Although the Sandin family seems kind of neutral and doesn’t participate in The Purge themselves, if we read into the subtext we can see how they really feel. The display of blue baptisias is a sign of support for The Purge in the same way that
A pink ribbon is a sign of support for the fight against breast cancer in our world. This light blue to cyan color can be found all over the Sandin’s house, it’s on their curtains, their kitchen, their furniture, their possessions and even their clothes.
All of the neighbors who participate in The Purge also don this color. Charlie, however, is fundamentally against the Purge and he is the only one not to wear the color. Even the interface of their security system uses this color of blue, and this is the system
That is supposed to keep them safe and keep the homeless out on the street to be purged. The Sandins do not initially have bad intentions, but it is because of The Purge that Mr. Sandin is able to sell a ton of security systems and become rich.
-[James] Ten years ago, we could barely afford rent. Now we’re thinking about buying a boat. So the financial comfort caused by The Purge causes Mr. and Mrs. Sandin to unknowingly look past how bad it really is. The baptisia blue color also becomes a symbol of the political party behind The Purge,
The New Founding Fathers of America, or the NFFA. In a television interview early on, the behavioral scientist Dr. Peter Buynak also wears this color as he explains how The Purge is effective, claiming that it creates psychological stability by allowing pent up aggression to be released.
However, later sequels would confirm that this data isn’t accurate and it’s actually quite the opposite. So the baptisia blue he is wearing is likely a clue to the audience that this man is an NFFA plant spreading misinformation for political reasons.
I’ll also explore how one of the neighbors has ties to a high ranking NFFA official, so stick around to the end of this video to hear about it. This video is sponsored by PDS Debt. ♪ Metal Music ♪ Welcome to Things You Missed.
Today I’m covering The Purge — the dystopian not-too-distant future horror story about a night each year where all crime is legal for 12 continuous hours. In the opening credits we see the video feeds of the previous nationwide Purges that have taken place for the past 6 years leading up to this night.
The story is just a small snapshot of one family’s experience in this messed up version of society, but it’s simplicity is also what makes it great, and it still contains setups to the greater lore that we would become familiar with as the franchise would expand.
So let’s lower the security doors and take a deeper look into some of those hidden details. As James Sandin returns home from work, he hears a guy on the radio explaining his own plans for Purge night. -[Radio Host] Pete from Northern Virginia, what’s your Purge plan? -[Pete] I’m gonna hunt down my boss. That son of a ***** has it coming.
The idea of an employee going after his or her boss would be explored in further detail in The Purge Season 1. And I don’t want to already be going on this rant, but I’m already going on this rant. It’s so annoying how the Purge franchise is titled.
If I say “The Purge”, I could be referring to this original movie, the TV series called The Purge or the franchise as a whole. But I can’t say “The First Purge” because the fourth movie is called The First Purge.
They should have called the prequel The Purge: Experiment and they should have given each season of the series a subtitle, like The Purge: Homecoming and The Purge: Bloodstained Saints. or something like that. Those are actually pretty good. We soon meet the Sandin kids. Zoey is the bratty teen prep student with a
Ton of accolades. She’s an excellent writer, softball player and gymnast. She even won a marathon and is also an excellent horseback rider. Her little brother is very much the opposite. He’s more of a science standout, engineering his own drone that he calls Timmy.
I’m not sure if this is an intentional Toy Story reference, but it is very similar to Sid’s babyface creation so I’m gonna count it. Charlie also has some disturbing drawings of The Purge hidden in the secret spot behind his closet.
These are never explained, and so we’re only left to wonder if this seemingly innocent character has a dark side. I know the idea of a story about the kid who once lost a parent in The Purge has already
Been done a couple times now, but it would at least be interesting to see where Charlie and Zoey ended up. They would just get Tommy Wiseau to play Charlie as an adult. At dinner, Charlie tells about his day at school. -[Charlie] And in English I wrote a story about a man
Whose love is so powerful that it can kill people so he cuts out his own heart. -[Mary] That is so sweet. This story is kind of similar to what happens to Mr. Sandin in The Purge. It is his love for his family that fuels his motivation to give Dante up to the purgers
So that they can be safe, but he realizes the error of his ways which ultimately means sacrificing his own life to save everyone else. When he locks down the house, we can see the security code 101382. I was looking around online to see if there might be any significance behind that number.
Famousfix.com suggests that “this equates to the date 10/13/1982, the date of Ronald Reagan’s Address to the Nation on the Economy.” I’m somewhat skeptical that this could be the motivation, but it’s worth noting that The Purge is supposed to boost the economy. -[O.S.] Crime is down. The economy is flourishing.
The family gets together for lockdown when James notices this. -[James] Hey look at this. Mr. Sabian and Mr. Barbero are going hunting. That’s daring. The name Sabian is significant. At the time, this was just kind of a throw away reference that director James Demonaco liked to put in his movies.
His 2005 film Assault on Precinct 13 had a character named Dr. Alex Sabian and he wrote the screenplay for the 1998 film The Negotiator which had a character named Chris Sabian. These were probably a reference to Andrea Sabian, who he’s given a special thanks
To in the credits of The Purge and The Purge: Election Year. But looking back on this line now, we can connect it to a character who was part of The Purge experiment. Arlo Sabian was the NFFA Chief of Staff who tried to manipulate the results of the experiment
By killing people to make it look like it had been a success. It’s hard to say whether or not this could actually be him, but it could definitely be a relative, as they both obviously support the NFFA. Mr. Sandin would spend the beginning of the evening finishing some paperwork, but another
Secret can be found on the TV he has playing in the background. As you all know, I love a good horror story. I mean that’s why we’re all here, right? But lately I’ve been fascinated with a different type of horror story. I’ve been watching a lot of videos about people describing their battles, not with a supernatural stalker or clandestine killer… but with debt.
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Zoey goes back to her room, where she discovers that her boyfriend Henry never left the house that afternoon. I noticed her pillow has text on it that reads: Lights Out. This isn’t a reference to the movie Lights Out, but it could be a foreshadowing of the moment that the power gets cut.
As James finishes up his work from that day, listen to the TV in the background. -[Reporter] We’re looking at some live feeds from around the country and discussing The Purge with criminologist Tommy Aagard. Tommy Aagard is also a significant name, it’s a reference to the first assistant editor and visual effects editor.
One of the news broadcasts features Purge coverage of Staten Island. Director James Demonaco is kind of obsessed with Staten Island. His first movie was originally titled Staten Island before the title was changed to Little New York. He also wrote and produced The First Purge, which was set on Staten Island, and he’s
Working on a new movie called Once Upon a Time in Staten Island. I told you — he’s obsessed. Charlie feels bad when he sees a homeless man, who we later find out to be named Dante Bishop, begging for help on the streets and temporarily disarms the security system to
Let him inside, then right as that happens Henry attacks Mr. Sandin, who had been against Henry’s relationship with his daughter. This allows Dante to escape into the house. Mr. Sandin fires back at Henry, which proves to be a fatal reaction.
A group of purgers outside threaten to tear down the door if they don’t deliver Dante, so Mr. Sandin goes to look for him, and in the hall he comes across his family photos covered in blood – a symbol of his worst case scenario for Purge night.
Eventually he finds Dante, but he’s taken Zoey as a hostage, and this scene is part of what makes this Purge movie the best. There are lots of scenes in the other movies where suspense is artificially created because a purger holding someone at gunpoint just doesn’t pull the trigger when they should.
Sometimes to a ridiculous extent. This scene, however, has a reason for it. If Dante kills Zoey, there’s no reason for James and Mary not to jump him and give him to the purgers. Mrs. Sandin sneaks up behind him, but she won’t shoot him either, because if they
Can’t turn Dante over to the purgers alive, they’ll break into the house and release the beast on the family instead. Mr. Sandin has to make a moral decision. Does he kill a possibly innocent man to guarantee his own family’s safety, or take his chances against them, perhaps putting everyone’s life in danger?
Ultimately, he ends up feeling empathy for Dante, perhaps due to him being able to feel sympathy for his situation because he was poor just 10 years ago. James doesn’t make it, but his decision still ends up saving his family, because Dante
Returns the favor by protecting them when the neighbors turn against them later that night. During the end credits, we learn that this was supposedly the most “successful” Purge yet according to the NFFA who just want to see a lot of violence and weapon sales. -[Reporter] The New Founding Fathers have released an
Early statement saying this was the most successful Purge yet. This is a running theme in the franchise — it seems like each Purge is always more violent than the last. The second Purge movie takes place 1 year after the original and unemployment has risen from 1% in the previous movie to 5%.
This may be a reflection of the economy in the world of The Purge worsening, despite the claims by the political group, The New Founding Fathers of America, that The Purge benefits the economy. As we now know first hand, it turns out massive amounts of death actually isn’t so great
For the economy as a whole, save for a select few of the world’s wealthiest companies. In our world, Walmart and Amazon are the rare examples of thriving businesses, but in the world of the Purge it’s all about weapon manufacturers.
This all plays into the commentary that Anarchy makes about gun violence in the US. The first pur… the original Purge introduced the New Founding Fathers, so this time around we learn a little bit more about them and we meet their opposition, a revolutionary group headed up by Carmelo Johns. Johns surmises that the Purge is a tool to funnel money upward to the upper class:
The politicians and their rich donors. It is the poor who are most likely to die on Purge night, as they are unable to protect themselves. This makes it appear as if the NFFA is doing a great job by cleaning up the streets and
Reducing the taxes that go towards welfare to take care of those people. Those rich political donors that I mentioned likely consist of two groups, those who sell security, as we saw in the previous movie, and those who sell weapons, which we start to see in this movie.
Everyone wants to get in on the so-called “holiday” sales trend. Even the street vendors try to sell Eva weapons as she walks home, telling her she needs them as “protection” as casually as tourist shops might tell vacationers that they need an item to commemorate their trip, and these are the same stalls that
You might find in LA selling t-shirts and postcards. The use of The Purge as a money making tool in 2023 is really only a slight exaggeration of what goes on in real life, where organizations like the NRA donate tens of millions of dollars
Per year to fund election campaigns for politicians who will do what they say, so when these weapons are used for the inevitable act of terror, the gun companies can rest assured that their politicians won’t do anything to hurt their weapon sales.
The satirization of American gun culture is a thread that runs through the entire movie, and seemingly the rest of the series. During the opening title, we see the seal of The New Founding Fathers of America. It’s very reminiscent of the Great Seal of the United States, the differences being
That in the NFFA seal, the eagle is holding an assault rifle and machete instead of arrows and an olive branch. The wings are much more rigid, like jet wings and the glory of stars, which originally represented the 13 American colonies coming together, is thoughtfully replaced with two knifes coming
Together — a symbol of unification replaced with a symbol of conflict. The first character we meet is Eva, a waitress taking care of a customer named Mr. Sabian. -[Eva] How is everything Mr. Sabian? -[Mr. Sabian] Great as always.
Sabian is a name that director James Demonaco often includes in his movies as a director’s trademark, but it has special meaning in The Purge franchise, where it is often tied to a character with some kind of link to the NFFA.
In The Purge, Mr. Sabian was one of the neighbors who went hunting during The Purge and in the prequel, The First Purge, Arlo Sabian is the NFFA Chief of Staff. This time, Mr. Sabian is played by an actor named Vick Sabian. There’s another potential reference on the TV.
The news scroller at one point reads: “A drive along Oregon’s coast reveals soaring sand dunes,” which may be a nod to the production company, Platinum Dunes. The news anchor also says that more people will partake in this Purge than ever before.
I mentioned in the last episode that this is the case in seemingly every Purge that we’ve seen, and in Anarchy we find out why. Roll it. -[Big Daddy] Tonight we take lives. We make things manageable for us. Unfortunately, the citizens aren’t killing enough. So we supplement it all. To keep things balanced.
As commencement draws closer a married couple, Shane and Liz rush to get to shelter and see people putting out blue baptisias, which the previous movie explains to be a sign of support for the Purge.
We don’t see them as much as you would expect in this movie, which may be because of a shortage caused by a drought, as explained in an article on the NFFA website. You can also spot men putting up plywood, and this shot is a powerful visual representation
Of what Carmelo Johns preaches about the poor being the ones who suffer most during The Purge, while the NFFA can afford to sit back behind their high tech security systems. While Eva is walking home, you can get a slight glimpse of a poster advertising the suspension
Of emergency services during The Purge, which is actually just a movie poster from the ad campaign of the original movie. In that film, we encountered one group of Purgers that wore creepy, nondescript masks. Shane and Liz encounter a new group who travel around on motorbikes, skateboards and a large van.
Some of them have religious iconography on their masks or faces. The last movie did have a little bit of evidence of The Purge starting to become a religion, with the crazy neighbors holding hands and reciting something like a prayer, the emergency broadcast ending with this:
-[Broadcast] Blessed be our New Founding Fathers and America, a nation reborn. …and maybe even the choice of flowers, the blue baptisias, being a reference to baptism, the symbolic form of purification in some religions. It goes along nicely with a phrase commonly chanted by purgers: -[Preacher] Purge and Purify! Say it with me.
-[Crowd] Purge and Purify! Anarchy takes the religious parallels the next level. I think the idea is that by making the violence into a religious experience, the NFFA hopes people will look past their morals, and blindly accept it as an OK thing to do.
Many people follow religion to help guide their morality, but I’m sure you can also think of examples of those who use their religion as an excuse to justify horrible behaviour. Like those nutcases who try to ban horror movies. Those people have strayed SO FAR from the light. -[Crowd] Purge and Purify!
We see The Purge become more and more intertwined with religion throughout the first three Purge movies. Carmelo calls this out in one of his rants. -[Carmelo] We no longer worship at the altar of Christ, Mohammed, Yahweh. We worship at the altar of Smith and Wesson. Smith and Wesson is a firearm manufacturer.
Next is the sniper woman acting as a herald from a rooftop. Her speech is rife with religious entitlement. She says: “I’m doing God’s work. He uses an earthquake, a virus. The masses nourish and flourish. I am that virus tonight. I am a one-woman f***ing plague and you’re all in my path!
I am the Holy Trinity. I am the Father F***er, Son of a B****, and Holy S***! And my MP-9 silver-tipped Auto Magnum. The right arm of the free world and the left hand of God! In flaming fire, I take the heads of them that know not God.”
And the host of the Purge Gala at the end of the movie describes one the weapons that she considers her favorite. -[Host] It is so precise it’s as if God had crafted it himself. That brings me to the Purge countdown billboard.
When hacked by Carmelo’s group, it glitches out and momentarily reveals a hidden message. ♪ Upbeat Music ♪ Probably the most iconic new villain in this second Purge movie is this guy, who for obvious reasons, I’ll just call “Godhead.” It seems that he’s labeling himself as God, a decider of who lives and who dies. Halfway through the annual Purge, Carmelo’s revolutionary group taps into the video feed
Of the countdown to deliver a message to the people about the NFFA. His video contains a lot of distortion and visual glitches which seems to be purely for aesthetic purposes. One of the glitches shows New Founding Father Donald Talbot, and if we pause right as it
Happens, the word EVIL is written across his forehead in the same spot Godhead has written the word God. Other subliminal messages in this presentation include a message reading: Frick the Purge and a protest sign that says Where Corruption Begins. WCB may stand for Workers Compensation Board, the state agency that provides benefits to
Those that get injured during work. We never hear anything more about this, but based on what we do know, it’s not hard to come to the conclusion that the NFFA is using the Purge to take out people that were injured on the job so that they don’t have to pay them.
This would be yet another example of The Purge disproportionately affecting the working class. Speaking of which… -[Liz] You know, we don’t have a lot of time before commencement, Shane. -[Shane] We’ll be fine. I promise. He would not be fine. The last character we meet is Leo Barnes.
These articles on his wall tell us he’s the new Jeff Denlon and if you look closely, you’ll notice the drunk driver who hit his son was let off the hook just two weeks ago, around the same time that Leo would have disabled the man’s security system.
-[Leo] Two weeks ago I came here and disabled his back barricade, that’s what we’re doing here. By the way, we spend most of the movie wondering how Barnes got all his awesome combat skills. When he drives out of the garage, it looks like he’s got a cop car with extra metal
Armor covering the body. Then when he comes face to face with this guy at the end, he says they looked up his info, and he refers to him “sergeant”. So it seems like Barnes learned to kick *** because he used to be a police sergeant.
When The Purge is about to begin, Shane is still optimistic. -[Shane] Hey hey hey. Don’t worry. We’ll figure something out. I promise. Promise. I do not think he knows what that word means. Speaking of which, when Eva and her daughter Cali have their apartment invaded by the sweaty
Guy from their building, he seems a little confused on the name of his favorite government tyrants, calling them the New Found Fathers. -[Diego] It’s my right! Granted to me by the New Found Fathers. Maybe he was confusing them with a certain late 90s early 2000s pop-punk act, but I just
Had to point this out, because it seems to have predicted this whole 2020 phenomenon known as the “Karen meme”, where these people film someone breaking the rules, and the person freaks out and claims they have the right to do whatever it is they’re doing
And usually cites made up information and makes a huge scene. -[Random Karen] I’m going to get my order, and I have a right. The name Karen is thought to be a reference to a character from the movie Mean Girls,
But there can also be Mankarens, so this guy screaming about how killing is “his right”, and incorrectly citing the name of the group that gave him that “right” seems be an almost Simpsonseque prediction of events later to come. Hopefully this isn’t one of those cases of life imitates art, though.
I did find a case of art imitates art, when the characters make it to Tanya’s house. The news coverage they have playing on the TV is the same channel that James Sandin watched a year prior. Even though this takes place a year later, the news scroll at the bottom has the exact
Same text as the first movie, about parliament’s criminal imprisonment measures, and a comedian copyrighting a catch phrase. Also, it turns out that Shane getting shot makes Liz realize how much she cares about him. -[Liz] I’m sorry. -[Shane] No, l got shot.
-[Liz] Oh, are you gonna use this excuse for the rest of our lives? -[Shane] Well, at least the rest of the night. Well. I guess this time they were both right… As the group travels through the financial district, they come across the remains of a man who has been purged.
There’s a note left on him that says, -[Shane]Here hangs stockbroker David Nuestadter. Stole our pensions now he’s gone. However, David Nuestadter is no stockbroker. He’s a horror film executive producer. In fact, he’s one of the most prolific horror film producers of the last decade — he’s
Responsible for funding all of the biggest hits made by Universal Studio’s rival studio Warner Bros. The spelling of the name is way too specific. Clearly, Universal Studios or director James Demonaco feels that Nuestadter stole something from them, and they’re quite bitter about it.
I’m not sure what that something is… maybe there were early talks to make The Conjuring franchise a Universal / Blumhouse movie before Neustadter swooped in and secured that $2 billion bag for Warner Bros. Or maybe Demonaco pitched something to him, and then one of his future movies was a little
Too similar to his idea. If anyone knows what this beef might be about, let me know in the comments. The climax of the movie would involve our characters being kidnapped by Godhead and his crew and sold off to be victims in this life-and-death stakes laser tag arena, but
There’s something interesting about the soundtrack in this sequence. ♪ Classical Music ♪ After being kidnapped and sold to rich NFFA associates who hunt people for sport, the main group is put on display to be sold off along with three other victims, and to add credibility to Carmelo’s theory, all three of them are dressed in clothes you’d typically
See on a homeless person. Also, the music being played during this gala is a classic piano piece by Chopin. Much like how the series opens with a montage of purging set to a classic piece by Debussy. After Shane is picked off by one of the bad guys, speaking of potentially stolen content,
The soundtrack here sounds exactly like a Green Day song. 🎵 Slow series of notes from string instrument🎵 🎵 “21 Guns” – Green Day 🎵 (intro) Oh wow, the lyrics fit too! And that in itself it funny, because 21 Guns has a melody from… Full House? Roll it.
🎵 “21 Guns” – Green Day 🎵 (solo) 🎵 “Everywhere you look, everywhere you look!” 🎵 So yeah, that’s how The Purge: Anarchy connects to Full f***ing House -[Carmelo] This is our time now! The team that helps Leo and the others escape is aided by Dante Bishop from the last movie.
They commandeer a vehicle in the parking lot. At the beginning, Leo was ordering two innocent people to get out of his car, essentially leaving them to die in the Purge; but now he’s ordering two bad people to do the same
It’s only been 12 hours, but his experiences on this night have already started to shape his morals. And about 40 minutes later, we see evidence of his character development again, when he decides to let his son’s killer go free.
I guess we don’t technically know that he was ever planning to kill him, I mean maybe he was just going to give him a stern talking to, but most likely, he had malicious intentions, but changed his mind. After coming out of the house, he’s finally hunted down by this guy, who’s known as
Big Daddy. Not that Big Daddy. Not THAT Big Daddy. That Big Daddy. It’s here that Barnes learns that the NFFA interferes with the Purge, and this may have been the moment that inspired him to fight against the NFFA by going into security work
And protecting their political opponents, as seen in the next movie. The final sirens sound, and Leo is rushed to the hospital. I think we now know that this is maybe the most unrealistic part of The Purge, since we’ve now seen how bad things can get when hospitals all reach capacity.
In the credits, there are a few hidden cameos from the first movie, like the interface of a Sandin Security system, the group that broke into the Sandins’ house, and James Sandin himself. At the beginning of this video, I mentioned how The Purge: Anarchy is a social commentary about gun violence in the US.
Demonaco himself has talked about how it explores the idea that if there was no government then what would dictate our morality? We see that some people will try to take the law into their own hands. We see those without guns of their own being the most vulnerable targets, but when given
A weapon, they fight violence with violence, because if you can’t afford one, you can’t really protect yourself through other means, the purgers will find you. It starts with just the gun lovers, but we see participation in The Purge grow year over year as the groups being gunned down start to retaliate.
And ultimately, allowing this to go on year after year causes things to devolve into complete anarchy. In The Purge: Election Year, Joe’s Deli serves as a symbol of The American Dream for Joe and his community, but some of the images seen around the store have a greater significance than you might have realized.
Election Year shows us the height of a revolution staged by the lower class against the government. This is essentially the New Civil Rights Movement of the United States. In the world of The Purge, the poor are discriminated against. Not only can the wealthy better afford to
Protect themselves during The Purge, but if you read into the lore detailed on the New Founders website, you’ll see they’ve enacted laws like the Contributing Citizens Provision of 2019 that straight up allows discrimination against the poor. There are both subtle and not so subtle comparisons to the original Civil Rights Movement that
Took place in the United States 86 years prior. Joe’s Deli is his pride and joy, his little piece of the pie, as he puts it. For him, the American Dream means owning and operating his own business that serves the community, but his dream, like the dream of his ancestor,
Martin Luther King Jr., is crushed, when his insurance company intentionally raises his rates 1 day before The Purge. -[Joe] They just raised the premium on my Purge coverage. By thousands. The day before the damn Purge. If I don’t pay it by tomorrow I have no Purge coverage for this store.
In previous Purge movies, we’ve learned that weapon and home security companies are the most likely shills for the political party that created The Purge, the NFFA, and Election Year suggests that insurance companies have joined that category.
But some of the images seen in and around the deli are more than just a generic symbol of civil rights — they reference specific historical events that foreshadow what happens at the end of the movie. There are also more modern references, in fact, Election Year may have actually predicted some future events. If you’ve been waiting for a video where Emo Abraham Lincoln, regular Abraham Lincoln and Angry Abraham Lincoln all collide, this is the episode for you. If you want to hear about the hidden meanings encoded in the third Purge movie, you are also in the right place.
This would be the last installment directed by series creator James Demonaco, although he would stay on as screenwriter going forward. If you look at Election Year literally, it looks like the silliest, most ridiculous entry, but we can find deeper meaning when looking on a metaphorical level. Let’s get into it.
All around Washington DC, there are NFFA logos and advertisements, but in low-income areas like the area near the freeway underpass and right around the deli, we see that the banners have been defaced, a symbol of the tension that exists between the social classes.
The divide between the rich and poor is highlighted by the use of technology. The movie is set in 2040, so you’d expect some futuristic gadgets, like Leo’s remote detonating briefcase and GPS tracking bullets, but Joe, Marcos and Lainey use devices that feel outdated
Even today. From standard definition monitors, to broken grandpa clocks to Samsung Galaxy S2’s and even this monstrosity. As I mentioned, the deli is decorated with photos of the most prominent figures of the original American Civil Rights Movement, like Malcolm X, who was an advocate of African
American human rights in the 1960s who was criticized for refusing to denounce violence as a form of self-defense. -[Interviewer] So Martin is your friend, yet you would disagree to his approach to what he wants to accomplish? -[Malcolm X] Definitely, if his approach would bring about what the black man in America needs,
To completely eliminate the problem that we have, I would say well and good. The Purge: Election Year has its own Malcolm X — it’s Dante Bishop, the homeless man turned revolutionary fighter who planned to assassinate the NFFA’s presidential candidate. The independent candidate Charlie Roan criticizes him on his methods.
-[Charlie] Mr. Bishop, I’ve heard stories of tactics that you employ on Purge night. I can’t say that I agree with any of it. Bishop changes his ways in the end, but they do share the same fate of being taken out by extremists.
Another picture seen in the deli is of Harriet Tubman. Harriet was born into slavery in the 1820s, and her most notable accomplishment was operating the Underground Railroad, a network of secret routes and safehouses designed to help escort African Americans out of slavery in the south.
The new Civil Rights Movement isn’t about slavery and race though, it’s about money and homelessness, so the new Harriet Tubman is Laney Rucker, who spends her Purge night working in a triage van to help Purge victims get to underground safehouses throughout the city where they can hide out and get medical attention.
Tubman also worked as nurse during the American Civil War and notably led a military operation known as the Raid on Combahee Ferry where 750 people were rescued from slavery on Union ships. At one point, Laney’s character is implied to also have some kind of notable military
Background, but it’s never explained or expanded upon and isn’t relevant to the story in any way. -[Schoolgirl 1]That’s Laney Rucker, Kimmy. -[Kimmy] Laney Rucker? They called you Pequeña Muerte. Little Death. You’re my motherf***ing hero.
This detail seems to only exist to explain how she knows how to use a gun, or as an added parallel to Harriet Tubman. Then there’s Frederick Douglass. Like the others, he was an important figure in slavery abolition and Civil Rights. He went on to
Hold several political offices and at one point he was nominated to become Vice President of the United States. If he does have a counterpart in the movie, I’m guessing it’s Senator Roan, but there may also be another historical figure who serves as a stronger reflection of Roan.
The most recognizable person pictured here, the true Patriot of his time, was Tom Brady; this was before he became a Buccaneer, but other than that, there’s Martin Luther King Jr., who of course is the most prolific Civil Rights speaker of all time, with his famous I Have a Dream Speech.
There are a couple of pictures of him in the deli, but I want to look at this one in particular, which was taken at a press conference on November 5th, 1964, just after Lyndon B Johnson was elected as President. Johnson was known for his domestic policies known as the “Great
Society” program and the “War on Poverty” program, which assisted millions of families out of poverty during his administration. Senator Roan’s platform is all about helping out low-income people, primarily by promising to end The Purge. The day this photo was taken, Johnson spoke with King Jr. to thank him for his support
And ask him to get behind the poverty initiative. -[LBJ] We’re gonna spend a lot of time with Schrieber on our poverty thing, I wish you’d give a little thought to it, because that offers a lot of opportunity for our young people. -[MLK Jr] Well, good, good, and again, let me congratulate you.
So as you can see there are a lot of similarities between Senator Roan and Lyndon B Johnson, but there may be one more parallel in looking at the circumstances of when they took office. Johnson was elected shortly after becoming President due to the assassination of John F Kennedy,
While Roan was elected shortly after the assassination of Caleb Warrens, the NFFA leader that gets sniped down at the end of the movie. The main characters would not be the only ones who represent a person or group of historical significance, and there are many other secrets waiting to be uncovered. The previous film, The Purge: Anarchy, started to explore how the NFFA was creating a religious aspect to the Purge as part of their wider effort to manipulate people into participating. Here, it’s front and center, as the new NFFA Presidential candidate is a minister
Who holds a midnight ceremony on Purge night where less fortunate people and political enemies are to be sacrificed. There are many moments that build up to the finale at the cathedral, from the first shot of the evening showing the sun setting behind a building that looks like a church to a church
Being the only location labeled on the GPS system that the NFFA’s mercenaries use to track the Senator. The United States has something called an Establishment Clause, the separation of church and state, but we see that all of the New Founding Fathers are the religious leaders,
Serving as ministers and priests. This isn’t a separate religion that they happen to be a part of, this is clearly an NFFA event, Minister Owens even admits that Midnight Purge Mass belongs to his party. His first name is Edwidge, a french name meaning “war”. He is a minister of war, and as
Senator Roan suggests in a debate, murder is his new religion. He’s joined at the altar by Harmon James. Harmon is also a French name meaning soldier, and he’s the one seen carrying out the ceremonious purging. On the topic of nomenclature, there are a couple of notable names on the other side
As well. As I mentioned in his Horror History episode, Dante Bishop is given a name for the first time in this movie, previously only being referred to as a stranger. Dante refers to Dante’s Inferno, a famous 14th century poem about the journey through hell, while
His surname Bishop would refer to the clergy member in the Christian church. So his name comes off as an oxymoron. Perhaps he’s split somewhere between heaven and hell. He has good intentions and wants to help people, but uses violent tactics to make his points.
At the end he has to choose between sin and virtue. Also of note, he has a right hand man whose name is Angel. Earlier on the streets, a crazy purger on chants about the gates of hell. -[Man on Street] That’s right! The gates of hell will open and invite me in!
The movie seems to be showing us the contrast between traditional religious beliefs where behaviour would dictate going to heaven or hell and the NFFA’s new distorted religious system where sin is glorified. One name that we’ve seen come up in every Purge movie is Sabian. Arlo Sabian was the
NFFA Chief of Staff in The First Purge, Mr. Sabian was a neighbor in the Purge and diner patron in The Purge: Anarchy and now Mrs. Sabian is a customer at Joe’s Deli. -[Joe] Mrs. Sabian, I wish I knew.
The name Sabian is a staple in every movie made by director James Demonaco, as is Staten Island. You can spot some channel 11 Purge coverage of Staten Island on the TV in the back of the Senator’s living room.
And speaking of stuff that appears in other Purge movies, were we not supposed to notice when the sirens sound, they just ripped an unused shot from The Purge: Anarchy? This is clearly LA. My only guess is maybe they were trying to encompass how far the Purge
Series has come with this sequence, which starts in the Senator’s home, (the first movie takes place all inside one home) then showing Los Angeles (where the second movie takes place) then showing Washington DC, which is the capital, it’s representative of the entire country.
There’s also a connection to the original film in that the flashback of Roan’s family being purged takes place on the same night as that movie. Before the NFFA hired mercenaries invade her home, there are a few significant items I
Noticed upstairs, like these two crane ornaments. In Japanese culture, cranes are said to represent good fortune and longevity, two traits that seem appropriate for Barnes and Roan who survive until the next morning against all odds. There’s also a turtle on the Senator’s mantle, a Chinese symbol for longevity. This
Is seen just before Leo bursts into the room and has her put on a bulletproof vest, her metaphorical turtle shell, if you will. Leo and Roan escape just before the bad guys break into the room, and their leader unmasks himself, revealing his affiliation with many of the most evil groups throughout history.
We’ve gotta slow it down to understand all of them. The more well known ones are the Nazi symbol, the party responsible for the Holocaust, the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremecist group, and the confederate flag of the breakaway state that fought for slavery in the American Civil War.
He also has a tattoo that says 88, which is supposedly a numerical code. H is the 8th letter of the alphabet, so this translates to HH which stands for Heil Hitler. Another tattoo says AB, an acronym for Aryan Brotherhood, a neo-Nazi prison gang and organized crime
Syndicate. My Google Search history feels very dirty after looking this stuff up and that’s coming from me. My favorite search result though, was when I looked up what a spider web tattoo on one’s head signifies, and found the answer: a serious lapse in judgement. Upon looking further I
Found out it meant they were in prison. The assault rifle on his temple signifies that he’s a gun carrier, and the words Free in America are written across his face. Which isn’t a bad message by itself, but it takes a darker meaning in the world of The Purge.
On the back of his head he has the American Eagle. I’m guessing it’s not because he’s a fan of the clothing brand… or the roller coaster, although he does seem to like Spiderwebs. There’s also an American flag, almost as if the US has become the newest evil group
In this universe. We see that the country definitely attracts negative attention when a story on the news tells about the latest travel trend called murder tourism. -[Traveler} We’re here to experience the purge. To k*ll. Release all the anger and h*te. Be like Americans.
I think this is kind of a commentary on how other countries see America today, where the rate of mass shootings is much higher than any other developed country. Of course, I’m American, so I can only assume how other countries see us.
There are also several examples of medieval weapons like a guillotine, a pendulum and a mace being used to purge, which I see as a symbol for the primitive nature of weapon regulations in the US. The murder tourists play an interesting role later in the story, as Barnes is trying to
Escort Senator Roan to safety and they’re stalked by a drone, which we later find out to be a Russain drone. In other words, this American politician is being followed around by Russian spies. The Purge: Election Year was released in 2016, which was an election year in real life for
The United States. It is said that Russia tried to influence the results of that election by creating bots on social media websites to spread propaganda. The drone is literally a Russian bot, and when Leo shoots it down, the explosion lights up a mural that says Keep Washington Beautiful.
If it’s intentional, it’s an interesting metaphor. I’ll just let you decide how intentional it really is though. The movie came out in July, but the election didn’t begin until the end of the year. It’s hard to say when the Russain initiative would have begun, seeing
As how I’m not a member of the CIA or FBI. However, paranoia of Russian plants has been a concept in American culture that goes back for decades. That being said, the next scene does seem to predict a Russian collusion, where bot accounts on social media pretending to be American citizens would spread information
That might influence the election. In The Purge, we have these Russian tourists masquerading around in Washington DC in the costumes of typical American icons, and they almost quite literally influence the election by purging one of the candidates. So we’ve discussed how many characters and groups have historical or societal significance
In this story. What about Kimmy and her Purge gang? We first meet her trying to steal candy from Joe’s Deli, then even when confronted about it, she’s resistant to give it up. Kimmy represents greed. She comes back during The Purge with the intention of stealing back the candy bar.
-[Kimmy] I want my candy bar. And I’m gonna take it. When she returns, we see that she’s already got it all: nice cars decorated with bright lights, bejeweled guns made of solid gold and flashy costumes because… -[Purger] THE PURGE IS HALLOWEEN FOR ADULTS!
No, Halloween as an adult is Halloween for adults. I appreciate the positive energy though dude. Kimmy and her gang are basically the typical American millennial archetype. Of course, this movie is set in 2040, so they aren’t actual millennials; this is just another social
Commentary on our own time period. She isn’t willing to buy the candy bar because she just feels she has the right to take it. -[Kimmy] If I want some candy, I’ll take some candy. I’ll take whatever the f@$k I want.
Her greed isn’t limited to material things either, she’s also a massive attention freak. Notice how their crew isn’t dressed for stealth combat like most purgers. They deck their cars out with lights and blast loud music, they wear skimpy outfits and wear mascots costumes and anime masks.
For them, Purge is all about being the center of attention, taking whatever they want and taking out anyone who tries to stop them. Her crew is so self absorbed that they don’t even hear Laney’s van driving up to take them out. (Van Speeding Up}
This is actually one of many just… kind of dumb moments in this movie. Like when Leo and the Senator encounter the swinging pendulum, and they try to time it when there’s clearly just plenty of room for them to crawl underneath.
I feel like I’m willing to forgive some of the ridiculousness though, because this entry does have probably my favorite line in the franchise: -[Caleb] We are going to use this year’s Purge to do some Spring Cleaning gentlemen… One of the most poorly titled movies of all time, The First Purge, invalidated 5 years of me referring to THIS movie as the first Purge. However, unlike the original Purge, this one came out relatively close to when the story takes place. The movie is set in
2016 and if you want to see me explain the timeline watch this video. But being set closer to the release date affords this movie an interesting opportunity to incorporate current events for the first time. Like how Isaiah has a poster for another poorly titled
Movie: Halloween 2018 in his room. This is part advertising for Blumhouse who wanted to hype up their other big release for that year, and part foreshadowing, as Isaiah and his loved ones would hide in a closet at the end of the movie, just like Laurie Strode did in Halloween.
There aren’t really any decent masks for sale for The First Purge for whatever reason, so I’m gonna go bare for this one. Welcome to Things You Missed. The initial three Purge films were both written and directed by James Demonaco, but for this prequel, he’d stay on as screenwriter
While tasking Gerard McMurray with directing duties. Subtle is probably not the word best used to describe any Purge film, but you could at least make the argument that the themes are subtle in 1 through 3, especially if you’ve seen my videos analysing them. McMurray decided to take a more direct approach.
The poster for this movie and the line said during this one scene are very obvious jabs at the United States White House administration during the time the movie was made, whereas the previous movies depicted the NFFA as an alternative to real life political parties.
One detail I found interesting was how the NFFA Chief of Staff intentionally sends his mercenaries to purge in low-income areas. This makes it appear as if the lower class is out for blood, which almost directly leads into the beginning of the original movie,
Where a group of affluent purgers hunt down an innocent homeless man for no other reason than the fact that he is homeless. We’ve also seen that the NFFA likes to use statistics to make it seem like The Purge is helping reduce crime during the rest of the year. Unfortunately, the NFFA website,
Which was updated with statistics and additional lore to promote Purge movie releases in the past has its weakest iteration for The First Purge — there’s basically no new information here. But perhaps more importantly, at the beginning of the movie, we see how this data was skewed.
The scene suggests they are doing their research about crime behaviour using crazies and addicts, as opposed to the general population. This is a tactic they use to craft their own narrative. They want to make it seem The Purge is the answer for the nation’s problems, but many
Of their opposers see through the BS and protest at the sign up stations, where citizens can volunteer to participate in The Purge Experiment in exchange for financial compensation. The conflict draws in many news stations, including one called KRXJ News, a station that has also
Appeared in the TV show Psyche and in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It seems it’s appeared in a couple of other shows as well. Is this a coincidence? I don’t think so. There are about 35,000 possible combinations that start with either K or W. I tried Googling
A number of random combinations, and surprisingly, they all seem to be taken. But KRXJ was the only one I found that yielded a fictional entity. After doing a little digging, I realized that prop designer Daniel Columbie has also designed
For a few Marvel movies. I’m guessing that’s the connection, and the answer to this pointless question. The sign up stations also give away blue flowers to those who sign up to participate. -[Psychologist] Baptisias. The official flower of the experiment. They represent rebirth.
This explains the origin of a through line in each of the Purge movies: the baptisias, which became a sign of support for the Purge. -[Stranger] And your blue flowers tell me that you support The Purge. The main antagonist this time is the original NFFA Chief of Staff, Arlo Sabian. If you’ve
Seen my other Purge episodes, you know that Sabian is a name that comes up in every Purge movie, which is perhaps just a symptom of the fact that they are all written by James Demonaco, who likes to have a character named Sabian in all of his work.
The other James Demonaco trademark is Staten Island, where the Purge experiment is going to take place. This location appears on a TV screen in preceding Purge movies, and the two non-Purge movies he’s directed are both set there. But not far from where this is taking place, our
Main character, Nya, leads a protest against the controversial experiment. One of the signs reads “The 28th is a h*te crime”. This suggests that The Purge is being considered as the 28th Amendment to the US Constitution, which is confirmed in the original iteration of the website.
But I think this movie creates an interesting metaphor for The Constitution. Nya and Isaiah live at a building called The Park Towers. Let’s pretend that building is The US Constitution. It’s an old building. It has a lot of leaks that have come up over the years. The people
That live there have a lot of issues with it. The problem is, the manager is never in, and isn’t much help anyway with fixing these issues anyways. Our characters are minorities, and they live on the 14th floor. It just so happens that
The 14th Amendment deals with equal protection of the laws, and is often used to fight racial discrimination. This is fitting, because the NFFA hires modern factions of racist groups such as the KKK and Aryan Nations to go into Staten Island and purge. The main bad guy, whose name is…
General Smiley?.. Has a gold armband very similar to the red Nazi armband you might see in generals wearing in old photographs. They attack the entire building floor by floor. On the second floor, a couple of armed citizens fight back against them. As it turns out, the second amendment is the right to bear
Arms, something citizens are reminded of in the form of a huge billboard. The text at the bottom says “Paid for by the UARO Political Victory Fund. I have no idea what the UARO is, but if you look up “political victory fund” you’ll find a bunch of stuff about
The NRA, who are stated at the beginning of the movie to be supporting the New Founding Fathers. -[Reporter] The New Founding Fathers, rising in polls, with the NRA now endorsing them and supporting them financially with large donations to the NFFA warchest.
The implication is that The Purge is fueled by money, that this whole thing happened because the NFFA values money, more than it values the lives of its citizens. -[Nya] They have monetized and incentivized murder. Walk away from their money!
The police officers who are keeping an eye on this protest don’t seem too enthused, but names like “Forbes” and “Sachs”, maybe it’s because they are in on it as well. ♪ Intense Music ♪ Staten Island was chosen as the site of the experiment partially because it is home to a number of street gangs, one of which is led by a man named Dmitri who surprisingly operates out of a community center named after Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey.
You’ve probably noticed that this movie picks up where Election Year left off comparing the anti-Purge movement to the American Civil Rights movement. The First Purge is, as usual, a lot less subtle about it; there’s one point where Nya even claims that she sees
The Purge as a way the government is trying to keep minorities down. In Election Year, Joe’s Deli was the center of the community, and it displayed the photos of several Civil Rights leaders. In The First Purge, the community center has some of these same photos. Literally, we see
The same exact picture for Martin Luther King Jr and a very similar picture for Malcolm X. I don’t know if this was the production just trying to save a few bucks on props, but it actually makes me wonder if Joe from Election Year might have been a youngster at this very community center,
And took these photos with him when he went to DC to start the deli. We know he has been a part of gang activity before. -[Joe] Told you I ain’t no saint. Everybody’s got a past. The other photos include civil rights figures: Jesse Jackson, Marcus Garvey, Thurgood Marshall;
And the corkboard celebrates athletes who broke the color barrier, like Jesse Owens, Mohammed Ali and Jackie Robinson. Robinson came up with the Brooklyn Dodgers playing first base, but faced a lot of adversity because he was the first African American-American
To play in MLB, as opposed to the Negro Leagues. Brooklyn is right next to Staten Island, and there’s a scene later in the film where a black man is purged by white police officers just in front of first base at a stadium with advertisements for The Purge
Experiment displayed in the outfield. So it feels like the movie is telling us that The Purge gave bad people the opportunity to undo the progress made by people like Jackie Robinson. And while we’re talking about sports, I have to say that there was a huge missed
Opportunity by the wardrobe department. They gave this guy, Taz, an Eli Manning jersey. But they should have given him #17 for Plaxico Burress, seeing as how Taz later gets shot in the leg, and Plaxico Burress infamously shot himself in the leg at a nightclub.
Gotta love the character of Dmitri though, I mean how many powerful gangsters have time to also be an inspiring community basketball coach? When it comes to gangsters named Dmitri, this guy is probably in my top 2 or 3.
In Dmitri’s office, he has a giant artwork of Ben Franklin, as seen on the 100 dollar bill. In universe, the reason he has it simply because he likes money, but there are many shots where the eye peeks through, as if it is watching and spying on him.
Ben Franklin is one of America’s original founding fathers, and in the film, the government is controlled by a party called the New Founding Fathers, and they are notorious for spying on the citizens, whether it be through surveillance cameras, recording contact lenses or attack drones.
Another symbol for this can be seen in the party scene, where a giant eyeball is passed around in the crowd. The party goers wear animal masks and makeup, such as foxes, lions, leopards and cows. I think I spotted a wendigo in there too. This is a way of foreshadowing the predator prey
Relationship between the NFFA and the public. And speaking of masks, there’s a scene where Nya is trapped by a guy with a creepy baby doll mask. The repurposing of a baby doll seems to be a nod to the remote control camera created by Charlie Sandin in the original Purge.
-[Mary] Quit playing with Timmy and come help me set the table, Kiddo Since this is a prequel, there are some things that we’ve come to know about the world of The Purge that seemingly haven’t been instituted yet. I noticed that the vehicles
Have New York license plates, where in later entries, the NFFA have instituted a uniform license plate for the US that says “A Nation Reborn.” This was also before the US Postal Service was replaced with NFFA Mail. Another difference is that the color of the emergency broadcast screen was red instead
Of the usual blue. Director Gerard McMurray kind of flipped the script when it comes to color. Other than this one graphic at the very end of Election Year, the NFFA is always associated with the color blue. Perhaps the NFFA intentionally chose light blue so that
The public associates them with the good guys. Think about pop culture: good guys blue, bad guys red. But McMurray uses light in this movie to reveal the true allegiances of characters. In addition to the red emergency broadcast, there’s the NFFA headquarters, the hunters that try
To purge Isaiah, and Sabian steps into the red light after revealing the true sinister intentions of the experiment. Isaiah has blue contacts, Nya’s church is blue, and Dmitri’s car has a blue underglow. Dmitri’s office is also blue, but when the assassins enter the room, they come from the
Lone red light in the corner. The office also has a picture of a man in red boxing against a man in blue; The Purge is like a punch in the face from the government to those that oppose them. Interestingly, Skeletor is the only character whose contact lenses are purple, a combination
Of red and blue. The bystanders who stay home are green, and the looters are usually green and occasionally orange. It’s possible that there’s also a political side to McMurray’s decision to color code. In the US, Green is representative of the third party, so maybe that’s why green is
Used to portray those that seem to be neutral. The artwork in Dmitri’s office is also representative of the differing ways that Nya and Dmitiri deal with their problems. In one scene, Nya confronts him because she was upset that her younger brother was getting involved in his operation. She criticizes him for what his
Gang has done to their community. As they argue, Dmitri is standing in front of the two boxers — he solves his problems with aggression. The artwork behind Nya also depicts a boxer, but he is sitting in the dark, thinking and quietly reflecting. Nya solves her issues with her head.
Isaiah had been hurt while selling illegal substances on the street for Dmitri. Nya is vocally against him him doing this, and their apartment is covered with signage that says “Drug Free Zone” and “No Smoking”. Dimitri’s gangs rule the streets, but the apartment acts as a safe haven for Isaiah.
I also noticed that their building looks very similar to the example of low-income housing that Dante Bishop shows on TV during Election Year. Election Year takes place 24 years later, so these images illustrate how nothing ever actually improved while the NFFA was in power.
Comparing the technology from The First Purge to Election Year highlights one of the many frustrating things about The Purge franchise — which is that technology actually seems to get worse as time goes on. Election Year has a lot of tech that feels old even today.
The coolest gadget in the series is probably The First Purge’s video contact lenses, which are actually based on a real concept that Sony has filed patents for, but we are still years and years away from seeing in practice as I record this video in 2021.
Now I’m gonna get to the end of the movie, and why it makes no sense, but before I do, it’s that part of the video, where I’ve gotta air them out a little bit. During the robbery at this cash for gold place, why does the store owner only have a security shade
Over one window? And I like how he keeps his neon signs on, so he can advertise to criminals that he has valuables. Also, there’s no way Dmitri would have survived this crash, but he’s perfectly fine a couple minutes later?
One thing I did find interesting is that the mercenaries that Sabian sent into the Purge to give the appearance that people had participated are hidden in everyday vehicles, like a plumber’s truck and a veteran transport van. Now the ending of the movie is a bit unconventional. With Dmitri’s help, Nya, Isaiah and the
Others are able to ward off General Smiley, Skeletor and the rest of the bad guys, and The Purge ends. Usually at the end of the movie, you see that the character has changed somehow. We call it: the character arc. But when Nya asks Dmitri what’s next he tells her:
-[Dmitri] Now we fight. Which kind of goes against the message of the movie, which has shown us how fighting basically nearly destroyed the community. So it’s kind of like a “bad guys win anyway” scenario, because conflict is exactly what the NFFA wants.
This ending also might be suggesting that Dmitri was kind of like the start of the resistance, kind of a seed that would grow into the anti-NFFA group that we meet later on in The Purge Anarchy, as more people in different cities get involved.
That group is probably not the most notable resistance in the Purge franchise though, I would give that honor to the group we see in another poorly titled installment, The Purge TV series. As the Betancourt family heads out to a party on Purge night, you may notice a sign in their front yard, noting that the house is armed by Sandin Security. This little detail is one of many in The Purge series that references
James Sandin, from the original movie. You may recall that Mr. Sandin used his own company’s security system to protect his family, and that didn’t work out too well for him, and he was purged before morning. Despite the supposed poor quality of these systems, they aren’t the only ones to trust the Sandin brand.
-[David] State of the art Sandin Security. -[Joe] Who’s providing the shell system?” -[Rick] Sandin. -[Joe] The best Even the NFFA once trusted Sandin to install their system. It’s surprising that Sandin is still trusted in The Purge Season 1. According to the NFFA website, their main competitor,
G&D security, overtook them after James Sandin’s passing, stating, “we’re what Sandin promised to be, and wasn’t.” The Purge Season 1 takes place in 2027 based on the dates displayed on these security systems. We can assume Henry’s signature on this release form was a typo. That sets the season
5 years after Mr. Sandin’s system was breached, so I’m guessing improvements were made to the company after his passing. The series opens with this shot of some blue and yellow shower loofahs. We later find out that these colors represent the robe
Colors of an organization called the Mercy cult. These kids are manipulated into giving themselves up to the Purge. Once they are old enough, they graduate from these yellow robes to the light blue ones that they die in. Light blue has always been associated with the NFFA and The Purge, but it’s not until
Season 2 that we discover the meaning of yellow. Yellow is the color of Remembrance Day, the holiday that takes place 3 months later to commemorate the lives lost on Purge night. In the first episode, Miguel Guerrero is looking for his sister at this abandoned structure.
This is actually an existing location in New Orleans, but the blue flowers and grim reaper happen to work perfectly with the Purge. As you know, the dystopian government party in The Purge franchise is called The New Founding Fathers of America, and the series features many locations and references to America’s
Original founding fathers who helped America gain its independence in 1776. The finale of Season 1 takes place at Thomas Paine High School, which comes up several times in the show. The Stanton family lives on Jefferson St, named after Thomas Jefferson. In Jane’s
Flashback, we see that she attended Thomas Jefferson High School. There’s also a street called Franklin. -[Catalina] We have roadblocks, [unintelligable], go across Franklin.” The classroom seen in Episode 9 shows the constitutional amendments and many of the Founding Fathers. When Miguel and Pete search for the school,
They come across a map of Washington Street, named after George Washington. Likewise, in Season 2, Esme Carmona searches Professor Adams’s house and there’s a framed picture of the Lincoln Memorial, a location also seen in The Purge: Election
Year. And, in the last episode of Season 2, reports go out about illegal use of weapons in Washington Square, another reference to George Washington. If you’ve seen my previous Purge Things You Missed episodes, which you should have, you know all about the name Sabian. Every Purge installment has a character named Sabian,
Because they’re all written by James Demonaco, whose trademark is to use that name in his writing. In the series, Sabian is mentioned in the first episode. -[Jenna] Oh and don’t forget, after you close the deal, he’s probably gonna make a pitch for us to become NFFA party members.
-[Rick] I know, I know, I’m ready for it. I’ll deflect my way out of it. Now remember, Billy Sabian closed a huge deal for his start up here last year and he didn’t join. Another element we’ve come to expect in all Purge entries is the inclusion of civil
Rights leaders in the sets, as a comparison between America’s Civil Rights movement and the mistreatment of the poor in the world of The Purge. This time, you can spot it in the hideout of Henry’s gang, where you’ll see images of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and
Other figures, as well as a quote by Harriet Tubman. MLK and Malcolm X are quoted on the wall as well. Another aspect we’ve become very familiar with is the idea that each Purge is bigger than the last. There are two Purges shown in each season. First there’s the 2027 Purge.
-[Reporter] Prognosticators are predicting a record turnout tonight. We only see about 90 seconds of the 2028 Purge, so participation is not mentioned, but the 2036 Purge continues the trend. -[Curtis] Estimates came in already. Thirty percent uptick from last year in every district. Biggest Purge in city history. The 2037 Purge is no exception.
-[Vivian] You ever seen crowds this big? -[Curtis] Never. This years tracking to become the largest Purge we’ve seen. One of the big Season 1 plotlines has to do with Jenna being pregnant. There are a couple signs early on, like her asking for Tylenol and ordering salt-water instead of alcohol.
That being said, I still find this to be kind of a risky question. -[Catalina] How far along? -[Jenna] Is it that obvious? The second episode would be filled with more connections to the movies, as well as easter eggs connecting it to other horror movie franchises. ♪ Upbeat Music ♪ In Miguel’s quest to find his sister, he comes across a Triage Van, a concept we saw more of further down the timeline in The Purge: Election Year. There are a few Election Year references in the series, like when Miguel figures out his sister is at the Carnival
Of Flesh, goes there and hears this phrase chanted by the announcer. -[Announcer] Purge and Purify! Purge and Purify! Purge and Purify! That’s the same motto chanted by Edwidge Owens, the main antagonist of Election Year. In Season 2, there’s a cold open set in a company meeting for The Merrymakers Mask
Company, and we see their logo strongly resembles the style of masks used by the Russian tourists in Election Year. We also see that Purge Tourism trend in another cold open in Season 2. Later on in Season 2, there’s also a part where a van gets flipped over. I don’t know
If it’s a reference, but we’ve definitely seen it all before in Election Year. One of the trials Miguel has to overcome to get to Penelope is an obstacle course known as The Gauntlet. If the name sounds familiar, you may be thinking of the 2016 Halloween
Horror Nights maze The Purge: Gauntlet of Fear, which happened two years before the Gauntlet appeared in the show. Other than the fact that there’s actual danger in this Gauntlet, it really does feel a lot like a Halloween Horror Nights maze.
I would definitely be the camera guy wearing skull makeup, and this is actually the stunt co-ordinator of the show making a cameo. There are actually a lot of funny Purge groups in this season, my favorite of which is these
Guys who dress up as golfers for some reason. And when they take their victim away, I love how he does this giddy-up motion. Imagine being that guy. The Purge is produced by Blumhouse, who has always been known to put funny stuff into
Some of their horror movies. One example of this is Happy Death Day, which is referenced in the entrance area to Pete’s Cantina. Masks are checked at the door, and on the rack, you can spot the Baby mask worn by the antagonist in Happy Death Day.
The property is referenced again in Season 2, where college students Ben and Turner live in a frat house that seems to be the same as the sorority house from the Happy Death Day movies. I believe the campus they attend is the same as well.
It looks like Ben’s dorm room even has a poster for a similar mascot. In Happy Death Day it was the Bayfield Babies, this poster is for a team called New Orleans Baby Cakes. There are plenty of other references on the wall of masks throughout the night though,
Like the sheep mask and fox mask, from the 2011 movie, You’re Next, a mask that was worn by one of the Mercy Cult purgers in episode 1, the mask of Godhead, from The Purge: Anarchy, (more on that later). The mask shown on the sign appears to be the same mask worn by Polite
Stranger in the original Purge movie, and that mask actually appears on the rack in Episode 8. It’s not just the movies that are referenced though. This may be the Finders Keepers app mentioned on the NFFA website.
Of course, I can’t leave out The First Purge. I mean, I could, it’s my channel, but I’m not going to. One of the storylines follows a businesswoman named Jane, who looks out her window and sees the only building lit up on Purge night is a bank. This is part
Of the idea that The Purge is fueled by money. Jane works at an equity firm, and in a flashback to her job interview, she says the following. -[Jane] I’ve been following your firm since I read a profile in Forbes back when I was an undergrad.
This is the second time Forbes has come in this franchise, the first being on a police officer’s name badge in The First Purge. Side note, in Jane’s flashback we see her boss checking her out as she leaves… but she never sees him, so how does she have that
In her memory. It doesn’t make sense. There’s another flashback in the following episode, where Miguel and Penelope’s parents are offered money to stay home during The Purge. We can see the pamphlet that says Staten Island Experiment this is the same pamphlet we saw being handed out in The First Purge.
The First Purge isn’t the only movie to have this struggle of classes. Many of the entries make it obvious that the NFFA is power because they are rich and The Purge is all about making money. There’s actually a piece of graffiti in New Orleans that says 2 MUCH
THREL, which is a slang term for a rich person, so this is likely a form of propaganda against the NFFA. We see how their brainwashing of the American people has affected people when Jane’s employee Alison purges her co-worker in order to ensure a promotion. I’m not sure I understand the
Logic here. Sure, murder is legal on this night, but wouldn’t she still be fired for offing a co-worker? Anyway, Penelope is taken away by a group of purgers wearing nun outfits. Not sure if this is a thematic choice, given how some groups are starting to see purging as a religious
Act, thanks to NFFA propaganda, or just a result of this show coming out in 2018 and creepy nuns being really popular at the time. What’s equally unclear is if the anti-NFFA checkpoints set up in the streets are related
To the anti-NFFA group from Anarchy. All I can confirm, is that a couple of their members seem to be wearing berets, as some of the Anarchy resistance did. This headline seen at the end of Season 1 is also familiar if you’ve seen Anarchy, it warns of ‘Heavy Consequences for Purge Night “Revolutionaries”’.
Oh, here’s another funny part. -[Crowd] Wah haha hah. This is part of the aforementioned Carnival of Flesh, which is also where you’ll find probably the most hilarious mask in all of Purge. But the Carnival may have more sinister affiliations than you might have realized. The “O” in the logo is a Celtic Cross
Turned 45°. This is a symbol used by Neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members. It’s also displayed in the merch cart inside the letter “O” in shopping. The carnival also sells merchandise with KKK depictions. These racist groups have been known to work with the NFFA and take advantage of The Purge in the movies.
Penelope spends like three to four episodes captive at the carnival thanks to her vengeful ex-boyfriend Henry. Meanwhile, Rick and Jenna escape after the Purge party they are attending is attacked by revolutionaries. Then they get held at gunpoint at home, by their neighbor,
Ross. This part actually drives me crazy. It’s as if they don’t understand that there can be conflict in a story without someone holding someone at gunpoint. Especially since we just saw like 3-4 episodes of that kind of tension.
And then if you’re going to do it AGAIN almost immediately, at least make it make sense — like she’s about to shoot this dude, and the people standing behind him aren’t even gonna move? What if she misses? What if she doesn’t but she blows his brains
Into the crowd? Or the bullet could go right through him. Now before I move onto Season 2, there are a couple things present in the background all throughout Season 1 that I’ve yet to touch on. What if I put the Plus-head mask on over the Angry Abraham Lincoln mask… That’s kinda not bad! The New Founding Fathers of America have one practice that the originals never would have been able to: using technology for surveillance of the citizens. -[Jane] I forgot that you were the eavesdropping type, David.
-[David] You know I’m always watching and listening Jane. We saw this more than ever in the previous entry — The First Purge, where I pointed out the eyes that symbolize the always watching government. The TV series gives us way more of that.
In the Betancourts’ house, you’ll see large artwork in the hallway of a human eye. When they return home safely after the party I noticed another eye up above a painting near the front door. In Henry’s apartment during a flashback, he’s also got artwork of an eye, a very
Illuminati looking one at that. An interesting note here is that it says the word: Purity, which may go along with that often repeated phrase: Purge and Purify. -[Joe] I can Purge and Purify myself. Another note on this piece is that this eye actually has a sword going into it, a possible
Foreshadowing of what happens to Henry — his cornea is permanently damaged in a fight with Miguel. Jane’s Purge night is a crazy one with many destinations, one of which is a sexist human art gallery held by her boss, David Ryker. He too is the proud owner of some artwork
Of a big human eye. At the end of Season 1, everyone is brought together by the main antagonist, Joe Owens. Joe has been saving each of the main characters, because he wants to put them on trial, where they can either give a worthy confession, or be purged by Joe himself.
Joe is very much like Jigsaw, specifically, from the movie 2017 self-titled movie. Both characters go around capturing people who have wronged them, in order to try to force them to confess to their wrongdoing. Also, Eleanor is here, so, there’s that. Joe plans
His victims’ abductions by posting all the information he has onto a big wall, something we’ve seen in the Saw franchise in the past, we learn he’s extremely smart and good at math in a flashback and he even builds traps that try to account for every possible outcome.
They even share the similarity of having basic, non-suspicious American names. “Oh my God, Joe?” “Joe Owens?!” -[Carly] John? John Kramer?! Anyway, the reason I bring up Joe Owens with the eye motif, is because he too ends up getting
An eye poked out. When it comes to Joe though, I’m not entirely sure that he’s dead. In the final battle, Miguel shoots his bulletproof vest, shoots his knee and kicks him into the pool. We never get confirmation that Joe died, and I’ll circle back to that later in this video.
The last thing I have to hit on before fast forwarding to Season 2 is our crew reference easter eggs. If you’re new to this channel, filmmakers love to hide their own names in movies and apparently TV because we’re very egotistical.
It starts at the rehab center Penelope discharged from: Kantrow Rehabilitation Center is named after producer Alissa Kantrow. There’s a list of visitors at that rehab center that includes first AD Paul Uddo and production accountant Jeff Reynolds. The character Rick Betancourt is named after co-executive producer and writer Mick Betancourt. Pete’s Cantina
Has a poster for a jazz show by Neal Orillion, which happens to be similar to the name of the art director, Nealy Orillion. David Ryker shows off an art piece that he calls “an original Lemercier”. This is probably a reference to executive producer Sébastien K. Lemercier. During one of Joe’s
Trials in Episode 9, he tries to get a confession from someone who picked on him in high school, and shows a yearbook page. Most of the other student names on this page are crew. You can pause if you want to read them all.
Finally, there’s a flashback to the moment when Rick and Joe had their falling out. The words: McNight House are written on the whiteboard in the background, that’s a nod to cinematographer Kevin McNight. The motif of an eye as a symbol for government surveillance would continue in Season 2, and
There would be a lot more examples — almost as many as the amount of times a character expresses their dislike for this damn night! -[Papa Rico] I’m gonna try to sleep through this God-forsaken holiday.I hate this night. -[Tavis] Must be the night. -[Shane] It’s nice to officially meet you on this sh**ty night.
-[Joe] I hate this night! -[Charlie] This night corrupts everyone. -[Dante] This is their way of protesting this damn night. -[Axe] C’mon, let’s go find a place to wait out the rest of this f***ing night. “I just hate this night.” “God, this night. This night is…” “She knows what night it is.”
“This night has been a long one.” “I think this night has taken a toll on all of us.” “Maybe he’s just having a bad night.” “…but this night is relentless.” “I hate this night.” “This night just kind of makes me start thinking about what’s really important.”
“A baby would probably make this night even harder.” “She hated this holiday, she wouldn’t be outside.” “I’m done with this night.” “God I hate this holiday.” “I hate Purge night.” The first eye motif can be found on the necklace of Ben Gardner’s girlfriend, Kellen. There
Are many instances of eyes being present in the graffiti found around the city, whether it’s a random piece of plywood, on the bank, on a warehouse accompanied by the text: ‘I’m watchin you’, or in an alley. The presence of these eyes play an even more important
Role this season, where the plot literally revolves around the NFFA surveillance team, and areas with no cameras known as “dead zones” are very important for the main characters. The surveillance team is known as the NFFA’s visual analytics department, but most people have a different name for them.
-[Ryan] You’re government. -[Esme] Yes. I am. -[Ryan] Which department? -[Esme] Visual analytics.” -[Ryan] Eyes in the sky. Their office has computers with an animated desktop background. The logo says: New Founding Fathers of America — established 1984. Of course, they weren’t really established
In 1984, they were established in 2014, which you know if you’ve seen my Horror History episode on them. Later episodes do not contain this text. The 1984 is a reference to the novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, which is about a dystopian future government
Who controls the population through constant surveillance, much like the NFFA, who always have eyes on their citizens. ♪ Intense Music ♪ In the second episode of Season 2, Ben relieves his urge 2 Purge with The Purge video game in a kiosk… in the mall. He exits when another guy complains about how long he’d spent in there and sees that he’s wearing a shirt with three pairs of gorillas’ eyes.
Esme’s sister has a poster of a peacock feather in her room, which kind of looks like an eye, although maybe she’s just a Jimmy Eat World fan. Esme has a pillow in her own home with a giant eye on it.
The opening of episode 8 shows off a mask with one eye, perhaps a callback to Henry from Season 1. In the frat house, there is a beer pong rules board which also, for some reason, contains a pair of eyes.
The main antagonist of Season 2 is Ben, who loses his mind after nearly getting purged by a man in a Godhead mask. Many of you wondered in my Anarchy video if this is the same Godhead from Anarchy. That guy was black, and this guy is white, so I’m gonna say no, they’re
Not the same guy, but I guess creating this mask became somewhat of a Purge tradition, as you’ll recall, we also saw one in Season 1. Maybe the NFFA emblem posted next to his bed is a clue that he’s going to become evil.
I’m not sure why the Big Brain meme is here though, maybe it has something to do with Ben being an example of the findings of Prof. Adams’s study, that aggression on Purge increases aggression throughout the rest of the year.
-[Darren] So those brain scans… they show that violent acts can light up the pleasure centers of the brain like a drug. Especially those in the younger generation, those who grew up with the 28th ammendment. Ben listens to an audio program from Bobby Sheridan, the same speaker who inspired Joe
Owens in Season 1. At one point, he listens to the same recording that Joe had on in the Season 1 finale. -[Bobby] People will always surprise you when they don’t want to die. But when you embrace the Purge. When you commit to the healing power of it’s violence. Anything can happen.
Ben starts taking out victims off-purge, the first of which is a farmer, who is eventually found, but the cause of death is reported as heat stroke. I was having a little bit of trouble understanding why the NFFA would lie about this. It could be part of their
Plan to give people the impression that The Purge is working, that crime during the other 364 days a year is down. But then why be so strict about people whose crimes went past 7AM? Maybe they only want to admit crimes occur when they think they can catch the person
In order to make it look like nearly all criminals are caught, and since Ben took out the farmer in the countryside, there were no cameras on it. This could also explain why they let him off the hook after he admits to smoking marijuana.
If the public doesn’t know that a crime occured, it’s in the NFFA’s best interest to keep it that way. What I don’t understand is why that doesn’t make him a bigger suspect towards being the campus killer. The whole campus killer thing is honestly a pretty big plot hole. Ben is playing video
Games with his friend, Asian Andy. They’re using an XBOX One. I’ll excuse the use of a console that’s 22 years old in-universe, and just assume they are fans of retro games. What I can’t excuse, is the fact this is where Asian Andy is taken out. Ben lies about
Having been there. That means there are no cameras in the hallways of the dorms, even though we clearly see that there are cameras on campus in the first episode. -[Turner] This is awful. I feel bad even taking a picture. Demonetized!
Speaking of that first episode — I think there may be a big callback to the first movie. A man named Marcus finds himself stranded outside during The Purge and tries to get his neighbors to let him in, but nobody does. It seems very similar to the situation that
Dante Bishop was in in the first film. That’s not the only time that Marcus seems to be connected to the Purge movie that started it all, because his flashback scene takes us back 14 years to 2022, the same date that The Sandins had their home invaded by purgers.
This is also where we meet Plus Head. Kind of a minor role to justify selling masks, but I’ll take it. Plus Head can be seen rolling with his buddy: Run Mouth. Marcus has one more connection to the first movie though. He has dinner with his wife
Michelle, in what they believe could possibly be their last meal because it’s right before the next Purge. She is playing Dubussy’s Clair de Lune in the background. 🎵 Clair de Lune – Dubussy 🎵 -[Michelle] So if this is our last meal.
This is the same song we heard at the very beginning of the original, which accompanied the montage of purgers from previous years. Marcus and Michelle both have the same dinner idea in mind that night. -[Marcus] You did not cook. The night before Purge? -[Michelle] We had sushi on our first date, remember?
-[Marcus] Yeah, where do you think I stopped before I came home? That one feels a little too close to the anniversary shared by Nick and Amy in Gone Girl. -[Amy] It’s… we had that joke that our sex was too good for ordinary, so these are 2000 thread… We’re so cute.
Marcus realizes that someone is trying to purge him because of a bounty posted on the dark web. The site is called “Ivory Road”, a parody of “The Silk Road”, which was one of the first dark web drug trading sites. -[Marcus] Wait, so how do you know about this?
I know about that as a fan of the internet and internet history, not as a customer. Another important detail in this scene is the calendar app seen on this phone, which is one of only two a couple details that help confirm when the season takes place. We know
It’s before 2037, because Ryan’s drivers license that expires in late 2036 is still valid. But because it has to be after 2032, based on how far back the flashbacks go. That gives us a range of 4 possible years where it could take place, and this calendar only
Aligns with one of those — it’s 2036. Just don’t take the dates of birth here too seriously. This guy doesn’t look 55, but maybe people age more gracefully in the future. And apparently the headphone jack is going to make a comeback and… a tape recorder…? Seriously? I feel like the technology
Problem in The Purge is never gonna get fixed. But this Ivory Road account becomes something that Marcus would keep coming back to in order to try to catch whoever ordered his hit. He puts up a post of his own to try to find someone
Who can get him more information — one of the responses is spam, advertising “Cheap Boner pillz the NFFA doesn’t want you to have!” The final storyline follows a band of thieves and the NFFA agent whose computer screen is home to even more Things You Missed. ♪ Classical Music ♪ The Purge is a night where all crime is legal, but for whatever reason, the first four movies and the first TV season focus entirely on murder — no other crime is addressed, outside of just a tiny side character here and there.
Season 2 totally changes that, making it one of my favorite installments. We see bank robbery, conspiracy, treason and hacking. During the initial bank robbery scene, Tommy has a shirt that says “break the rules.” He breaks his gang’s code by going back for one more bag of money as the sirens are
Beginning to sound. This is what leads to him getting arrested, because he doesn’t make it out in time. He should have tried to make the argument that his foot was lifted off the ground. I mean how does this work anyway? Is it college rules or NFL? We need some clarity, James Demonaco.
Anyway, Tommy goes to jail for 1 year before his execution date on the next Purge. During his time in the clink, Ryan brings him a book. It’s the 1844 novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, about an innocent man who is wrongly, but deliberately imprisoned. The book ends
With one final message: all human wisdom is contained in these two words, ‘Wait and Hope’. This was Ryan’s way of telling him that if he holds on until Purge night, they may have a way of breaking him out. In the meantime, they also plan their heist for the next Purge.
-[Ziv] Our city attracts a lot of people on Purge night. Although it hasn’t been updated in a couple years now, this actually calls back to the NFFA website, that was used to promote each Purge movie. In 2014 for The Purge: Anarchy
Iteration of the site, they did a blog post about the top 5 Purge destinations, where New Orleans ranked number 3 in the country. I guess that held up for over a decade. It’s actually referenced again in the fifth episode, where Miami and New Orleans are hot tourism destinations during The Purge.
Part of Ryan’s plan for stealing the bank’s money is to let the jackal’s steal the money for them, and then steal it back later in the night. The jackals are thieves that steal from other thieves, so Ryan’s plan involves giving them a taste of their own medicine.
When he and Esme look up the jackal’s identities, I noticed some familiar names, like Trent Sarreal and Sam Bogh. These are also the names of Professor Adams test subjects from her experiment about the effect of purging on the human brain. The photos are different
Though… and the test subjects did not survive, so I think this is a mistake, like they accidentally used the name twice for minor characters. Season 2 is not void of crew reference easter eggs. Ryan has a flashback to his days on
The police force, where we we the locker next to his is labeled Federico, named after second unit director of photography Federico Veradi. During that same flashback, Ryan catches a surprise out in the field on Purge night. -[Ryan] Reynolds what the f*** are you doing out here?
I already brought up Jeff Reynolds. He was also a crew reference easter egg in Season Ryan’s director of training at the police academy was Amy Krebsbach, who was named after the truck costumer. There’s also an article written about one of Ryan’s heroic actions
As an officer. It’s written by James Crafton (that’s the production secretary) and there are mentions of names like Paul, Emily and Raul Uddo, all probably family members of Paul Uddo, the first AD who was also mentioned in Season 1.
The other article shown here mentions a gas station incident, where Ryan is named again, along with his superior, Andrea Ziv. Her character is named after writer and co-producer Krystal Houghton Ziv. The article mentions a couple more crew members: travel coordinator Callie Martin, second assistant director Ben Ledoux.
Esme then moves onto a letter that Ryan received from the mayor in 2010. It’s signed by a Colleen E Moody, who is also the script supervisor. There’s one other crew reference later on. Remember the part where Asian Andy raves about Dr. Updale’s book?
-[Andy] I’m halfway through Dr. Updale’s Foundations of the Experiment. Unauthorized. I’m kind of a history buff. -[Bonnie] NFFA History? -[Andy] Yeah. It was a best-seller. -[Kellen] Didn’t she kill herself after creating the first purge night?” -[Andy] No, that’s been debunked. She died Purging.
Not only does that explain exactly what the NFFA told the public after the events of The First Purge, but we see this book throughout the series. First on a poster, then Parker finds the book itself in Ben’s possession, where we see the author: M Martin, a reference
To the prop master Michael S Martin. There’s also a poster that can be spotted in town advertising for Purge: The Musical, a story of good vs evil. I wonder if that’s a sign of things to come. -[Ryan’s Mom] Why aren’t you in school? -[Ryan] It got cancelled.
Well that one hit home a little bit HARD. Not the first time the Purge has predicted a disaster either. When I did the Things You Missed episode of The First Purge, I pointed out this wall art of a boxer, and explained how it represents the character Nya. In the Frat House where
Ben tortures his fellow fraternity members there’s a portrait of a football player in a very similar style. Another callback can be seen when Ryan’s gang busts Tommy out of captivity. It seems the Mercy Cult bus from Season 1 has been repurposed, and is now used as the prisoner transport vehicle on Purge night.
Season 2 comes to a close as Ben truly becomes the new Godhead during the 2037 purge. He takes out most of his frat, but Parker survives. As Ben is hunting him, he’s hit by a car, and wakes up in a triage center.
When he comes to, the first thing he sees is a Jesus statue looking down on him. Perhaps this angers him, because he now sees himself as God, he doesn’t want to be looked down on by this religious figure. -[Ben] You’re just trying to play God. But you’re not God. I AM!
Marcus is able to sedate him and save the rest of the Triage Center, but Ben survives. In the final shots, he can be seen preparing for another Purge. It’s an interesting choice, and if my theory is correct, that means both major villains from the TV series, the new
Godhead and Joe Owens, both survive. In the scene where Dylan Tucker is securing his family during the Purge, we see him use an app based security interface. The UI is clearly the same as the interface of the Sandin Security system seen back in the first movie.
There have been many references to Sandin Security since then. The company is never mentioned by name here, but it’s clearly supposed to be the same system. To learn some of the interesting secrets hidden around The Yeehaw Purge, or as you may know it, The Forever
Purge, stick around to the end of this video. It’s the Purge! The Yeehaw Purge! I still can’t believe they didn’t call it that. Huge missed op. The Forever Purge doesn’t even make that much sense. Most of the characters in the movie call it The Ever After Purge. Not The Forever Purge.
So THE YEEHAW PURGE was written by series creator James Demonaco and directed by Everardo Valerio Gout, who had mostly worked in TV. His previous film was an award winner at the Mexican Academy of Film, so he was probably seen as a good choice to be able to direct
A movie with scenes that contain English and Spanish interchangeably. The use of language actually relates to one of our Things You Missed, so let’s get in — to the cosas que te perdiste. Early in the movie, we see the border wall between the US and Mexico, which now blocks citizens from being able to see into the other country, unlike the current wall which has slits. This is probably done to increase the feeling of division and tension between the
Two nations. It goes along with the graffiti seen later: Build bridges, not walls. It also allows people to deface the wall with graffiti, some of which is kind of impressive. This American flag has the hammer and sickle from the old USSR flag, suggesting that someone
Wants to see the US transition to communism. The government in power during the Purge movies is the NFFA, or New Founding Fathers of America. They are portrayed to be objectively evil, but they are clearly not the type of evil that subscribes to communism. For example,
The NFFA thrives on division between different levels of income, while communism looks to eliminate the free market entirely. So this symbol suggests the emergence of a new group, which we see before long. The opening titles show animated scenes of the USA, with each becoming corrupted with
Red splatters and scary imagery. One of these shows a good ol’ fashioned American barbecue, and the guests become corrupted with purge masks, one of which looks just like Kimmy’s mask from The Purge Election Year. Also, there’s one that I find funny. We see this street front with shops like Victoria’s
Bakery and Kyle’s Dress Boutique, but when it glitches out it just becomes Kyle’s DIE. Now that sounds like somewhere I would shop. We learn that the NFFA has been voted back into power again. And this is where I need
To pause the analysis for a little rant. The last movie chronologically before The Yeehaw Purge was The Purge Election Year, where we saw Senator Charlie Roan win the election, thus ending the NFFA’s reign of power. But at the very end, there’s an uprising.
– [TV announcer] We’re just now hearing reports about a few scattered incidents around the country where NFFA supporters are reacting violently to this defeat, they are burning cars, breaking windows, looting, attacking police officers — – And then it just ends, the movie ends. Then they did a prequel, then they did two
Seasons of the TV series, which both took place before Election Year. So all of this time, we’re waiting to see what happened after the election. Finally, they announce The… The Yeehaw Purge! And it looks like it’s going to be about groups who
Refused to stop purging. I thought it was gonna take place right after Election Year. But it’s not. It’s years later. President Roan would have been in power from 2040 to 2044. In the US you can serve a maximum of two 4-year terms, so if she was re-elected,
She’d last until 2048. Our only real clue about the date in The Yeehaw Purge is this poster for a Purge Week BBQ on Friday, March 19th. It doesn’t matter if Roan served one or two terms, the first time March 19th lands on a Friday is the year 2049. Yes, The Purge
Has now caught up to Blade Runner and San Francisco Rush. This is what future tech looks like in Blade Runner 2049. Here’s what it looks like in The Purge 2049. Transportation in Blade Runner. Transportation in Purge. I’m sure the real 2049 will fall somewhere in-between, but still, we’re getting scammed out of
Potentially cool sci-fi elements. Anyway, in America we ended up not having to wait for a Purge movie to show us what it looks like when people refuse to accept losing an election, and that is as much time as I’m willing to spend on that.
Our main characters this time are Juan and Adela, who are illegal immigrants looking to get away from the drug cartel in their home country. We see Adela making a great effort to learn English. Everything in their house is labeled with sticky notes containing
Both the English and Spanish words. Sink, dish, curtains, toaster, flower pot, plants, television, and others. She scolds Juan for not putting in the same effort that she does… – [Adela] Please, where are we? You need to practice your English!
– And she listens to an audio program that seems to teach her what to say if she ever gets caught. – Repeat after me. I was just visiting friends in Texas. – She’s even seen with a book called English Fast Track Learning For Spanish Speakers,
Though it would make more sense if the title of the book was in Spanish, considering the target audience wouldn’t understand English until after reading the book… The reason I bring all of this up is because the language barrier comes into play at the
End when Adela is captured and forced to call her people for help in order to lure them into a trap. She calls out in Spanish, and he demands she speak English so he can understand, but she refuses. As a result, her friends are able to save her. Usually in a movie,
The main character goes through a character arc, where a character is one way at the beginning and undergoes a change that allows him or her to overcome an obstacle. In The Purge, James Sandin learns that a stranger’s life is just as valuable as his family’s
And gives him a chance to live. In Anarchy, Leo Barnes realizes that revenge on his son’s killer will not make him feel better about the loss. Adela almost has like a reverse-character arc, because she basically goes back to the way she was before the movie. It feels kind of backwards.
Dylan has more of a traditional character arc. At the beginning wants his culture to stay separate from Mexican culture, and he’s envious of Juan’s cowboy skills. At the end, he has to work together with Juan and he finds that he is now the one crossing the
Border and integrating into Mexican society. In that sense, he’s actually a lot like Leo Barnes in Anarchy, who started off wanting to be a lone hunter, but ended up being saved by his new friends. There are a lot of loose homages to previous Purge movies. One example is Chiago Harjo.
Early on we see him on TV preaching the truth about how the Purge is not effective at releasing anger. Later on he meets with the main characters and helps escort them through danger. He’s filling the role of Carmelo Johns in Anarchy, or Dante Bishop in Election Year; the revolutionary
That our characters see on TV and later meetup with to receive assistance. By the way, his broadcast about how the Purge actually only increases anger, and does not decrease it, is an echo of the research done by Professor Drew Adams in The Purge: Season 2.
Chiago doesn’t specifically mention Professor Adams, but we can assume he is referencing her study, which the NFFA unsuccessfully tried to cover up. Like in past Purges, there is a lot more we can learn from looking at some of the small details hidden in the graffiti and artwork around the city. The immigrant character Adela works in a butcher shop. You may have thought about how this feels representative of The Purge, which temporarily turns the entire country into a butcher shop. In fact, the logo features two knives coming together, different, but also reminiscent
Of the clash of knives seen on the official NFFA seal which first appeared in Anarchy. This idea is further touched on at the beginning of The Purge. As everyone locks down we cut from the ranch, where all the cattle are herded together in the dark, to the passengers on
The bus full of potential purge victims. It’s very symbolic of how human lives are treated like cattle in this world. The bus, by the way, says Lemercier Public Schools on the side. It’s named after one of the producers, Sebastien K Lemercier, and this isn’t the first time there’s been
A Purge easter egg to reference him. –[David] This right here, is an original Lemercier. – Overall, the NFFA takes a back seat this time thanks to the rise of the radical group, The Real Patriots of America. I’ve talked a lot in my Purge videos about how the NFFA
Is always associated with the color blue, which matches the color of the blue baptisias. In the world of The Purge, people put these flowers out to show support for The Purge. We only see one example in this movie, maybe a sign that the NFFA is losing favor.
On the contrary, the New Patriots of America logo is red, they probably made that choice so they can be viewed as enemies of the NFFA. I also noticed that the emergency broadcast screen is red again. They have also reinstated immunity for government officials ranking 10. Guess they didn’t
Like their President getting killed too much in Election Year and decided to roll that one back. We don’t see much of the blue baptisias this time, but there’s a new flower of importance: the red roses. Our characters are told to follow the roses if they get into trouble
In America. Being red, they symbolize safety, whereas the blue flowers symbolize violence. I’ve talked before about how this is the opposite of what you’d expect, which is probably why the NFFA chose blue, to deceive people. These can be seen throughout the city.
It’s established that they guide our characters to safety, but what isn’t immediately obvious is how directions are hidden in each painting. This one is part of a mural with a one way sign, telling them to go right. The next one
Has a grim reaper pointing to the left. This poster shows a Lucha Libre wrestler pointing up and to the right. The stem of this rose extends into an arrow pointing left. All of these signals lead them to the neon rose at the end.
There are other relevant pieces of street art. When everyone arrives at the safe zone, I noticed artwork of a giant pair of eyes with a gunshot in between. The Purge TV series featured lots of eye graffiti as a symbol of the NFFA’s dystopian surveillance. This
Area is essentially the new underground triage center from Election Year. The intercutting between it and the more comfortable conditions of the ranch family relaxing at home show how The Purge affects different social classes much more than others, an idea that has been heavy in the series ever since the first movie.
It seems the Florida man meme is one of the many things that hasn’t changed by 2049. The line that the broadcaster leaves us with before going off the air is also a significant reference. – [broadcaster] Good night, Texas. And good luck. It’s a nod to the 2005 movie, Good Night and Good Luck.
–[Edward] Good night, and good luck. Yeah, that’s the one. I talked earlier about the communist symbol appearing on the American flag on the border wall. Good Night and Good Luck is all about a group of journalists who try to expose the truth about the American politician Joseph McCarthy, who was making
Reckless and unsubstantiated accusations of communism around the time of the Cold War. The trailer for Good Night and Good Luck describes America during this period as a “a nation terrorized by its own government”, certainly, not a far cry from what’s going on in The
Purge, only under very different circumstances. Good Night and Good Luck deals with the integrity of the media, which is not really an aspect of this particular Purge film. There’s no journalist character in the movie. The only somewhat relevant beat is when the NFFA announces
That anyone displaying the Ever After Purge flag will be arrested immediately, which of course would be unconstitutional in the United States, because it would violate freedom of speech. A lot like how McCarthy tried to silence his critics. The journalism aspect might be
Relevant if the filmmakers are trying to give themselves a pat on the back; essentially saying that they are making a brave statement through their art. The last few Purge films have gotten more and more pointed towards aspects of the real life USA political situation. Again, not really interested in getting into that.
So let’s talk about franchise callbacks. As this Purge begins, we see scenes of purging happening around the city, as we often do. Here there are a bunch of men tracking victims with dogs, as seen during Anarchy. This dude gets dragged behind a motorcycle, something
We saw in The First Purge. Then there’s this firing squad set up right outside a church. The firearms go off right as the church bells strike midnight. This is an example of Midnight Purge Mass, which we were first introduced to in The Purge: Election Year.
The saddest part about 2049 is not the Purge, but the fact that we still don’t have protected bike lanes. Get it together America! Later on there’s also an encounter with this guy with a swastika on his face, as kind of a spiritual successor to Earl Danzinger, the neo-nazi from Election Year. He refers
To the gunshot sounds all around them as “homegrown music from the heartland.” I think he’s meant to signify the attitude of some gun enthusiasts; the idea that it becomes a recreational activity, like listening to music, and they may lose sight of how dangerous these weapons actually are.
We meet this guy inside the police van which is rounding up Ever After Purgers. In typical Purge fashion, this van gets rolled over. That’s basically tradition at this point in this franchise, it happened in Election Year and in Season 2. One tradition they seemed
Not to uphold, however, was having a character named Sabien. Then there’s this: Yes, they really did try to make a jumpscare out of literally just a horse walking. LOL. Then we’ve got my favorite guy. His name’s Kirk. The Yeehaw Purge! Then there are some not so great guys, like this man in the high vis vest. Not exactly great for sneaking around
During Purge. He also uses a mallet as his weapon, even though it seems very easy to get guns in this world. Guess this dude’s playing on hard mode. As were the motorcyclists who thought they could challenge a big truck. Not a battle you’re gonna win.
The characters realize their best bet is to seek asylum by crossing the border back into Mexico. I’m not gonna talk about the Dracula, Frankenstein and Psycho appearances, because they’re not even references. They’re just there. But 99K USD is a damn good deal for
A luxury condo, especially considering inflation by 2049. What a deal. I wonder if you can walk from there to the festival in Central Park. Better check website.com to find out. One of the things I like to do is scan all the graffiti in the Purge films and see if
There’s anything interesting written. In my video on Anarchy, I talked about how they took a shot at Hollywood film producer David Neustatder, by making a man named David Neustatder be one of the Purge victims found in the street. In this one, there’s a message that reads:
Kill David Dead. There’s probably no connection… but if there is, wow! They’re still not over this are they? The mystery deepens. Anyway, the Native American Chiago is gonna help them get across the border, but not before we stumble upon a few more eye opening details. ♪ Mysterious Music ♪ An interesting detail about the finale is that The Forever Purgers don’t need masks anymore, but a couple of them continue to wear them anyway. I think it’s generally accepted that the purpose of the masks is to hide the Purgers’ identities, because
After The Purge, you gotta go back to work, and even people that participated are ashamed. But with the Ever After Purge, they aren’t planning on ever going back to normal. Perhaps some were confident that it really would last forever, while others were not.
But they do have these hats though. How much you want to bet these are the same hats that they gave the cast and crew? We hear a new chant from the Purgers. -[Purgers] Purge and Purify, ever after. – [Crowd] EVER AFTER!
Actually, it’s more of a twist on an old classic. We first heard chants of Purge and Purify in Election Year. These anti-NFFA radicals have taken a motto from the NFFA, and twisted it into something of their own. I think it’s meant to be a parallel to groups
That latch onto one political idea and fester into their own little cult, or whatever. The battle rages on. This guy thinks he’s in a Legend of Zelda game with the bomb arrows. As our characters get closer to the border, the purgers close in on them. There’s a Wilhelm Scream. If you aren’t familiar, the Wilhelm Scream is a funny sound effect found in many, many movies, usually when a character falls down or gets shot or something. It’s named after a character named Private Wilhelm from the 1953 Western film, The Charge At Feather River, which used it over and over. You can find compilations on YouTube that show just how many movies, shows and games have sampled this sound. So I was absolutely shocked that this is the first Wilhelm Scream I’ve pointed out on Things You Missed. I guess it kind of makes sense… it’s a very
Silly sound effect, so it’s probably not that likely to be used in horror movies. This is a horror channel. I guess it’s fitting that the sound became famous in a Western, and I’m introducing it in this Purge movie with Western elements. We should start a Wilhelm counter. We’ll see if we ever revisit that. Anyway, the characters make it across the border, and Dylan and Cassie are able to safely have their baby. –[Cassie] It’s a girl. Do you want to hold your daughter? I’m sorry, WHAT? What the **** is going on here? Do they not know how this works?
Did they just run out of pink hats? How do you run out of pink hats? This was supposed to be the last movie in the franchise, but it answers nothing and it really just raises more questions. In fact the first thing we hear during the credits is “this isn’t over.”
–[Reporter] What will the new America look like when this all ends? – ♪ This isn’t over! ♪ – [Zac] It wasn’t long before James Demonaco suddenly had an idea for a new Purge movie, and reportedly, it went into development. It’s pretty clear now that we were lied
To about The Yeehaw Purge being the last movie, but honestly, I’m kind of glad. This next one will allegedly bring Frank Grillo back. He’s the guy that plays Leo Barnes. That’s something that I wanted for this movie, and it wouldn’t be right to close things out
Without a proper conclusion to the Leo Barnes trilogy. I’d also like to see the adult Charlie Sandin, the kid from the first one. He’d be in his 40s now. He’s a character who lived most of his life in The Purge era, lost his father in The Purge at a young age
And has been shown to be selfless the last time we met him. He could be a useful character to turn to as the country continues to fall apart. As for villains, Joe Owens and Godhead 2.0 from the TV series are, as far as we know, still alive. They are among the most powerful
Villains we’ve ever seen and they could easily be side villains that work alongside one final threat. I am probably hyping this up too much, we’ll probably JUST get Frank Grillo, but when The Purge returns so will I. With another episode of Things You Missed. Click the playlist on
The left for all of my Purge analysis’ and remember to subscribe to CZsWorld for new horrors every week, ring the deathbell and select all notifications and I’ll see you in the next one. Assuming we both survive. (spooky dance music)
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