The chase is still on: how ‘human hunting’ movies have reshaped The Most Dangerous Game for the 21st century

On 15 April 2022, former heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast on which it is not uncommon for guests to indulge in wild conspiracy theories. In keeping with the show’s reputation, Tyson shared an earnest belief that someone, somewhere has hunted a human being for sport – and, specifically, that a cabal of powerful elites regularly kidnap the vulnerable, traffic them to isolated locales and prey on them like animals. Thankfully, this is (probably…) proof of nothing more than Tyson having seen too many movies – and, by extension, the power of cinematic narratives to speak to real-world power structures.

After all, it can’t be a coincidence that Tyson’s story very closely resembles the plot of various action movies. To name just a few examples, Hard Target (1993), Surviving the Game (1994) and, more recently, The Hunt (2020) are all films in which wealthy men and women hunt innocent people in a variation of the ‘human hunting’ narrative innovated by The Most Dangerous Game (1932), a pre-Code hybrid of action, thriller and horror elements that popularised the concept of a hunter with a taste for stalking human prey.

Based on Richard Connell’s 1924 short story of the same name, The Most Dangerous Game follows Bob Rainsford (Joel McCrea), a famous big-game hunter who finds himself shipwrecked and hunted on an island belonging to a murderous Russian ex-patriot, Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks). With its nail-biting chase scenes and action set-pieces, the film is one of the great Hollywood movies of the 1930s.

It also singlehandedly created a micro genre with inherently political themes – because, of course, any film in which one human hunts another must answer a central question: who will fulfil the roles of the hunter and the hunted? Who runs and who chases? Or, in other words, who holds the power?

One of the most nuanced human hunting films in this regard is, unsurprisingly, the first. In The Most Dangerous Game, made amid the economic misery of the Great Depression, the predator is a depraved aristocrat, his prey an independently wealthy socialite who travels the world killing innocent creatures. Rainsford and Zaroff represent two sides of the same coin – they are both rich men seeking excitement. No matter how you look at it, then, the earliest human hunting narrative has something to say about the corruption of wealth.

As the human hunting film developed throughout the 20th century, though, the distinction between hunter and hunted grew far more pronounced. By the 1990s, in the likes of Surviving the Game, Hard Target and Death Ring (1992), the hunters are invariably rich men paying a small fortune for the opportunity to hunt the poor.

In the 21st century, the human hunting genre has become more ubiquitous than ever, and its themes have diversified significantly – though that broad concern with social power structures has remained central. See Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge (2017) or Elizabeth Blake-Thomas’s Hunt Club (2022), for example, two films that put a feminist spin on The Most Dangerous Game, as predatory men seek to literally prey upon women.

Several films have also transferred the human hunting conceit to new national contexts. Get Duked! (2019) and Hounded (2022) update the class-conscious themes of Hard Target and Surviving the Game for modern Britain (with the latter dressing them up in fox-hunting garb for good measure), while the Brazilian film Bacurau (2019) sees an entire town beset by a hunting party of foreigners who have paid to shoot them in a sharp piece of post-colonial satire.

But the notion of humans hunting each other has always been a particularly American cultural narrative, and this has remained true this century. Perhaps this is because the US is the nation that has the most problematic relationship with firearms. This seems particularly apparent in Trigger Man (2007), Downrange (2017) or Night of the Hunted (2023): horror films with an unusual determination to detail the visceral effects of gunshot wounds, in which innocent people become victims of senseless gun violence at the hands of concealed hunters armed with high-powered rifles.

Or perhaps the US produces so many human hunting films because it is a nation defined by division and social disparities, particularly in an era that has seen far-right ideologies come to the fore. Desierto (2015) – a Mexican film, but one very much about America – presaged a resurgence of human hunting narratives in the age of Trumpian populism. Set on the Mexico-US border, it follows migrants seeking a new life as they are stalked by a heavily armed racist and his hunting dog.

In 2016, the year that Donald Trump was elected, the US produced Carnage Park and Happy Hunting, both films about the re-emergence of far-right ideologies. The former sees a deranged survivalist, psychologically scarred by his experiences in the Vietnam War, hunt anyone who dares set foot in his desert compound. The latter follows an alcoholic drifter who finds himself hunted in a deeply conservative border town. This was also the year in which the belated sequel Hard Target 2 was released, in which that pervasive trope – of the elite hunting human quarry – was revived.

And then, of course, there is The Hunt – a film so politically divisive that it caused controversy before anyone had even seen it. Shortly after the unveiling of its first teaser trailer in 2019 and the publication of a Hollywood Reporter article that revealed its narrative concern with Trumpian Republicans being hunted by wealthy liberals on an isolated property nicknamed ‘the Manor’, Trump himself vented his disdain for the film’s premise on Twitter. Along with two mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso, his comments fuelled a backlash that delayed the film’s release until early 2020.

When the film was finally released, it became clear that it was less concerned with partisan politics than with the same theme that has recurred again and again in the human hunting film since The Most Dangerous Game: the corrupting nature of wealth and power. The Hunt is, in truth, less a story about political affiliation than class allegiance, in which the haves hunt the have nots – as represented by the film’s central protagonist, a working-class woman who has lost all interest in party politics because “everyone is lying”.

So, the legacy of The Most Dangerous Game in our own time is an entire genre of films particularly well-equipped to confront the social injustices and inequalities that are ever more apparent in the modern world. One so powerful, in fact, that – for some, at least – its fictional conceit has begun to blur with reality.

Run for Your Life is a selection of chase films screening as part of the BFI Art of Action season at the Showroom Cinema.