he look of the tape is uncomfortably like The Blair Witch Project. On a steep, wooded hillside south of Denver, in the early spring of 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, with their companions Mark Manes, Jessica Miklich, and Philip Duran, laugh, joke, and shoot off guns. The amateur quality of the tape brings out the visually arresting location in the Colorado foothills. Straight tree trunks rise from the steeply angled ground, with little undergrowth and patches of late-winter snow. Viewing this tape, I am well aware that, six weeks later – on Hitler’s birthday – Klebold and Harris would kill 13 of their fellow students, and themselves, in their attack on Columbine High School.

But the idea that a local sheriff’s department should release the “Shooting in the Woods” video four and a half years after the killings would seem almost as strange as Klebold and Harris themselves. The 15-minute tapes were first made available a couple weeks ago, officially acknowledged as “part of an ongoing effort by the Jefferson County sheriff’s office and a task force established by the attorney general to examine evidence assembled during the Columbine investigation.” The official explanation that “the goal is to release as much evidence as possible to the public” can only be countered with “What took you so long?”

The real answer is that the tape has been released because we are thinking about Columbine again. From April 1999 to September 2001, Columbine was America’s dark and scary preoccupation. Then ´´ came 9/11, and shock changed everything. For a short period, crime itself was on hold, and, for much longer, no school shootings occurred, and no workers went postal. But gradually all reverted. The first post-9/11 disgruntled-employee shooting erupted around mid-2002. The D.C. snipers followed. Filmmakers were among the first to comment; Michael Moore with Bowling for Columbine, followed by Home Room and Zero Day. Now, Gus Van Sant is garnering accolades for Elephant, which, as Andy Klein notes in his October 22 CityBeat review, seems to suggest that “the killings themselves are a result of factors so inconceivably complex that they might as well be random.” When Colorado law enforcement released its Klebold and Harris tape – timed so it could have been a promo device for Elephant – eager news channels ran with it, airing long segments, as a supposed insight into the minds of the crazy.

The first impression is of disarmingly normal teenagers. It could be a camcorder remake of River’s Edge, or John Milius’s Red Dawn, where Midwest teens fight off absurd Communist invaders, or some rural illusion of The Matrix – by synchronicity, a spring 1999 release. In one sequence, Jessica Miklich, lit by dappled sunlight, fires an assault rifle for the camera with cool dexterity, playing the deadly ingenue, but disturbingly real.

Equally disturbing is the money these kids were able to invest in their firepower. Media accounts confirm that they are shown shooting a TEC-DC9 pistol and at least one sawed-off shotgun, Doc Holliday-style. An assault rifle, maybe an AR15, and a pump shotgun can also be seen on the tape. They also have the accouterments – the boots, duster coats, and sunglasses. And they have seen all the movies; Harry Callahan, John Rambo, Morpheus, Sam Peckinpah, and Sergio Leone. The poses they strike are all from the gunfighter classics. Mark Manes pumps the shotgun one-handed like Steve McQueen in The Getaway. Klebold shoots rapid-fire from the hip, then he and Harris examine a bullet-shredded tree trunk and laugh, “Imagine that in someone’s fucking brain.”

On the web, the two boys discussed Himmler and the Manson Family, Che Guevara, pipebombs, and The Turner Diaries. Nineteen ninety-nine was the year of Y2K, alien invasion, and apocalypse, and Klebold and Harris became so immersed in the abyss of extreme electronic folklore, they ceased to come up for air. Instead, they posted the demented concept that an attack on their own high school would trigger a nationwide uprising by armed goth-geeks. On the tape, the shooting party brought bowling pins for targets. This marries with Michael Moore’s disclosure that Klebold and Harris went bowling at 6 a.m. on the morning of the massacre. Moore played up the absurdity of how, in a town where the affluence is military industrial, and the ambiance Prozac/Stepford, a retreat into violent fantasy could be painfully attractive, especially when dragged from bed to bowl before dawn in a mandated high school “activity.”

Back in 1999, TV pundits attempted to blame the killings on Hollywood, Marilyn Manson, or the videogame Doom. The Matrix was too new for the pundits, but the Wachowskis’ scenario, in which reality was merely an oppressive illusion with which to do battle, must have messed with Klebold’s and Harris’s already messy minds. Now no one is quite so sure who to blame. In the psychiatric reality, counselors and therapists seek still “closure.” In the reality of litigation, lawyers press for more evidence as they look for someone to sue. Pressure to release evidence also comes from parents like Sue Petrone, whose son, Daniel Rohrbough, was killed at Columbine, and who feels that authorities missed spotting the web-posted intentions of Klebold and Harris and other crucial chances “to keep my son alive.” Coming shortly is the Harris and Klebold Basement Tape, in which they show off all the weird stuff they hoarded like packrats. With creepy irony, I’m certain if someone else had done the killing, Harris and Klebold would be trying to score copies of their tapes.

The one given in the whole tragic epic is that no single factor turned Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris to slaughter. No rock band, no game, no movie – not even that they were raised on Ritalin – can be singled out as the root cause. They were computer babies awash in a sensory overload of brightly colored random nonsense that their parents couldn’t understand, much less monitor. And all was wrapped in a teenage boy’s warped perception that death is something he can live through.

This is not to say that Klebold and Harris weren’t nasty bastards and clinically paranoid, even before they were homicidal. The problem is that they are not being remembered that way. Like Manson, Fromme, and Dahmer, they are being mythologized by macabre curiosity, and made into a mystery. They will become unhealthy icons in an even greater overload-of-weird that will undoubtedly fall on the next generation, and the one after, perhaps spawning a whole new phase of dangerous children. How exactly law enforcement is supposed to spot the next crop of killers-in-the-making is unclear, unless American schools turn into miniature police states.