One of the many, many things I've always loved about the films of Quentin Tarantino - ever since me and my mates had our minds blown by Reservoir Dogs - is their treatment of violence. It can be used in darkly funny ways, or with devastating consequences. And it is usually very, very fast.
It was baked into his films right from the start - the final shoot-out in Dogs takes place in less than a second, to the point where there were years of debate about who killed Nice Guy Eddie.
And it continued throughout his cinematic career - the violence in Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown is sudden and shocking, usually coming out of nowhere and resolving itself in seconds.
There are exceptions - the fights in Kill Bill are gloriously epic (and even then, the final battle against Bill is over in a moment), and the way Cliff and Rick deal with those dirty Manson freaks at the end of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is protracted to a horrible degree.
But in general. it's hard and fast. Half the cast of Kill Bill meet their end in the basement of a French café, and the shootout is over before you know it, with the status of many of the victims still unclear for some time.
One of the main characters and the main villain in Django Unchained are dead in the blink of an eye, and the various massacres in The Hateful Eight are extremely sudden (except when it all goes slow-mo in the westerns, which is occasionally called for).
And for all the heightened reality of Tarantino's films, this sudden carnage has the unmistakable taste of truth - violence is sudden and brutal when it happens in real life, and never pretty or exciting. It's just awful.
Which is why it always works so well in these films, violence and the pain it causes is not glamorised in them, it's just a part of the world. It's never pretty on planet Quentin, but it feels true.
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