Cancelling The Hunt Was a Mistake, Because Its Message Isn’t Going Away

Earlier this month, one of 2019’s most destined-to-be-polarizing movies was snuffed out before anyone could even lay eyes on it. Pour one out for The Hunt, which had its release date cancelled after a particularly high-profile string of mass shootings and a minor conservative firestorm gave Universal unusually cold feet.

Of course, no one actually seeing the movie didn’t stop a bunch of people from getting really mad about it (including, perhaps inevitably, the President of the United States). And what was it about The Hunt that lit such a fire? A story built around rich people hunting and killing poor people.

As anyone who has seen basically any Hollywood movie can tell you, a ton of violent deaths is not generally enough to get a movie cancelled. So what happened here? Part of the problem, I suspect, is that the marketing for The Hunt was so incoherent that it was impossible to figure out the political statement it was trying to make. Was it supposed to be a satire on rich liberals who claim to care about poor people even as they treat them as less than human? Or a satire on a conservative movement that had empowered capitalist billionaires to treat the 99 percent as less than human? Or—as its own director claims—an attempt to "poke at both sides of the aisle equally"?

Right now, The Hunt has been shelved indefinitely, so maybe we’ll never know. But while Trump was watching Fox News, tweeting angrily about a movie he’d never seen and didn’t even seem to understand, a similarly-pitched movie managed to slip through the cracks. This week’s Ready or Not, which GQ’s own Tom Philip calls one of the year’s best movies, infuses its thrills with a similarly unsubtle undercurrent of full-on class warfare.

Ready or Not follows Grace (Samara Weaving), a newlywed from an impoverished background who—having just married into an obscenely wealthy family—reluctantly agrees to indulge in a bizarre tradition. The family’s blue-blood patriarch explains that Grace will need to draw a random card, which will tell her what game she needs to play to officially join the family. Unfortunately, Grace draws the card for hide-and-seek, which comes with one hell of a catch: If anyone in the family can find Grace before dawn, they’ll kill her. ("It’s true what they say: The rich really are different," one character deadpans.)

With the big reveal out of the way, the rest of Ready or Not is a riff on a thriller trope that’s nearly a century old: People Huntin’ People, as a terrified victim attempts to elude gun-toting hunters (and, in Ready or Not’s case, a few crossbow-toting hunters as well). And like any good social thriller, there’s always a political message buried underneath all the blood and gore.

This is a tradition with a long and varied history. If you dig deep enough into the DNA of stories like The Hunt or Ready or Not, you’ll always find trace elements of Richard Connell’s "The Most Dangerous Game," an O. Henry Award-winning short story published in 1924 that established pretty much all of the tropes that remain today. (If you haven’t read it, go nuts, it’ll take you like 20 minutes.) "The Most Dangerous Game" follows Rainsford, a big-game hunter who falls off a ship and washes ashore on a mysterious private island. Before long, he meets Zaroff, an ostentatiously wealthy man who lives in a lavish mansion at the island’s center. Over a fancy dinner, Zaroff reveals himself to be a hunter, but explains that his increasing boredom with killing even the world’s deadliest animals has led him to chase after a different prey: human beings.

So yes, "The Most Dangerous Game" is about a weird psychopath who kills people for sport. But it’s also about the disturbing, perverting effects of having too much money. Zaroff is the beneficiary of inherited wealth from a father who owned a quarter of a million acres in Crimea. He used the money he never worked for to travel around the world, killing every exotic animal he could find, until—having discovered that his limitless money wasn’t enough to quench his even-more-limitless capacity for boredom—he bought a private island and turned it into a playground for his extralegal desires. It is significant that Zaroff says he targets "the scum of the earth" and goes on to describe exactly which races he means by that slur. It is also significant that Zaroff explains all of this offhandedly, over dinner, because he’s so insulated from consequences that it never even crosses his mind that Rainsford might be disgusted by him.

Is any of this sounding familiar in 2019? Maybe even, disturbingly, not that implausible? 95 years later, the idea of someone embarking on a human hunt remains so polarizing, and so politically resonant, because it’s a way to explore ideologies that regard certain people as less than human.

The most interesting thing about "The Most Dangerous Game" and the imitators it spawned is the way each makes subtle shifts so it can use the concept as a way to explore then-contemporary social and political ills. The legions of "The Most Dangerous Game" imitators have always had politics that tend to shift with the times. A Game of Death, released just months after the end of World War II in 1945, reimagines the original story’s hunter as an unrepentant Nazi. The sleazy sexploitation movie The Woman Hunt, released in the midst of the women’s liberation movement in 1972, reimagines the story as a group of rich guys hunting "the tastiest game": sexually-active women. 1993’s Hard Target finds rich men hunting desperate, homeless Vietnam veterans, who are wooed with the promise of a $10,000 prize if they can survive.

So it’s probably not surprising that the most recent examples are all about class warfare: The Hunger Games franchise, the Purge franchise, and The Hunt (assuming it ever sees the light of day). That brings us back to Ready or Not, which is all but explicitly the story about how the rich treat the poor as expendable assets. Grace is a sneaker-wearing chain smoker who came up through the foster system. Long before they start trying to kill her, it’s clear that most of her husband’s blue-blood family views her as a gold-digger who has no place in their lavish mansion. And once the surface-level manners drop away, the disdain turns out to be mutual. In a moment of frustration, Grace looks up at the starry sky and shouts, "FUCKING RICH PEOPLE!" into the void.

But depicting a violent class struggle is only one half of the story. The other half is what you actually say about it. How do these stories always end? By upending the social conventions by which they began. "The Most Dangerous Game" concludes with Rainsford breaking the rules of a game he never consented to play in the first place. He sneaks into Zaroff’s room, and—greeted by the hunter as a peer—self-identifies as a "beast at bay" instead, and (it’s heavily implied) murders him. "He had never slept in a better bed, Rainsford decided," the story concludes.

There are two morals at play in this ending: One for the haves, and one for the have-nots. Zaroff thinks he gets to define the rules of the game. He spends much of the actual hunt toying with Rainsford, smug in the sense of superiority that comes from total control. It never occurs to him that Rainsford might reject the rules as he lays them out: Killing him not in the jungle, but in his own posh bedroom, and outside of the arbitrary three-day time limit that Zaroff imposed on the hunt.

Rainsford, for his part, begins the story openly horrified by Zaroff’s hobby. In the end, he manages to escape. And then he decides to double back and kills Zaroff anyway. And then Rainsford spends the night in the man’s luxurious bed, apparently guilt-free.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say the climax of Ready or Not hinges on a variation of the same cathartic (but somewhat disturbing) paradox at the heart of "The Most Dangerous Game." These stories are always about a power shift, as the people who have always had control learn, too late, that the underclass would rather strike back on their own terms than die by someone else’s. And by the end, when the "victim" is the last one standing, they’ll have to decide whether they want to destroy the whole system or take a seat at the top of it.

There's no guilt in this nonstop, bloody pleasure of a film.

How many of these have you seen?

Originally Appeared on GQ