lilyanna Dioneff, an ex-member of the group who sought mental health treatment.
The purported connection between real-world violence and the TCC is hard to ignore.
Since January 2024, reports by the ISD have linked the TCC to at least 25 attacks and attempted attacks, primarily on schools. While the ISD currently states they are not aware of any attacks in 2026, four have been stopped so far.
Allizandra Herberhold is a de-radicalisation coach with Parents 4 Peace and a TCC expert. She claims the story is slightly more complicated. Under her newly established TCC Stoplight Model, identifiers – those most lethal few who are most likely to move to real-world violence – make up the smallest percentage of the community.
The other two main groups are romanticisers, those who are attracted to the killers romantically, and idolizers. Idolizers may mythologise violence, yet never go on to do it themselves.
Crucially, she argues, the young people in the TCC are most at risk to themselves, showing higher rates of suicide and depression.
On Zero Day’s specific fanbase, he says, “I’ve talked with several of them, and it kind of runs the gamut. People would reach out and talk to me, and, you know, none of them ever seemed dangerous.
There are definitely a subset of people that are Romantically – and I’m gonna say Romantically, as in the 18th century sense of the word – attached to the shooter as a person of action. It’s not realistic, but it’s understandable.
Another segment of it is, as we discussed, kids processing trauma around this. One kid who reached out to me was, for instance, on a hit list at their school, and that’s how the movie worked for them. It was cathartic, you know. I hear stuff like that a lot.”
Coccio describes his twenty-four year long connection to Zero Day as “really fascinating.”
He says, “at first it was very important to me to stand by my work against any claim I was being exploitative.
Over the years, it’s become more like a relationship with a piece of art I didn’t make, where I like it when I’m this age, and then maybe I like it less later, and then I like it again. It’s interesting.”
