They usually offer a face for the controlling force, like Battle Royale’s ex-teacher Kitano or Hunger Games host Caesar Flickerman. Battles royale interrogate how society and its structures control us, with rules, rewards, and punishments. These movies invoke another classic story, The Most Dangerous Game, about a shipwreck survivor who must survive until dawn while being hunted by an ultra-rich murderer.īoth the battle royale genre and the dangerous-game genre are fundamentally about games, but they differ in their approach to the villain.

That all holds true for Squid Game, but the show also incorporates elements from other recent horror movies, like Ready or Not, Escape Room, and The Hunt. They invoke the same horror inherent in Shirley Jackson’s controversial short story The Lottery, which says tradition, culture, and other controlling forces in our lives can convince us to do terrible things - things which seem perfectly natural until they happen to people we care about. These stories are usually set in alternate realities where unimaginable violence is routine. In most battle royale media, from the genre-naming Battle Royale to Hunger Games and The Purge, the overall story arc is about testing the game’s boundaries and exploiting its vulnerabilities. And the fact that she isn’t in this case says a lot about Hwang’s intentions with the show. But in most battle royale or dangerous-game stories, the skills and defiance Sae-byeok demonstrates would have marked her as the clear winner. To be clear, I don’t think Sae-byeok “deserved” the games’ prize money more, or that Gi-hun or anyone else deserved to lose either the game or their lives. In almost any other version of this story, she would have - but Squid Game writer-director Hwang Dong-hyuk refuses to challenge the game structure at the story’s core, so she, like almost everybody else, is lost to the game. If not, I thought she would at least escape, maybe taking the hapless Gi-hun along with her. But very early on, I began to think Kang Sae-byeok, the savvy loner formerly of North Korea, would win. Squid Game, Netflix’s surprise new horror hit, is clearly focused on one person from the start: Gi-hun, the kind-hearted gambler who eventually wins the titular game.

Ready or not game reddit