How do the metropolitan elite unwind after a busy week of launching legal challenges against the government? The Hunt, the latest film from the all-conquering horror production company Blumhouse, posits an alarming answer.
The film, starring Hilary Swank, begins with 12strangers waking up in a wood with no memory of how they got there. Luckily, one member of the group has been reading up on the peculiar pastimes of the idle rich and knows whats going on: Every year these liberal elites kidnap a bunch of normal folks like us and hunt us for sport.
Cue a battle of wits as the blue-collar prey (whose apparent misdeeds include racism and animal cruelty) try to escape their plutocratic, super-woke,pursuers. The quarry are referred to as deplorables a term once memorably used by Hillary Clinton to refer to a swathe of President Trumps supporters.
Boasting a body count that makes 1917 look comparatively genteel, The Hunts planned release last September was postponed out of respect to the victims of the Dayton and El Paso mass shootings. It has also earned the ire of President Trump, who excoriated it on Twitter as a typical attempt by Liberal Hollywood to inflame and cause chaos.
Jason Blum, the films producer, has promised that the film is a satirical comedy commentingon our polarised society, in which belittling and humanising those we disagree with seems to be becoming the norm, rather than a call for liberals to start taking pot shots at Trump voters. The film leaves no political ideology on the left or theright unscathed.
But although it may be making an impeccably serious point, The Hunt, like all good horror films, primarily wants to engage with some of the less salubrious parts of its audiences psyche: in particular, that bit of us that feels an innate thrill at the transgressive concept of humans hunting humans. It doesnt take much to awaken this normally dormant part of the brain: see how long you last in a game of paintball before youre seized by a frenzied desire to gun down your best mates.
The inventors of paintball claimed as one of their inspirations a literary work that has also been cited as an influence on The Hunt. This is The Most Dangerous Game, a short story by the American author, journalist and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Richard Connell that was first published in Colliers magazine in 1924. US filmgoers are likely to spot the allusions to Connells story in The Hunt: it is a staple of American anthologies and widely studied in schools.
The story begins with Sanger Rainsford, a famous big-game hunter travelling on a yacht in the Caribbean, poking fun at a fellow huntsman who wonders whether the animals they pursue feel fear. Who cares how a jaguar feels? says Rainsford. The world is made up of two classes the hunters and the huntees. Luckily, you and I are hunters. (In the film, this line is swapped for a story about a racing box turtle and a jack rabbit. "The jack rabbit always wins.")
Before you can say oh the irony, Rainsford topples off the yacht and washes up on an island that turns out to be inhabited by an exiled Russian aristocrat, General Zaroff. The walls of his palatial chateau are lined with animal heads, but Zaroff admits that in recent years he realised that he needed a quarry with which I can match my wits man.
Thanks to a fake lighthouse that sends ships on to the islands treacherous rocks, Zaroff has a steady supply of fresh victims. When Rainsford spurns the offer to partner him as a hunter, Zaroff gives him a head start and then pursues him with his pack of ravening hounds. Even the most dedicated hunt saboteurs will find their sympathies shifting towards Rainsford as, desperately laying cunning traps for his persecutor, he comes to realise what it feels like to be a huntee. Similarly, we can't help but grimace in sympathy watching The Hunt's big-game hunter get pulped by an explosive.
At the most obvious level The Most Dangerous Game carries an anti-hunting message, but it also explores more complex ideas. Rainsford is a veteran of the trenches, and Zaroff expresses amazement that his experiences in the war have not divested him of his romantic ideas about the value of human life. The Great War has shown life to be cheap; and, in Zaroff's view, at least if you hunt men for sport, they die for a reason in the service of bringing pleasure to others.
The resonance of its dark themes, as well as its pacing, make The Most Dangerous Game a viscerally thrilling reading experience even today. Like The Hunt, it has its detractors; in 2012 a Colorado mother tried to have it banned from the school curriculum on the grounds that it incited violence. It has also apparently inspired more than one serial killer: the prolific Zodiac Killer appeared to quote from it in one of the taunting coded letters he sent to San Francisco newspapers in the late 1960s.
But the greatest impact of The Most Dangerous Game has been in the cinema, with a raft of variations on the human-hunting theme ranging from the thought-provoking to the mind-numbing.
The first film to be based on the story has arguably never been bettered. The Most Dangerous Game (1932) is an outstanding chiller from the golden age of Hollywood horror, shot largely at night on the jungle sets that were used by day for another classic of the genre, King Kong. Kongs leading lady Fay Wray screams marginally less often in this film, playing a love interest interpolated into Connells all-male tale to accompany Joel McCreas Rainsford on his flight across the island.
Subsequent movie versions have reflected changing mores and preoccupations. A Game of Death (1945) followed much of the 1932 film word-for-word, but changed Zaroff into a Nazi called Kreiger. Run for the Sun (1956) retells the story with Trevor Howard as an English villain, a Lord Haw-Haw-esque Nazi propagandist in hiding.
The framework of Connells story, if not its more subtle aspects, has proved irresistible to film-makers in some of the schlockier genres. Bloodlust! (1961) tried to capitalise on the success of I Was a Teenage Werewolf by having four toothsome teens as the villains quarry. The Suckers (1972) was a slice of soft-core sexploitation that saw the Zaroff figure and his henchmen in pursuit of buxom models lured to his estate for a photoshoot, and raping as well as killing their prey.
Another distaff-victim version made the same year, but positively feminist by comparison, was The Woman Hunt, one of the many women-in-jeopardy films made under the aegis of Roger Cormans New World Pictures. According to Brian Senns book The Most Dangerous Cinema: People Hunting People on Film, the studio encouraged cinemas to co-opt local lovelies to take part in promotional woman hunts at shopping centres: Watch the public join the fun and flock to your theater when the film opens.
Perhaps the most ludicrous iteration was Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity (1987), which saw two bikini-clad women escape by shuttlecraft from space prison and crash-land on a planet where they end up as the guests of a patrician figure called Zed, who likes to hunt youve guessed it. The fact that the film follows the basic plot of Connells story fairly closely makes some of the additions a pair of camp, squabbling robot guards, numerous zombies, and sapphic sex scenes even more unintentionally hilarious.
There have been more serious takes on the story, however, which have combined Grand Guignol with progressive politics: the hunting of humans has evolved from a madmans private passion into a business model appropriate to the era of Reaganomics.
Turkey Shoot (1982) featured rich folk being given permission to hunt the social deviants resident in a re-education camp; Hard Target (1993), John Woos debut US feature, starred Jean-Claude Van Damme in a tale of down-and-out Vietnam vets offering themselves up to be hunted for the chance of a cash prize if they outwitted their pursuers; and Surviving the Game (1994) wags its finger at Americas neglect of the homeless by focusing on a group of hunters who prey on vagrants on the grounds that theyre worth less than nothing.
The Most Dangerous Game has also been spoofed many times, notably in the relentlessly unfunny John Leguizamo comedy The Pest (1997), and Clown Hunt (2008) the title is, bizarrely enough, self-explanatory. The story has also been parodied in episodes of Charlies Angels, Gilligans Island, Spy Game, The Simpsons (Mr Burns hunts Homer) and American Dad!
It all goes to show that Connells story still holds powerful sway over the American imagination almost 100 years after it was written. But despite the myriad ways in which it has been adapted and expanded, no dramatisation has quite caught the exquisite thrill of the one-on-one battle of the original.
Although it dutifully makes its moral points, the storys true power perhaps lies in the fact that following in poor Rainsfords footsteps may be the closest you can get to feeling something of the true terror of being hunted; and even, perhaps, to the deliciously illicit pleasure of hunting a human yourself.
I would love the President to see this movie: Jason Blum on The Hunt, this years most controversial film
The Hunt, review: liberal elites gun down Trumps deplorables in a deft and playful satire
Continued here:
Humans hunting humans: the lethal literary legacy of The Most Dangerous Game - Telegraph.co.uk
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