Parents Guide for
American History X (1998) More at IMDbPro »

The movie opens with a couple having sex under a quilt. The girl's breasts are shown in some of the shots.

A man mimics (at some length) a woman having sex.

There is a very intense scene in which a man is raped in a prison shower. Several men in the shower are shown fully nude--front, back, and side.

Two car thieves are killed. A man shoots both of them. He also shoots a car being driven away. One of the thieves does not die from the gunshot, so the killer places the man's mouth over the curb and stomps the man's head. This incident includes some close-up shots that are tough to watch. (Parts of this incident are shown at two separate points in the film.)

In prison, a prisoner is pinned to a wall by five other prisoners as a sixth taunts and rapes him. His head is then slammed into the wall and he drops to the floor.

A teenager is shot multiple times in the chest, with blood splattering all over the wall behind him. We see parts of this in slow-motion, and then the aftermath later.

A group of teenagers throw another teenager to the ground and punch and kick him repeatedly. A man points a gun at another man's face.

A gang of white supremacists raid a grocery store that employs minorities, severely beating and tormenting various individuals there while destroying the merchandise.

A family dinner turns into a fracas with torn clothes and pulled hair. A guy tries to stuff his sister's mouth with meat. She hits him with a baseball bat.

205 uses of "fuck"; racial slurs are used constantly throughout the film, including (But not limited to) continious uses of "nigger", "kike" and "spic." Other profanities such as "son of a bitch" and "damn" are used on occassion as well.

A man smokes marijuana, but is told to stop by a White Supremacist based on racial beliefs. Characters (Including teenagers) smoke cigarettes continiously throughout the film.

There is a big party with lots of beer and lots of drunkenness among lots of people.

Three violent scenes stand out--the food store raid, the prison rape, and the curb-stomping. These are particularly intense within a generally intense film.

There are a couple of lengthy tirades (against blacks, immigrants, and Jews) that, while debatable, are clearly racist within the context of the film. These speeches, arising in situations where one would expect more pleasant conversation, are pretty unsettling.