Editorials
Why ‘The Purge’s’ Disappointment Was Actually the Smartest Thing About It
From the moment the concept was announced, it was all but guaranteed that The Purge was going to be a hit at the box office. Set in the not-too-distant future, the film promised to introduce a world wherein all crime, including murder, was made legal for 12-hours each year, and audiences came out in droves to witness all the madness. Made on a budget of just $3 million, the James DeMonaco-directed film pulled in 10x that in its first weekend alone, going on to gross a worldwide total of nearly $90 million.
Per Wikipedia, “It was the lowest budget film to hit the top of the box office charts since 1988.”
Impressive numbers aside, the reception from fans and critics alike was decidedly lukewarm. Those who didn’t love the movie all had their different reasons as to why, though the most common viewpoint was that The Purge just didn’t live up to its premise. And let’s be real here: it totally didn’t.
The film centers on the Sandin family, the most well-off residents in their town’s most well-off community. On the night of the annual Purge, 2022, an injured stranger is invited into the Sandin home by young son Charlie, setting off a chain of events that literally brings the chaos of the streets directly into their home. Masked maniacs are outside the door, and they want in.
When all is said and done, The Purge‘s high concept set-up turns out to be fancy packaging for what is ultimately, as the above synopsis suggests, a fairly traditional home invasion film. What promised to be a boldly original franchise was launched with a movie that didn’t really feel all that original, and it’s easy to see why that rubbed a lot of people the wrong way back in 2013. Mind you, it is my personal opinion that The Purge is a damn good home invasion film, but it’s a home invasion film all the same. We spend the whole movie locked inside a house with one family, provided only with very brief glimpses of the much larger universe established by the premise – mostly via news footage from Purges past.
But is that a problem? Or was that actually its smartest quality?
I realize that I’m probably praising the franchise for what is essentially a happy accident, as the reason why The Purge didn’t go for broke right out of the gate was likely because the budget just wasn’t there, but I’m of the mind that the film’s restraint is what makes it such a pitch perfect franchise-starter. Giving us the tiniest sampling of the concept, The Purge leaves you wanting so much more, and in doing so it brilliantly set the stage for bigger (and perhaps better) sequels. The appropriately titled The Purge: Anarchy, released in 2014, was made on a budget nearly four-times higher than the first one, allowing James DeMonaco to sell us on the same promise… but deliver everything we wanted the first time around.
And you better believe that tactic, whether or not it was the plan all along, worked like a charm. Worldwide, Anarchy pulled in even more money than The Purge, proving that audiences were only made hungrier by the first film’s perceived waste of the futuristic premise. The sequel managed to get us excited about the idea of the franchise all over again, and since it took us out into the streets and let us witness all the brutal chaos we hoped to see back in 2013, it was a hit both critically and financially.
Horror franchises, well, they just don’t get much smarter than this one.
So was the The Purge a let-down? If it was back when it was released, I’m fairly certain many people who felt that way would feel differently if they revisited it in the present. Armed with the knowledge that The Purge is merely an appetizer for the main courses that are The Purge: Anarchy, The Purge: Election Year, and The Purge: Whatever They Cook Up Next, it’s a whole lot easier to appreciate it for what it is rather than hold a grudge against it for not quite being what you wanted it to be.
My advice? Revisit The Purge. It’s a damn good movie and a brilliant franchise launching pad.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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