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Thank you for coming. I have purchased the Springfield YMCA. I plan to tear it down, and build a nature preserve where I will hunt the deadliest game of all - Man.
And there's ten stuffed heads in my trophy room right now,
Subgenre of The Chase where the villains are hunters and the hero is the prey—the game—in a formalized hunting motif.
Most action series have a The Most Dangerous Game episode as well as a Forced Prize Fight.
If it's an actual contest, you're talking about Deadly Game. The villain often is an Egomaniac Hunter for whom sapient game is the ultimate hunting thrill.
The Trope Namer is The Most Dangerous Game.
(And no, it's not this .)
See also Blood Knight
Examples:
Anime & Manga
- In Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix: Life, a TV producer plans to create a gameshow based on this concept using human clones created with technology from a mysterious Mayincatec civilization given to them by the titular bird-god's daughter. Of course, things quickly go pear-shaped for him when he himself is used as the template for the clones & then gets mistaken for one.
Comic Books
- This is Kraven the Hunter's big schtick in various Spider-Man media.
- Kraven the Hunter was played for laughs in Ultimate Spider-Man. He was still a devoted hunter, but now a devoted celebrity hunter, sort of like Steve Erwin in leather pants. He declared his intention to catch and kill Spider-Man, often believed to be a mutant. He successfully tracked Spider-Man down, but since Kraven is just a normal human who happens to wrestle alligators or whatever, Spider-Man completely wipes the floor with him. Moral of the story: The Most Dangerous Game is no fun for anyone if the hunter is unarmed.
- The MTV animated series was an exception, of sorts - Kraven was given a different role in the finale, while an original villain, Shikata, subjected Spider-Man to The Most Dangerous Game partway through the series.
- One arc of The Trigan Empire features a rich maniac who keeps a whole island set up for "sporting" manhunts.
- One Story Arc of Ultimate X-Men actually has this as its title. Naturally, it's about a media mogul who has a TV show in which mutants convicted of capital crimes (often falsely, but, as it turns out at the end, not in the case of the guy our heroes wound up protecting the whole time.) are hunted and killed.
- And Ultimate X-men did it again with Deadpool ars the hunter and Spiderman as a cameo huntee.
- Actually, it was in Ultimate Spider-Man, but otherwise it's pretty right-on—Deadpool was going after the X-Men and thanks to Shadowcat trying to get help, Spider-Man found himself tangled up in that mess and Deadpool didn't care.
- The French graphic novel Exit (with a scenario by the sci-fi author Bernard Werber) revolves around suicide pacts that turn out to be this.
- Rogue CIA agent Stryker subjects Travis Morgan to one of these in The Warlord #13.
- Otto Orion, a.k.a. the Hunter, captured The Legion Of Superheroes and subjected them to this in Adventure Comics #358. His son Adam later adopted his father's alias and M.O. and attempted to avenge his father, eventually becoming a member of The Legion of Supervillains.
- Ramba #7-"The Hunters and the Prey". Ramba has received an invitation to a party on the island of Elba, with a rich bounty in it if she survives the experience. Three men want to play a hunting game. The whole island is the playing field, and she agrees to become prey. Each hunter has part of a clue to the whereabouts of a large cache of money. If she is caught, she loses the money she already has, and submits to their "most perverse wishes." If she catches them, she gets the money. Ramba agrees. She quickly catches and seduces several of her would-be hunters and a female bystander. She demonstrates her own perverse wishes and gets their clues, which lead her to the vicinity of the money. The third man is guarding it in an old German bunker, and manages to get himself impaled on the wall. Her third perverse wish is a necrophiliac one, after which she takes the money and leaves.
- A villain called the Stalker subjects Batman to one of these in Detective Comics #401.
- The second issue of EC's The Vault Of Horror comic book featured a story
similar to blatantly ripped off from The Most Dangerous Game called "Island Of Death".
- Subverted in The Walking Dead where a group of survivors reveal that they kill and eat people because it is less work then hunting animals.
Film
- The MST 3 K-featured ripoff Bloodlust!
- The movie Jumanji had a nineteenth-century big game hunter come out of the game and try to hunt one of the main characters ("He rolled the dice.").
- It's heavily implied that Van Pelt (the hunter) had already been pursuing Alan over the years that they were inside the game, based on Alan's reaction when he read Pelt's description after rolling.
- In the cartoon spin-off, the game hunter was one of the frequent villains. The protagonists eventually just got used to him, even using him against other adversaries on occasion.
- Spoofed in The Pest.
- In the James Bond movie Octopussy, Kamal Khan uses a tiger hunt from elephant back to hunt down the escaped spy.
- Predators apparently prefer Xenomorphs to most humans, but a skull taken from sufficiently skilled human is a prize.
- And they respect their opponents, too: When Danny Glover succesfully defeats the hunter in Predator 2, they give him a trophy!
- But the trophy is so old that the Predators must have been coming to earth to hunt people for centuries. Think about it.
- In the John Woo-directed, Jean-Claude Van Damme-starring, New-Orleans-set Hard Target the Big Bad is the head of a hunting business which allows rich men to hunt homeless or down-on-their-luck war veterans. Homeless or down-on-their-luck so no one cares, war veterans to make it interesting.
- This forms the plot of the Ice-T/Rutger Hauer/Gary Busey movie Surviving the Game.
- Not to mention somewhat reversed by the knock-off Battle Royale-esque Mean Guns. The Busey-who-is-not-Busey knew it was a trap but pretty much went there with this intention in mind, and to settle an old score with the John Wayne-meets-Mick Jagger lead 'cowboy-style' gunfighter. The reversal is that the majority of the crooks led there by the syndicate do various mafioso-style versions of this in their daily lives, but the Syndicate simply doesn't want them anymore for various reasons. So it stages a false contest to make them hunt each other. At the end Ice-T lets the winners know this, and intends to kill the 'winners,' but cowboy gets them both. And hoists the Busey-clone by his own petard while at it.
- Christopher Lambert is a Busey-clone now? Sad face.
- Let's not forget the movie version of the Trope Namer.
- Remade in 1945 as A Game of Death with Zaroff recast as a Nazi named Erich Kreiger, and again in 1956 as Run for the Sun with the villain still a Nazi.
- Gymkata somehow combines this trope with gymnastics! Generally regarded as So Bad Its Good. Your Mileage May Vary.
- In Blood And Chocolate werewolves set humans free on an island and proceed to hunt them.
- Naked Fear where a serial killer hunts women he abducts from a nearby town, but he first strips them completely naked and offers them no tools, rendering them as near to a wild animal as possible.
- The 2004 made-for-TV movie Bet Your Life.
- In Turkey Shoot, after an unspecified holocaust Twenty Minutes Into The Future, survivors are herded into prison camps. There, they are hunted for sport by the leaders of the camp.
- Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity is a 1987 direct-to-video film that transports “The Most Dangerous Game” to an alien world and populates it with bikini-clad space prison escapees and weird space monsters.
- The Woman Hunt (1973). Exactly What It Says On The Tin.
- In Deadly Prey (1987) a group of sadistic mercenaries kidnap people off the streets and set them loose on the grounds of their secret camp, so the "students" at the camp can learn how to track down and kill their prey.
- In The Naked Prey (1966), Cornel Wilde gets hunted by warriors of a native African tribe.
- Lethal Woman (1989): A group of men are told that they have won an "erotic vacation" at a fantasy island. In reality, they are being lured to the island by women they have wronged, and once there they are captured and set loose on the island to be hunted down.
- No Mention of The Running Man? Here the Most Dangerous Game is also the Most Popular Gameshow, and convicts are given their chance to fight for their freedom in a somewhat one-sided battle arena (or in the populace at large in the original book). Rather a lot of carnage ensues.
Literature
- Of course, the original short story by Richard Connell that the trope is named for. The story's main villain, General Zaroff, has spent his life hunting every kind of animal imaginable and has grown bored of his hobby. To keep his interest in hunting, Zaroff resorts to hunting the most dangerous game of all - humans.
- A similar theme forms one of the threads of Gavin Lyall's aviation/espionage thriller The Most Dangerous Game.
- The hero of Rogue Male is a big game hunter whose stalking of an unnamed Great Man (implied to be Hitler) is presented as an exercise in stealth, he wasn't actually going to shoot. Only later is it revealed that he had a motive (revenge for the execution of a lover) and would have shot if he'd had a moment longer.
- One set of villains in Elizabeth Moon's Familias Regnant series is a cadre of senior military officers who abuse their positions to hunt people.
- In the Doctor Who novel The Doctor Trap, the Doctor is taken to a planet where the galaxy's greatest hunters (the Endangered Dangerous Species Society) are in competition to kill him.
- The Matthew Reilly novel Contest has this as its theme, but extended to include the most dangerous game from throughout the galaxy. Let me tell you, we're not that bad.
- The Devils of Langenhagen, a short story by Australian sci-fi author Sean McMullen. In the last days of the Third Reich an Me262 interceptor squadron is visited by some strange and elegant guests — a couple of high-ranking pilots (and their wives) flying the very latest aircraft (a Horten 229 and a Japanese Shinden canard fighter). It turns out that they're time-travellers, seeking to shoot down Allied fighters for thrills.
- An unusual version in Immortality, Inc by Robert Sheckley. In this novel, a rich guy, wishing to die in style, hires hunters to hunt and kill him. He can hunt and kill them back. The catch is, there's the scientific (and very expensive!) process to ensure that someone will have an afterlife - and without said process to have one's soul survive death is almost Million To One Chance. The rich guy has guaranteed afterlife and doesn't fear death, while the hunters mostly don't.
- In the Women Of The Otherworld novel Stolen, Elena and other supernaturals are kidnapped to be experimented on and the major funder of this project is a millionaire video game designer who likes to hunt them when they've outlived their usefulness.
- In the Discworld novel The Fifth Elephant, Angua's evil brother Wolfgang decides that he and his pack will do this to Commander Samuel Vimes. Let's just say it was a strategic error.
- It was however noted that 'The Game' was a tradition and that many clever people actually had won, and owed their start to it. Wolfgang was cheating, however.
- In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, it is mentioned that Araminta Meliflua, a cousin of Sirius Black's mother, tried to have a Ministry bill passed that would make it legal to hunt Muggles.
- The bored, virtually immortal residents of Chasm City have Shadowplay, a game where they're hunted by professional assassins according to pre-agreed rules. The game is set up so most of the clients survive, in order that people will keep paying for the thrill-seeking experience.
- In the Dirk Pitt novel Dragon by Clive Cussler, Dirk makes a direct reference to the original The Most Dangerous Game, and even uses the same method as the hero of that story in order to win. Genre Savvy indeed...
- The obscure novel The Sound of His Horn features the hero being captured by a sadistic Nazi Nobleman who hunts human beings for sport.
- Marion Zimmer Bradley's Hunters of the Red Moon is The Most Dangerous Game - In Space! With twist ending, no less.
Live Action TV
Magazines
Newspaper Comics
- Happens to Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin in "The Killing Ground" arc.
Tabletop Games
- This is the major shtick of The Hunt Club in Hunter The Vigil. They're made up of a bunch of aristocrats who got tired of fox hunting and decided to try their hand at... different game. As they're a bunch of wealthy, well-connected individuals living in the World of Darkness, they also have the resources to make sure they never get caught.
- The members of the Ashwood Abbey are of a similar make-up, only they do it using supernatural creatures (such as werewolves and vampires) and only after making sure they've "had their fun" with the critters first. The Hunt Club thinks they're pussies.
Video Games
- One of the subquests of Oblivion makes your character the prey of such a game... however, in the Tamriel setting, it really doesn't make much sense, since there's plenty of 'prey' around that's far more dangerous than any human. Ah well, it was still a fun mission.
- You think? There most definitely isn't any more dangerous pray in the world than the main character, with the possible exception of guards.
- Prey? I was just sneaking around and everybody in there with me somehow got killed, each by different traps. But no level is fun after being topped with a failure to save a random, if asking-for-it, innocent. Well, unless you don't care.
- I think the point of the 'game' was the 'players' are all sadists who want to kill humans for fun with little risk to themselves. hunting monsters would not be fun for these people.
- One mission in Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy also puts the player in the role of the hunted. You are locked in a cell, stripped of all your weapons, and then released to try to escape while a sadistic fat man blasts at you with a concussion rifle, because he's "never hunted a Jedi before." Your goal is to survive long enough to get to your ship, but when you reach the hangar, the hunter reveals he wasn't going to let you go anyway, and starts shooting at you from six stories up. Up until that point, even without your lightsaber, it's been pretty easy to just go through slaughtering the stormtroopers. Nope, this guy has to be killed from close-up due to weapon inaccuracies, and he keeps blasting the walkway out from underneath you.
- The boss at the end of the "Bog of Murk" level in Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc is Razoff the Hunter, the son of Count Zaroff and a descendant of Nimrod and Artemis, who decides to hunt down Rayman, who wanders into Razoff's house.
- Manhunt and its sequel Manhunt 2.
- Deer Avenger and its sequels revolve around a bipedal, talking deer which hunts humans, especially hunters, in order to avenge his fellow deer which have been hunted.
- Hitman: Contracts contains a level where the protagonist must rescue the potential victim of a human hunt from an English manor.
- Subverted when Walter Bernhard makes himself the prey in Castlevania: Lament of Innocence.
Webcomics
Western Animation
- American Dragon Jake Long episode "The Hunted".
- Parodied in an episode of Johnny Bravo, where the hunter was constantly annoyed by Johnny's inability to survive in the wilderness, or even find a decent hiding place.
- One of the "Dial M For Monkey" vignettes from Dexters Laboratory featured this. It's also a prime example of the character who is supposed to stand in for the hunter in the original story using high tech tracking devices and weaponry even though he considers himself a sportsman. In the original story, the hunter only had a six-shooter and a pack of hunting dogs.
- Said episode is mostly a parody of Predator, complete with Monkey stripping himself and preparing primitive traps to defeat the hunter.
- Rainier Wolfcastle expresses his desire to hunt his fellow man in an episode of The Simpsons. Rainier is briefly shown chasing Lenny through a forest later in the episode, so it looks like he was serious.
- A later "Treehouse of Horror" skit ("Survival of the Fattest") had Mr. Burns doing this.
- The Mighty Ducks had an episode involving a hunter played by David Hyde Pierce and a bunch of robotic animals menacing the Ducks.
- The Birdman episode "Hannibal the Hunter" pitted Birdman against the titular hunter. Amusingly, the villain crows that he has "succeeded where all others have failed" by capturing Birdman, evidently unaware that he is captured roughly every other episode.
- One episode of Samurai Jack featured Aku sending a team of intergalactic hunters after Jack. After a long, arduous chase, they finally subdue him... then let him go, respecting the challenge he presented.
- In the Thundercats episode "Safari Joe", the title character is a big game hunter who goes after the heroes. And he does so with gusto.
- In the Galaxy Rangers episode "The Power Within", the heroes find themselves in this situation, with the added twist that the villain removes the Rangers' badges to prevent them from accessing their Applied Phlebotinum powers. The episode's dialogue uses the phrase "most dangerous game" as a Shout Out.
- Batman Beyond had the Stalker, an African hunter whose spine had to be cybernetically replaced after a run-in with a jungle cat, granting him such unnatural strength that he was able to exact his revenge with his bare hands, and soon tired of hunting normal animals. His intro episode had him playing this trope with the show's titular character, believing him to be the inheritor of some sort of "bat totem" that would be the ultimate test of his strength.
- Danny Phantom has the villain Skulker chasing the hero and his rival/enemy in conjunction with the Egg Sitting plot.
- An episode of American Dad used this. In the end, it turned out that it was just a "Most Dangerous Game" theme park type attraction, not that the family knew.
- In an episode of Transformers Generation 1, a big-game hunter decides that he wants Optimus Prime's head hanging on his wall.
- The Kids Next Door episode "Operation S.A.F.A.R.I".
- The Di Gata Defenders episode "Hunter and the Hunted".
- In Frisky Dingo, Xander Crews goes on an annual hunting trip where he kills, skins, and eats a mother panda, which he claims to be The Most Dangerous Game.
- The Critic - In one of the running gags during the main credits, Jay's boss Duke calls him, inviting Jay to his ranch upon the news that Duke has received a license to hunt man. Jay is advised to bring "comfortable shoes".
- Roger Ramjet and his sidekicks meet up with one of these hunters. They deduce that the hunter is, in fact, afraid of animals, and they defeat him by wearing animal costumes. Ramjet wears a bunny suit. It works.
- The Simpsons parodied this twice — once on the season 12 episode "Children of a Lesser Clod" where Rainier Wolfcastle (the show's No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Arnold Schwarzenegger) announces that he's going to close down Springfield's YMCA and "hunt the most dangerous game of all: man" while loading a sniper rifle, and again on a Halloween special where Mr. Burns invites the men of Springfield to his mansion, where he hunts them down as part of a reality show.
Real Life
- Robert Hansen, a serial killer who was active in the early 1980s, would kidnap women and then release them in the Knik River Valley in Alaska. He would then hunt them, armed with a knife and a Ruger Mini-14 rifle.
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