As pointed out in this video, the concept behind the series - while far-fetched when taken literally - is a terrific illustration of why laws exist in the first place: to keep otherwise law-abiding citizens accountable for their actions. While there would still be law breakers in a law-bound society, the amount of theft, assault, and other crimes that would ensue wouldn't be nearly on the same scale as what's seen in the Purge.
The leader of the gang goes on and on about how their participation in the purge is doing a great service for their country. But the stranger is wearing dog tags and camo, indicating he's a former soldier and has probably done more for his country than they ever will.
With the true nature of the Purge being further revealed in the following movies, this is actually a pretty good hint at what's really going on here. Nothing has anything to do with the good of the country, it's solely a way to eradicate the lower classes and keep the higher classes powerful. It basically boils down to 'the poor and weak are nothing but playthings to the rich and powerful', which is true for both cases.
By the second movie we learn that the government are hiring death squads because Purge Night isn't killing ENOUGH random people - because most killers only kill with reasons, while all semi-decent people will hide on Purge Night, while others go vigilante, and the true monsters who go out to commit random crime are being legally killed themselves as we see during the movie. So you're certainly getting rid of society's true monsters - except for those death squads.
In the first film, Charlie has a habit of checking his vitals. At first glance, it seems like he's just a strange kid, but when you think about it he's just being cautious. If he has medical problems during the purge, he's screwed because no emergency services means no ambulances or hospitals.
The Sandins' neighbors resent them for their success, especially given that they feel that they essentially paid for the Sandins' lifestyle by buying James' security systems. When the Sandins' house is overrun, they also get to see that their "security" systems, identical to his, aren't all that they're cracked up to be. So their reason for attacking the Sandins is more than just petty jealousy — they feel that James ripped them off.
Probably not intentional, but The Purge is likely a major source of crony capitalism (the government supporting large businesses, and keeping them afloat). Big businesses, like Walmart, would have the resources to protect their assets, small businesses would not, and thus the competition would be eliminated.
Not to mention businesses could use the Purge as an opportunity to destroy competitors.
All the below mentioned Fridge Logic about The Purge's supposed economic benefits can be justified by one simple fact: we only learn about said benefits via government propaganda. For all we know, it's all a bunch of lies.
While the Kill the Poor element is established, it might also appear as a safety valve for the poor too. They might use the night to make marginal improvements to their lives via looting and thus be less likely to want improvements year round. This also would expose them for execution.
Plenty of people have pointed out how any prison sentence that runs through the Purge is almost certainly a death sentence now, as the prisoners would either be free to kill each other, or be picked off by guards. Then you remember how Leo wanted to avenge his son against a drunk driver who was let off on an unspecified "technicality." You then have to wonder just how many criminals are let go by police and juries who don't think they deserve to die... which, in turn, gives you even more reason to question the touted "low crime rates."
It's debatable if this was intentional, but you could argue that the government's use of death squads is a parody of the way right-wing politicians in the US demand that free-market capitalism runs unregulated, but then vote to subsidize corporations when profits aren't high enough.
Alternatively, it is a parallel to the Cold War-era Latin American far-right dictatorships, backed by the US, which used death squads that raped nuns, slaughtered whole villages and tortured people.
What was a homeless man doing in a well-to-do suburb a good distance from the poor section of the city? Why was the polite stranger and his gang so intent on pursuing this one homeless man, even to break into a fortified home? Anarchy answered this Fridge Logic: the polite stranger and his gang paid some people that abducted him so they could personally murder him within the comfort of their own home. He killed one of them and escaped.
So who benefits from the purge other than security? Funeral homes must make big business right after a purge. Overtime for hospitals, police and fire departments after the purge is over. Construction/repair companies must do well, as with landscaping companies.
I imagine the insurance companies don't like it, though!
It's probably a double-edged sword for them. On one hand, they'll have to pay out the backside after a purge. On the other hand, the existence of a purge means more people will want to get insurance to make sure that a purge that hits them hard won't screw them and their families over, and the increased risk of damage through a purge (especially to low-class families) gives insurance companies a good excuse to drive up the premiums.
This is actually explored in Election Year with Joe Dixon and his deli. He's forced to stay and protect his store, his livelihood, because the costs of purge insurance went too high that particular year for him to be able to afford it. The purge helps the rich not only by letting them physically kill the poor, but indirectly. If you own a small business and cannot afford insurance, you can either A) go about your usual hiding and waiting out the purge plan and pray to whatever deity you're closest to that your place of business will not be damaged too badly, or B) stay at your business and defend it as best you can, which puts you at risk of death yourself by keeping yourself exposed to murder while defending from looters. The insurance companies of the rich are causing people to either risk losing their livelihoods so that they become more homeless canon fodder to be knocked off by death squads, or putting themselves up for death risk right up front.
In Anarchy Diego is clearly symbolic of a non-intellectual Conservative, spouting ideals he only half understands because he sees them as momentarily beneficial. Not only does he say that his Right to Purge was "granted" (an idea never stated by the Sandins in the first movie, and going wildly against Conservative principles of "Natural Rights"), he even mispronounces the name of his own Political Party, calling them the "New Found Fathers."
The third film shows a corpse disposal service during the Purge. Awaiting morning might be safer, but corpse-related services are subject to a plethora of regulations that could be ignored.
A common question that comes up is why are the crimes shown on screen violent? What about hacking into a financial institution and transferring all the funds into your account? If you think about it, while acts may not be prosecuted criminally, there are civil recourses to recover your assets. And considering the premise of the movie is the truly wealthy and powerful gaining control over society, it's not too much of a stretch to assume that they'd have put into place safeguards for regaining their lost property, even if the act of taking that property was technically not illegal.
A lot of people question the statistics shown of the purge's efficacy, but there's a good chance they're just not accurate. Especially considering the jingoistic propoganda that's shown on television, the truth is probably more insidious: the rich people in power are in control of the media, and want to continue having popular support for the purge, so they simply create fake statistics to rally popular support.
One criticism about the Purge is that people could take simple steps to avoid it, such as leaving the country for the night. However, the flaws in this plan are exactly what defines the Purge's target death demographic. Middle to upper class people might have the means to leave if they don't wish to participate or want to avoid all potential risk. Meanwhile, those who are poor, and thus unable to leave, would be forced to stay at home if they're not in a border state close enough that they could skip across for a day or two, even if they'd be able to get off work early enough to do so without losing their jobs. The people that the government wants to die in the Purge would be trapped simply by economic circumstance, regularly at risk of dying each year with no recourse.
A possibly unintentional case of Genius Bonus in The First Purge: the soldiers at the end aren't just dressed in blackface masks, they're dressed in masks that resemble the Tonton Macoute, a traditional Bogeyman figure in Haitian folklore. During the dictatorship of Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti, the "Tonton Macoute" was the name for a government sponsored paramilitary group that wouldn't just murder dissidents (see The Serpent and the Rainbow), but also had a reputation for being lawless and abusing their power to indiscriminately rob and rape other citizens note the linked image is actually a parody of both the mythological figure and of the Tonton Macoute paramilitary, who traditionally dressed in blue shirts. The people dressed in the photo are at the Port-Au-Prince Carnaval.. Fitting that those masks would be worn by another government-sponsored kill squad exploiting a day of lawlessness to murder dissidents.
The Purge's success in help reducing the poverty rate and helping the economy makes more sense when it's revealed that the N.F.F.A. has been sending in death squads. The squads are probably sent to areas where people require government assistance for various reasons, thus cutting government spending and lowering tax rates.
The film is full of this. For instance, the trailer says that the USA has the unemployment rate at 1% and crime at an all-time low. Just how many people get killed off in The Purge to achieve this?
Alternately, what kind of miserable working conditions are people now willing to tolerate rather than risk getting fired and ending up on the streets, defenseless, when it happens?
The movie says unemployment is down to 1% ironically. This does not mean the economy is doing better at all, it means the American economy has stagnated, meaning no new jobs are being made for people to fill.
Leading economists debate the unemployment figure which would be healthiest in an economy (bearing in mind that people are always moving between jobs, etc) but the general consensus is that it's somewhere between 3 and 5%. 1% unemployment is not healthy. Either, as has been stated, the population has been dramatically reduced, or nobody is taking the risk of leaving a job they aren't happy in to find a new or better one.
In the opening screen of the sequel, it is stated that unemployment is at 5%. That is, not even the extreme killing and the property damage are holding the economy. Three years later the unemployment is still rising.
Alternatively, this could be propaganda with fudged and deliberately twisted half truths for statistics with wider interpretations of what is considered "employment".
The government instituted The Purge in order to achieve minimal unemployment rates and crime. How many years has The Purge been in effect?
The second film refers to the current year's (2023) purge as the sixth annual purge. Meaning in that future The Purge started in the year 2017.
However this seems to be retconned in the third film, in which a character loses her family in the purge 15 years prior to the events of the movie (2025) mean the purge has been happening since at least 2010.
Other sources say The Purge: Election Year is set in 2040 with the prologue being set 2022 and that the 2017 Purge was a trial run making 2018 the official first Annual Purge.
The neighbors got off scot free. And they know that they outnumber the Sandins. And odds are pretty good that they are nice and pissed about failing the first time. What's stopping them from trying again next year? Letting them off the hook is going to come back and bite the Sandins big time.
Unless the Sandins just move, or let the neighbors know that they will be prepared the next time the neighbors try to kill them.
If you're wealthy, you should hope your neighbors don't resent you for it.
If you're wealthy, you can afford the best private security on the market.
The Purge has normalized murder for the upcoming generation of kids. Think how easily Zoey's boyfriend came to "murder her father" as a solution for his problem: he can simply kill Mr. Sandin on Purge Night. It's perfectly okay as long it's on Purge Night. It also implies that the new party has done some persuasive propaganda at schools so that kids grow up thinking that the Purge is a legitimate tradition. Kids are easy to convince, as long as the adult authority figures say it's okay. Even worse, this world could have children Charlie's age or younger that might have murdered someone, or have abetted their families in murdering someone, before they are old enough to understand the grave impact of their actions.
Brought up as well below, but bears elaboration here: it is now normal that one night out of the year you can do whatever you want with no consequences. Want to rape that cute girl you know but won't go out with you? Wait until Purge Night. Want to molest a family member? Wait until Purge Night. Want to burn down houses just to watch the glow? Wait until Purge Night. Want to beat the shit out of that one coworker who just pisses you off? Wait until Purge Night. The idea, on the face, is simple: curb the worst of human dark impulses by allowing everyone to "purge" them one night a year. But really, how much more is it encouraging those same dark impulses, knowing that if you can just wait for the right time, you can indulge that desire, instead of finding a healthy way to come grips with those impulses and purge them without indulging them?
Not exactly horror, per se, but still worth thinking about. At the beginning of the movie, a radio caller admits that he's going to try to kill his boss during the Purge. What if his boss had heard that? What if the caller couldn't find and/or kill his boss while the Purge was going on? That's going to be rather awkward when he comes into work the next day.
Said boss would probably try to kill him first... without announcing it.
Like the OP said, it's not Fridge Horror, it's more Fridge Stupidity. It can fail/backfire in many ways. Best case scenario for him would be if he failed by not getting a chance (he couldn't enter the house, she was out of town, etc.). He just failed and would have to deal with her the whole year. Of course, the other scenarios of her seeing him and outright firing him are possible, and if he doesn't get another job soon, he would become homeless, the main target for the purge. And worst case scenario would be failing at killing her, and she just killing him while she can. So, the moral is: Don't announce your boss-killing plan on the radio.
A true source of Fridge Horror, aside all of the killings, are the unholy number of sexual assaults that are going to take place. In Real Life, over 90% of all sexual assaults and abuse are committed by people the victim knows; e.g. in male-on-female rape the rapist is almost always (contrary to the media) a boyfriend, a husband, family members or friends. What about all the kids who are forced to continue living with sexually-abusive parents because the parents manage to restrain themselves until the Purge?
Look, no matter how brainwashed the people are in this film, it's likely they would go "fuck the legal system" and personally tear the molester's limbs from their body with their bare hands.
But even more likely that those kinds of people will be too busy with their own purging to carry out those kinds of self-administered justice.
Fair enough, but there would still be people determined to take down rapists and pedophiles no matter how fucked up the world of The Purge Universe is.
Would someone willing to rape/molest someone really be willing or able to resist doing so for a whole year except for one night? Maybe murder can be put off because you can only murder someone once, but surely if you're the type to rape your spouse you're not going to be happy with just doing it once.
College campuses are going to be a horror show in the making (and especially the Greek houses), for it won't be just other students raping and killing, but professors/lecturers and the jealous/angry townspeople, and you know that there'll be groups of people who wait for this every year, and travel around to different colleges just to get to rape every beautiful young co-ed they can get their hands on.
Maybe by this point, all colleges and universities are online campuses?
What really makes this a case of Fridge Horror is that either there's a massive baby boom every year, roughly nine months after The Purge (which makes sense - that's how the government replenishes those killed every year), the government deliberately has The Purge in the summer (to avoid colleges becoming magnets for devastation) - or there are very few, if any colleges anymore (save private schools that can afford mercenary forces to protect the campuses every year, and even then some of them might decide to turn on the colleges they're paid to protect).
Moviebob brought this up in his review for The Purge, what other crimes are being committed during those twelve hours; hackers and black marketers doing all their work, all small businesses close because only megastores have the funds to hire private armies needed to keep their stuff, any terrorist attack on American soil, amoral scientists with no regards for human life begin inhuman experimentation on people and make work on any and all banned research.
Speaking of a terrorist attack, someone could make a bomb, set it in a public area during the Purge, and then set it to explode after the Purge is over to make for an unexpected and devastating terrorist attack.
It's possible large bombs are considered level 5 or above weapons. The government has no interest in the Purge resulting in a terrorist attack, essentially a blow against itself. Maybe the cameras that seem to be everywhere are even monitored for such a possibility.
Imagine the aftermath of each Purge. The immediate day after. Imagine yourself going through your phone book, or using the social mediums, to see who's answering and who seems to have vanished. How many of your friends are dead? How many members of your extended family have been killed? How many people you know have been murdered to get that beautiful 1% unemployment rate and low crime? And, most of all: How many of your friends, how many members of your extended family, how many people you know have KILLED other people that night? How could you trust other human beings after thinking they may have been killing other humans during an event that makes it all legal? How will you act towards your neighbors if you find out they've killed some people? How would you react if, say, one of your friends killed another of your friends because of an argument you didn't know about? All trust between humans is gone due to the Purge. The Purge comes and goes after 12 hours, but the psychological wounds stay.
As in the original novel for Battle Royale, this may be the point. I've only seen the first movie, but the worshipful attitude people have toward the New Founding Fathers makes me think that there's a LOT of brainwashing and propaganda that goes on that isn't shown in the movie. The Purge might be for the purpose of making people feel grateful for the enforced order the New Founding Fathers impose, as well as distrustful enough of each other to cripple any sort of resistance movement.
And this is not even going into the matters of rape as stated earlier on this page. Death is permanent, but people who have been raped and are still alive will have to live with the consequences of these crimes, including psychological trauma, unwanted pregnancies, and the list goes on...oh, and since it was all legally sanctioned, there would be no way to seek justice or any kind of legal or punitive repercussions, either, outside of maybe getting your revenge on your attacker during the next Purge if you are able to identify and locate that person by then.
There are no criminal penalties for crime committed during the Purge, but there's no mention of immunity to civil consequences. A woman who is raped on Purge night can still go get a rape kit made afterwards, and prove parentage of any unwanted child and sue for child support or cost of abortion. Since evidence can be collected for a rape kit for 96 hours after the assault, a rape victim could claim that the rape occurred before Purge hours and the rapist better have a good alibi or proof he raped her during the Purge and never before or after.
For that matter, imagine a few years down the road, you're a perfectly happy kid living with your single mom (although you may actually have both parents), and everything's going swell, even if you never knew your father or you don't look like him. One day, out of curiosity, you count back nine months from your birthday to try and figure out the date of your conception... and you realize you were conceived on Purge Night.
Unfortunately, even if a child has both blood parents and things are going alright if their conception date falls in line with the Purge night the possibility of them being a Child by Rape is still high. Not exactly a far fetch that even spouses/significant others would betray or abuse one another in the worse ways possible during that time...
Being a child growing up with the Purge being a regular thing would still be harrowing even if they weren't as personally affected. Imagine young kids — even kids in kindergarten and first grade — going into their class the next school day, seeing a couple of empty desks, and knowing that those kids are not going to come back, and this is treated as a completely normal, routine incident. Teachers probably would not even bother explaining those kids' absences, or if they did, they might use those deaths as propaganda of how the kids died good, necessary deaths for the nation. The number of deaths per class will likely increase when they get to high school as teens will be encouraged to participate in Purge Night. They would also regularly hear classmates brag about all the murders they committed on Purge Night, and, for some of them, that might be how they discover who killed their parents or best friend.
On the headscratchers page, someone brought up the question, if you can keep what you stole on Purge Night, can you keep who you kidnapped? Well, what if the answer is "yes"? The Purge must be a sex trafficker's dream come true.
Even if you can't legally keep whoever you kidnapped, what's stopping them? Twelve hours is enough time to kidnap some poor girl and get her miles and miles away from home, far away and without a trace of evidence left by the time the police can look into it. Imagine that girl's poor family, not knowing why their daughter didn't make it home, praying that she's alive somewhere and didn't get murdered during the Purge, only to find out she's been taken away and made a Sex Slave...
The reverse would also be true. There's dozens of South/Southeast Asians being trafficked from their countries TO AMERICA already, and Purge Night just means the ships are going back to Asia with MORE "passengers."
A meta example: Plenty of people have commented on the bikers being Karma Houdinis. Then you realize: Within this universe their Punch-Clock Villain status doesn't even make them evil enough for the narrative to bother punishing them!
In real life, many hate groups such as the KKK, Westboro Baptist Church, etc. either harass people, intentionally provoke people, or advocate for murder of innocents over immutable characteristics even without legal protection. Now imagine what they'd be like in the Purge.The Forever Purge answers those questions and results are not pretty.
There are probably guys and girls in that universe who idolize the Heath Ledger Joker and other fictional villains. Imagine those people living out their fantasy pretending to be them during the purge. There would be no cops and army to stop them. You would have a bunch of Jokers, Ghostfaces, Hannibal Lectors, and Harley Quinns running rampage on the streets. It could get MUCH worse. The Purge could give birth to "real life" super villains. You see psychopaths wearing costumes and masks in the films. Imagine a bunch of crazies going all the way by adopting gimmicks and codenames.
Applying to The Purge: Election Year, what if the proviso for not harming government officials being repealed also applied to foreign diplomats and ambassadors? What if during the night where Charlie and her associates were scrambling to survive, embassies were being stormed and their staff massacred because it was legal that night. Foreign countries take an extremely dim view of attacks on their embassies and ambassadors, which counts as hostile action against the nation whose embassy it is, and none of them would accept the excuse that it was the American purgers' right as being legitimate. If that did happen, Charlie Roan's government could be facing action from overseas allies who are furious at their citizens being murdered.
The idea of the Purge is, on its face, pretty simple: curb the worst traits of humanity's dark impulses by allowing them to be indulged one night every year. Here's the problem: the Purge requires a "go big or go home" (actually, "stay home") mentality. Say the urge you really, really want to indulge is to slam back five shots of whisky then get in your car and tear down the highway at 120 MPH. Aside from all the risks inherent in that behavior, you now are also potentially placing yourself in the path of a roving band of marauders who've decided that this year, they really want to see what ocular jelly tastes like. If you're not prepared to meet and defeat that level of barbarism, your only recourse is to stay home and hope to hell you have a good security system.
How many have jobs that won't let them off this one magical night every year? Even assuming companies realize the stupidity in putting their employees in harm's way every year, many professions just can't call in Purging. Delivery drivers who get stuck or lost on a route and don't make it back to the hub before 7pm, hub employees waiting on that last driver to check in before they can go home, security guards patrolling places where everyone with a better job has gone home hours earlier, and so on. How many people are stuck out there just because they drew the short straw and had to work on Purge Night?
While there are some jobs which just have to be done at any time even in the night, there are actually very few of those that you to do in the street. About the only ones, under the normal circumstances, are precisely those which are explicitly said to be unavailable at the Purge Night - that is, emergency services. Everything else either can wait or is done behind closed doors with presumably serious security measures (like industrial production, power stations, military etc.), which means that you would do very good to actually BE at work there during the Purge Night. Wouldn't be surprised if such lucky workers actually took their entire families to work for safety.
, the concept behind the series - while far-fetched when taken literally - is a terrific illustration of why laws exist in the first place: to keep otherwise law-abiding citizens accountable for their actions. While there would still be law breakers in a law-bound society, the amount of theft, assault, and other crimes that would ensue wouldn't be nearly on the same scale as what's seen in the Purge.