This thesis seeks to develop a new framework for analysing portrayals of violence in recent Spanish cinema, based on interdisciplinary studies of violence and textual analysis. Taking into account different types of violence, my research examines the aesthetics of violence through its different representations in Spanish society and film. These will include social films dealing with current topics such as domestic violence and immigration, as well as violent film genres such as war films, psycho-killer films and certain sub-genres of adolescent cinema, all of which will be identified through a corpus of contemporary Spanish films. By means of detailed analysis of this corpus, I aim to demonstrate that cinematic violence in Spanish cinema is a very complex phenomenon, which is shaped by what can be summarised as the following six factors: genre characteristics, narrative, social and ideological dimensions, stylistic choices, industry (different contexts of production), and audiences.