Fuck It, I’m Doing the Purge: The Purge (James DeMonaco, 2013)
In which a silly film franchise is afflicted with the Gift of Prophecy, to mixed results.
Welcome to our Summer Content. Its premise is obvious now, and will become only more so as you read. Before that, however, book announcements:
Be Not Afraid #2, the second issue of my horror comic series with Lisandro Estherren, comes out on July 16. (Why did I tell you it came out on July 17? Look, reading a calendar comes less naturally to me than writing comics.) You can see a preview of it here, and reviews have been exceptionally kind so far.
My non-fiction book DILF: Did I Leave Feminism is due out October 14 – and it is now one of LitHub's most anticipated books of 2025. Start anticipating it yourself by pre-ordering it anywhere you buy books, including your local bookstore via Bookshop.org.
I was somewhere between headlines about Trump calling in the Marines on ICE protesters when I decided: Fuck it, I’m just going to cover all the Purge movies.
“The Purge” is an inherently sticky, memetic concept. Even if you have never seen one of these movies — which, until this summer, I hadn’t — you know what it’s about: In the near future, there is a state-sponsored night in which “all crime is legal,” which the people of America celebrate by ritually donning spooky masks and murdering each other in theatrical fashion.
It sounds very silly — it is very silly; no-one ever uses the Purge for, say, embezzlement — and for the most part, that’s how it’s cited. If you want to denote a state of comically exaggerated chaos, you say people are doing “the Purge.”
And the thing is: They are doing the Purge. All of them. All the time, without even knowing it. The Purge franchise is stupid — hugely, dramatically, beautifully stupid — but it also turned out to be a more accurate and prescient look at the future of the United States than any sci-fi franchise in recent memory.
So we are doing the Purge, all summer, at this newsletter, beginning with the first one, which posited — in the year 2013, one year after the re-election of President Barack Obama and one year before Mike Brown was shot by cops in Ferguson, Missouri — that by the year 2018, America will have been taken over by a fascist government which permits orgies of consequence-free violence in the name of cleansing the national soul and/or getting rid of working-class people of color. Also: That when this happens, most white people won’t care, or do anything about it, because they’re safe behind their locked doors in the suburbs.
… Or are they???