Fuck It, I’m Doing the Purge: The Purge (James DeMonaco, 2013)

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???