Hunting Humans is Satire?

When is hunting humans okay?

When Hollywood profits from it.

When is hunting humans bad? 

When real life tragedies force Hollywood to cancel a movie’s release.

The Hunt’s 2019 release date was cancelled two days after mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio and another in El Paso, Texas, in early August. It’s bad form to release a movie about hunting humans so soon after a couple of whack jobs did so in real life.

Producers might be labeled insensitive.

The Hunt was originally to be titled “Red State vs. Blue State.” That title was a little too on-the-nose for the film’s producers, though, given the movie’s premise – Liberal elites kidnap, hunt and kill “redneck deplorables.”

Director Craig Zobel define this as “social satire.”[i]

Satire:[ii] the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.

Hunting and killing ordinary people is nowhere to be found in that definition.

“If I believed this film could incite violence, I wouldn’t have made it,” Zobel said.

The Hunt’s premise was intended to provoke conversation and satirize liberals and conservatives both, he said.

Time Magazine’s Rachel E. Greenspan described the movie as “a satirical thriller wherein wealthy Americans hunt ‘deplorables’ for sport.”[iii]

Hunting humans is not new subject matter for Hollywood. Including The Hunt, 14 movies are directly based on Richard Connell’s 1924 short story titled “The Most Dangerous Game”[iv], in which wealthy and bored elites hunt unwitting humans for sport.

IMDB.com, the Internet Movie Database, even created a category specifically for the hunting-humans sub-genre.[v]

The only people who appear upset about The Hunt are the so-called ‘deplorables’ Hollywood elites believe should be killed.

• Two screenwriters thought writing a movie about Liberal elites hunting and killing ordinary factory workers and their wives was okay.
• The producers who put up $14 million believed making a movie about Liberal elites hunting and killing people whose politics they disagree with was okay.
• The director of and the actors in this movie all believed making a movie about killing regular people with regular jobs was okay.

This is the unmasked contempt Hollywood holds for ordinary, every day people like us.

The director’s protestations aside, The Hunt will do little but pour more gasoline on the raging fires of division already rampant across North America.

There’s nothing funny about that.

 

 

Offensive Content and Parental Warning

View the original trailer for The Hunt:

View the revised trailer for its March 2020 release

 

Sources:

i] https://fortune.com/2019/08/19/the-hunt-director-controversy-canceled-craig-zobel/

[ii] https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/satire

[iii] https://time.com/5650047/the-hunt-movie/

[iv] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Dangerous_Game#Film

[v] https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/?keywords=human-hunting-a-human&sort=moviemeter,asc&mode=detail&page=1&ref_=kw_ref_key