The Purge movies have continued to act as unforgiving social and political satire, as unsubtle as they are violent, and that trend will only go further in the next installment in the series. The fourth film, titled The Purge: The Island, takes place on the very first Purge Night, confined to the shores of Staten Island, and the concept sounds appropriately horrific.

Writer and director James DeMonaco (who passed directing duties off to Gerard McMurray) shared some new info about the next Purge movie in a lengthy interview with Vulture, which touched on how his terrifying movies reflect living in America right now. He also explained how he came up with the idea of setting the fourth Purge movie on the first night, back when it was just a social experiment engineered by the New Founding Fathers, and what ghoulish idea he came up with to make it work.

I was wondering how you get people to stay for the first Purge, and what they do is they start monetizing it. People from Staten Island can easily go to Brooklyn for the evening, so what they do is start promising very decent sums of money for the very poor people in the neighborhood. It becomes a monetization of murder and violence, incentivizing killing and keeping people around for them to be victims. So you see the inception of how grotesque the idea of the Purge is, and the manipulation upon the society.

That’s messed up, but actually totally believable for the Purge’s inception. DeMonaco also mentioned that this movie will follow a kind of antihero who is bound to be one of the most “crowd-pleasing” of the franchise’s offerings:

What’s fun too is there’s an anti-hero. More than the previous films, there’s a singular hero in this movie. This is one man’s journey, William, an anti-hero [who] was inspired by Eastwood in Unforgiven, so it’s this very cool, modern kind of badass who redeems himself through the story.

This sounds dark, even for The Purge, tempered perhaps by the addition of this new character journey. It sounds very exciting, and we won’t have too long to wait. “Next July 4,” DeMarco said, “it’ll be coming.”

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