The Original Purge Movie Initially Had A Dark Twist For Its Protagonist

There are few bigger horror franchises that have been created in the last 20 years than "The Purge." Writer/director James DeMonaco had the pretty twisted idea to envision a near-future world where all crime is legal in the U.S. for a 12-hour period each year. The trade-off? There is much less crime the rest of the year. It's a concept that, thus far, has produced five hit movies and two seasons of a TV show, with a potential sixth film written and ready to go. For as dark as the original 2013 movie that started it all was, DeMonaco recently revealed it could have been even darker.

"The Purge" celebrated its 10th anniversary earlier this year. The film centers on a family trying to survive the annual night of violence in their big, expensive house that was paid for by selling Purge security systems. Ethan Hawke plays the head of the family, who does not participate in the annual evening of bloodshed. However, in the original script, things were very different in that regard. Speaking with Collider, DeMonaco made the following reveal:

"[He] didn't just sell security systems. Because I wanted it to be a morality play. This is the big thing that we cut. We put it in Part Two a little bit. He purged someone in the basement as a ritual every year. He bought someone to purge as the societal catharsis that the purge has promised to be, that it will make you a better person. He bought fully into this propaganda and kills a man on page 25. That's the first purge of the movie."

Admittedly, that would have painted a very different picture of the original movie and its main character. By the end, we feel sympathy for Ethan Hawke's James Sandin, who realizes the error of his ways. If we had seen him Purge someone in the first act of the film? Probably pretty hard to see him as anything other than a monster. Audiences responded very well to the film as it exists, so it's hard to argue against taking that out of the script.

To date, "The Purge" movies have made $535 million at the box office against very tiny budgets, and they've gone a long way in making Blumhouse the $5 billion horror behemoth it is today. Amazingly though, Universal Pictures, the studio that has distributed all of the movies, didn't interfere too much, as James DeMonaco tells it. So it wasn't as though they were breathing down his neck to make the change.

Speaking with The Playlist, the filmmaker explained that "The Purge" was such a small production that it hardly even registered on Universal's radar (something that worked in the movie's favor):

"To be honest, I don't think they were paying attention. I think they were just letting Jason [Blum] do his thing. ['The Purge'] is a $2 million film, and they're making $100 million films simultaneously and that's where their energy goes. We didn't get many notes. It was the strangest thing. We were just left free to just go make the film. We actually got more notes when the film became a hit."

So DeMonaco and his collaborators managed to make the right call without a lot of studio interference. "The Purge" movies may be dark, but having sympathetic characters at the heart of the stories helps to make them tick. The stories are better for it, and DeMonaco seems to know that.