James DeMonaco’s 2013 film, The Purge, spawned a franchise based on the question: What would happen to humanity if we had a holiday that legalized murder and every other thing society deems illegal, for just one day?
It’s a question that brings up a lot of answers, which have given the franchise its staying power. And it turns out that DeMonaco’s inspiration for the film came from three sources: a road rage incident he had with his wife, his hatred of guns, and a certain episode of Star Trek.
In the recent book, Horror’s New Wave (via People), DeMonaco dishes on how his father was a major Trekkie and forced him to watch The Original Series. One of the episodes they saw together was “Return of the Archons,” which the writer-director said stayed in his head.
“I can’t say it was a direct inspiration,” DeMonaco said. “I think it was one of those inspirations that came almost after I came up with the idea.”
DeMonaco goes on to describe “Return of the Archons” as a “Star Trek episode where a seemingly peaceful alien civilization engages in a yearly orgy of violence called ‘Festival.’” As Reactor’s reread of the episode explains, the planet turns out to be controlled by a supercomputer that allows everyone to go batshit for twelve hours. The episode is generally agreed to not be one of Star Trek’s finest, and while The Purge wasn’t well received by critics either, the film did well enough to spawn four additional films to date as well as a short-lived television series.
Jason Blum sums up the franchise’s staying power well in his interview with People: “To me, The Purge always carried with it a sense of ‘it could happen here.’ That’s part of what makes it so disturbing. It’s not anything I’d like to see in real life, and I hope I don’t. That movie was always meant as a warning—not a suggestion.”
