Welcome to the 31 Days of Horror Redux, a month-long celebration of genre filmmaking. Last time around, I made the recommendations. This time, I will be watching 31 days of films that are completely new to me. I hope you will join me on this journey of discovery.
Day 9: The Purge: Election Year, directed by James DeMonaco, The First Purge, directed by Gerard McMurray, and The Forever Purge, directed by Everardo Gout
What is a metaphor without subtext? I don’t know, but the Purge franchise would have no trouble answering the question in about 15 different ways, all of which would be so clear as to be unmistakable. These films lack subtlety is what I’m saying – and what the films are saying every five minutes or so. So, the question we face becomes: Is that a problem? Unsatisfying as it may be, the answer is: yes and no.
I was late coming to the Purge movies. I missed all of them in theaters and never had the itch to watch them at home. I don’t know anybody who swears by them, and the premise pretty much tells you everything you need to know. But, there are now five films and a TV series in the franchise, so there must be something there.
I did a little double feature of the first two films in the series (The Purge and The Purge: Anarchy) one cold January night in New York in 2019. The first one is a nice little home-invasion thriller, and the second one leans heavily into action – these films are produced, in part, by Michael Bay. At the time, a third and fourth film in the series had already come out, but I didn’t feel compelled to go beyond where I left them. But, some inexplicable force drew me to the final three films in the franchise, which I finished in a single sitting this week.
If you are somehow unfamiliar with the premise, I would like to welcome you out from under your rock and inform you that the past 11 years have seen many changes. The Purge Universe presupposes a dystopian America, wherein for 12 hours, one night a year, all crime, including murder, is legal. They always say it that way – “All crime, including murder, is legal” – as if the powers that be are trying to goad you into murder specifically. We find out in The First Purge that this is essentially true.
This setup, of course, is rife with metaphorical and allegorical possibilities, mostly concerning class, race, privilege, and mankind’s inherent humanity or lack thereof. The thing is: None of these films operates on a metaphorical or allegorical level. They are all quite literal and become only more literal as the series goes on. Yet, that’s not what I have a problem with in these movies. Our real-life political discourse is deeply unsubtle and nearly as unhinged as the world depicted here.
In a truly disturbing fun-house mirror way, one of our current candidates for president of the United States even seemed to suggest a Purge wouldn’t be such a bad idea, saying in reference to exaggerated reports of shoplifting (actually, the corporations can’t pay their rent but would rather blame made-up crimes and criminals for store closures): “You know, these are smart, smart people. They’re not so stupid, but they have to be taught. Now, if you had one really violent day … one rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out, and it will end immediately.” That’s the Purge.
I don’t need to tell you which candidate said that, but the point is that no matter how far these movies take their reality, the real world is constantly nipping at their heels, like some gluttonous ouroboros. So, when I tell you the political commentary in these films sits firmly on the surface at all times, perhaps that is not the greatest knock. We live in times that can neither be parodied nor exaggerated. The whole damn world has lost the plot.
Anyway, we’re here to talk about movies. The consensus seems to be that these movies get worse with each subsequent entry, but that was not my experience. I will rank them all at the end of this piece, but for now, I will say that I think The Purge: Election Year is probably the best balance of horror, thrills, and vox populi speechifying.
Election Year concerns an anti-Purge senator (Elizabeth Mitchell) running for president as she and her head of security (Frank Grillo, reprising his character from Anarchy) attempt to survive the night of violence. The senator is running on a platform of, essentially, We’re better than this. Meanwhile, the ruling party, the New Founding Fathers (NFFA), will use every dirty trick in the book to stop her, including murder, which they love.
This movie came out in July 2016 and is about as close to a 1:1 for the Clinton vs. Trump election cycle as you can get without making one of those HBO docudramas. In real life, Clinton lost. In the movie, the senator wins. But, what is truly fascinating – and further evidence of how our times cannot be parodied – is the final line of the film, spoken during a news broadcast following the election of the senator:
“We’re just now hearing reports about a few scattered incidents around the country where NFFA supporters are reacting violently to this defeat. They are burning cars, breaking windows, looting, attacking police officers …”
This was a full four and half years before the Jan. 6 Insurrection. Of course, every one of those things happened when Trump lost to Biden. Those of us still in possession of our sanity are certainly fearful of what a potential loss to Harris might mean – not fearful enough to change our votes, lest the bastards win through fear (that’s called terrorism, by the way), but fearful nonetheless. But, we’ll get to The Forever Purge in a second.
With nowhere to go really after electing an anti-Purge senator whose main campaign promise is to end the Purge, the franchise went with a prequel for its fourth installment. The First Purge is the first film in the franchise not directed by DeMonaco, though he does have sole writing credit on all five installments. McMurray takes over and gives us a look at the first experimental purge, before it was called the Purge, which takes place among the poor, mostly black and Hispanic, communities of Staten Island.
The series makes it pretty clear that the underlying reason for the Purge is to kill off a lot of poor people and people of color as a way of cutting welfare roles. This is one of the series’ most overt heart-in-the-right-place-but-deeply-problematic assertions. The film is very Rich White Liberal coded, in that it is condescending and thinks it’s helping when it actually completely misunderstands the fundamental problems it is exploring. I am mostly blaming DeMonaco here, since he is the primary authorial voice of the franchise, and not the director of color, McMurray.
One nagging question the film does helpfully answer, though, regards the obsession with murder. Throughout the entirety of the first three films, the biggest question I kept asking was: Would people really turn to murder instantly in a lawless world? I would think theft would be the biggest issue, but the Purge Universe posits a world where everyone carries a murderous instinct (see our piece on Cure from earlier in this series). I don’t really agree with that. Neither does The First Purge.
Here, the NFFA is left disappointed by the early returns of the Purge when it turns out, rather than kill each other in the streets, most people are content just to party with their neighbors. This feels right. So, the government sends in mercenaries to boost the kill numbers and justify the continuation of this practice. By the way, Marisa Tomei is in this movie as the Architect, the social scientist who first conceives of the purge night. She is sorely underutilized. The good guys mostly survive, but we know this is the first purge, so the victory is pretty hollow. Those folks are going to have to survive a lot more of these.
Which brings us to The Forever Purge, which does away with any remnants of subtext, turning them into text, written out in big, bold, all-caps letters. This time, the reins are given to Mexican-American filmmaker Gout, though as mentioned, DeMonaco remains the sole credited writer. This largely city-bound series moves to the vast expanses of Texas for this installment, which follows a group of Mexican immigrants and the racist ranchers they work for as they join forces to survive.
Briefly, America goes (further) to hell as radical Purgers decide that 12 hours of lawlessness just aren’t enough to eliminate the undesirables. They need a Forever Purge, read: a license to kill non-white people any time and place they see fit. The only recourse left is to seek sanctuary across the Mexican border, but due to increasing danger, Mexico eventually closes its border. And, this is where my eyes rolled into the back of my head.
The film’s final sequence involves smuggling a pregnant white woman over the border into Mexico so that she might give her child a better life, free from the constant violence and terror of the US. This is what I mean when I say subtext is out the window. Maybe it was watching all three of these in quick succession, but by this point, I was exhausted by the obviousness of every political idea espoused in these films. And, I largely agree with all those ideas. I just like my films presented with more intelligence than an internet message board.
One last thing, and this is not unique to this franchise, but it bears pointing out: The overarching message of the series is meant to be one of anti-violence. This is great. But, in virtually all of these movies, the hero survives by being the fabled “good guy with a gun.” That’s where you can feel the Bay of it all most acutely. For movies that specifically call out the negative influence of the NRA on our political system, it seems wrong that the good guys often win by shooting the bad guys.
My ranking of the Purge movies:
1. The Purge: Election Year (2016)
2. The Purge (2013)
3. The Purge: Anarchy (2014)
4. The First Purge (2018)
5. The Forever Purge (2021)
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