This year has been full of horror movies so far, with films like The Witch and The Conjuring 2 terrifying the daylights out of audiences. But the scares are just going to keep coming throughout the rest of 2016, starting with the July 1 release of The Purge: Election Year. The third installment of the popular series about a day when all crime is legal for 12 hours gets political this time around, with the focus on a presidential candidate looking to end the purge. But how scary is The Purge: Election Year ?
If the movie is based on the prospect of Donald Trump becoming president, as its title might imply, then I would say it's pretty scary. The movie does appear to be taking advantage of the happy accident that it's coincidentally coming out in the middle of a presidential campaign that a lot of people really do find quite terrifying, and don't think the filmmakers don't know it. The slogan for the movie, "Keep America Great," is quite obviously referencing Trump's own campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again." Not only that, but the film wasn't even originally called Election Year — this year's crazy election inspired a name change. "In the beginning when we shot the movie it wasn't called Purge: Election Year," star Frank Grillo told Comicbook.com. "Oddly enough, the guy who plays the President in the movie, he plays him like Trump — totally by accident. There's a lot of parallels between the GOP race and the movie and the messages that are being put forward and then Universal got this great idea to call it Purge: Election Year."
Once you get past the tenuous real life parallels, the movie essentially follows the same course as its predecessors, The Purge and The Purge: Anarchy. That is, some people get trapped outside during the purge, when murder is legal, and have to survive until the purge ends. So with that being the case, odds are that if you were scared during either of the first two Purge movies, you're going to be scared by this one as well. To test your mettle, have a look at the trailer below.
By combining the tried and true horror formula of the first two Purge films with the scary real life political iconography of today, The Purge: Election Year looks like it could be the scariest movie in the series yet. Whether or not it's as frightening as the idea of Trump being elected president is totally up to you.
Images: Universal Pictures
