trash masterpiece Deadly Prey, the
recent Ready or Not, and to some
extent The Hunger Games and
its Japanese antecedent Battle
Royale.
What unites all of these films
is the central theme of wealthy
elites hunting less well off prey
(though for a time in the ‘70s, in-
spired by the success of Deliver-
ance, we got a class reversal of
this scenario, with poor rednecks
hunting middle class city slick-
ers). Blumhouse’s Purge franchise
has taken this dynamic to a politi-
cized extreme, making the wealthy
hunters a group of WASPish elites
whose goal is to erase the poor
and minorities. In the Purge mov-
ies, the villains are very much of
a conservative “Make America
Great Again” bent, but the truth
is that rich people are as likely to
be liberals as conservatives, and
in recent years much of the most
fervent classist rhetoric has come
from wealthy liberals who view the
poor as an inconvenience. Some
liberal commentators have touted
the idea that those who don’t pos-
Watch the trailer for The Hunt
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