When films come dangerously close to the real world
Days before 29 people were murdered in a pair of mass shootings within the same 24 hours, one in El Paso, Texas and the other in Dayton, Ohio, a trailer was released for The Hunt, a satirical thriller in which working-class Americans are targeted for violent death by a wealthy elite embodied by Hilary Swank in a severe wig. Last week, amid outcry about its premise and a thinly veiled condemnation by Donald Trump, The Hunt was pulled from release.
Made by Universal Pictures and Blumhouse, the production company behind horror hits like Get Out and Split, The Hunt had come to be considered in recent weeks as more overtly political than its trailers had implied. Originally titled Red State vs Blue State, it is reportedly a far sharper pastiche of the current American political divide, with the “hunted” a cluster of gun-loving, anti-abortion “deplorables”, and the “hunters” moneyed liberals determined to rid the country of the Right wing.
In a series of tweets, none of which specifically named The Hunt, Trump wrote of “[a] movie coming out [that] is made in order to inflame and cause chaos”. He continued: “[Hollywood] create their own violence, and then try to blame others. They are the true racists, and are very bad for our country!” Faced with death threats relating to the film, and the challenge of releasing an ultra-violent political horror movie amid an increasingly toxic political climate, Universal felt that their only option was to cut ties with the film altogether. It is currently unknown whether it will be released at all.
But one of the curious realities of modern filmmaking is how typical this situation is, with Hollywood and real-life horror always entangled in a complex dance of endlessly rotating parts. Hollywood likes to reflect reallife ugliness as much as it is blamed for perpetuating it, while also having a tendency to pause and retreat whenever fact and fiction become too intimate.
In the wake of 9/11, the John Travolta thriller Swordfish was pulled from cinemas due to scenes featuring an exploding building, while the Arnold Schwarzenegger terrorism thriller Collateral Damage and the comedy Big Trouble, which featured an extended set piece involving a bomb at an airport, had their release dates substantially pushed back.
Two years earlier, the Columbine High School massacre sparked a heated societal debate about violence in pop culture, while film studios ran scared, cancelling or postponing various projects. And then there’s
The Interview, Seth Rogen and James Franco’s controversial Kim Jong-un comedy, which inspired a North Korea-affiliated hacker group to leak thousands of private emails from the film’s backers at Sony in revenge, and threaten to bomb cinemas showing the film. To no one’s surprise, Sony Pictures got cold feet about the project, eventually releasing The Interview on streaming platforms and in a small selection of presumably very brave cinemas.
It goes back further, too. A Clockwork Orange was pulled from British cinemas at director Stanley Kubrick’s request when it was blamed for a number of violent murders and attacks across the country, while The Good Son, an attempt to transition Macaulay Culkin out of children’s movies by casting him as a homicidal little boy, was refused a UK cinema release due to its similarities to the murder of James Bulger.
In most cases, Hollywood seems to respond to real-life horror with equal amounts of empathy for those who might be upset and fears about their own bottom line, figuring that it’s often much easier to delay or alternatively bury a film than try to ride out a storm. Both I Love You Daddy, a provocative dark comedy about paedophilia and sexuality by the The Interview comedian Louis CK, and a Gore Vidal biopic starring Kevin Spacey were quietly abandoned by their respective studios amid the MeToo allegations that engulfed both men in 2017 – even if, in the case of Gore Vidal, it meant Netflix spending $40 million on a film that no one is ever likely to see.
But, while it might be tempting to condemn studios for quashing creative freedom and works of art, regardless of their uneasy parallels to real tragedy or the bad behaviour of their creators, it’s not particularly hard to understand their financial reasoning – especially in the case of The Hunt. After all, are we really going to want to pay £15 a head to watch this sort of horror movie when we see reports of real-life atrocities regularly broadcast on the nightly news?