Richard Connell’s short story "The Most Dangerous Game" created the now-common trope in which humans are hunted by other humans for sport. It is one of the most influential and adapted short stories of all time, having gone through countless iterations in both film and television since its initial release in 1924. Naturally, new adaptations of "The Most Dangerous Game" make changes from the original over time. However, with this story, in particular, each new adaptation always alters to reflect the anxieties of the decade in which it was made. The original short story’s questions about the imbalances of power, the morality behind different kinds of violence, and investigation into what makes us human, make the story adjustable for any fraught period of time. For the 20th and 21st centuries, its endless iterations serve as a mirror for quickly changing but always troubled times.

Connell’s original story is about big-game hunter Sanger Rainsford who, after accidentally falling overboard his ship, washes up on an island owned by an eccentric Russian aristocrat named General Zaroff. Zaroff is initially very hospitable to Rainsford, welcoming him to his château, which is surrounded by the thick jungle that covers the rest of the island. Zaroff is a big game hunter himself and, having heard of Rainsford’s hunting prowess, looks forward to hunting with him. He explains that having grown bored with killing animals, after becoming so skilled that even the most dangerous animals are no match for him, he has turned to trapping men on his island and hunting them for sport. Man, for him, is the most dangerous game because Man can reason – making the hunt more interesting.

He gives all of his human prey food, clothing, a knife, and a three-hour head start; he himself uses only a small-caliber pistol. If the person being hunted survives for three days, he has won. So far, no one has ever beaten him. Rainsford is horrified and refuses to hunt with Zaroff. Zaroff says that in that case, he will hunt Rainsford. Like all other victims, if Rainsford refuses, he will be handed over to be dealt with by Zaroff’s burly servant, Ivan. In the jungle, Zaroff finds him easily but decides to let him go in order to make the game more fun.

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Image via RKO Radio Pictures

The next day, Rainsford hunts Zaroff back, creating intricate traps such as a Malay man-catcher and a Burmese tiger pit. When Zaroff brings out Ivan and his hounds, Rainsford uses his knife to create another trap that kills Ivan, and leaps from a cliff into the sea. That night, Rainsford is waiting for Zaroff in his bedroom: he swam around the island to sneak into the château without the dogs noticing. Zaroff congratulates him on winning the game; however, Rainsford insists the game is not over until only one of them is left. That night, Rainsford enjoys sleeping in Zaroff’s bed, implying that he won the duel and that Zaroff is dead.

The first film adaptation of The Most Dangerous Game was made in 1932, and it was quite faithful to the original story. The main differences reflect a certain Hollywoodification that was common in book-to-movie adaptations of the Golden Age; this included changing Sanger Rainsford’s name to the more every man-sounding “Bob Rainsford,” as well as hefting up the cast and providing Rainsford with a love interest/damsel in distress named Eve (played by King Kong’s Fay Wray). However, the story also makes sense for a depression-era audience, placing considerable emphasis on Zaroff’s wealth as he hunts his prey.

In this way, it displaces the audience’s difficulties from real life onto a fictional medium in which they are defeated and replaced with a happy ending. Similarly, the 1940s saw the dawn of adaptations specifically tied to the Second World War. The 1945 version, A Game of Death, changes Russian aristocrat Zaroff to German Nazi Erich Kreiger. Even throughout the 1950s, films preyed on the post-war public concern that even after their defeat, Nazis were hiding in every corner of the earth, evading justice and waiting to rise again. Run for the Sun (1956) features not only a Nazi war criminal as its villain, but a British traitor secretly working for the Nazis; it takes place in the Mexican jungle, and instead of hunting the protagonists for sport, the Nazis are hunting them so that they don’t escape and reveal their location. These post-war anxieties manifest themselves in adaptations of Connell’s story even up to 1961’s Bloodlust!

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Image via Crown International Pictures

The 60s and 70s saw Richard Connell become part of the porn and sexploitation genre. Either the woman is the hunter and hunts a group of men, or the hunted consists entirely of women who are being hunted by men. Such films include Confessions of a Psycho Cat (1968), The Woman Hunt (1972), and The Suckers (1972). The genre came about as a result of the relaxation of censorship in film and also tended to take advantage of events in the public consciousness. "The Most Dangerous Game" themes of inequality and violence held up against the sexploitation adaptations’ tendencies to pit women and men against one another, making them appear reflective not only of decreased censorship rules but also of the sexual revolution and its effect on the public consciousness. The story’s additional exploration of man’s separation from animals, as well as different attitudes towards violence, easily translates to the exploration of alternating attitudes towards sex as well.

In the 80s, "The Most Dangerous Game" grappled with the aftermath of the Vietnam War: Deadly Prey (1987) features a Vietnam War veteran named Mike Danton as its Rainsford character. In what must be a terrifying scenario for those who have fought and survived a war, Danton is kidnapped while taking out the trash in his home and taken to the forest to be hunted. In the 90s, the concern shifted more to homelessness – 1993’s Hard Target features a homeless veteran as its protagonist, and the Rainsford character Surviving the Game (1994) is homeless as well. As in the 1930s with the Great Depression, Connell’s framework allows for a story in which society’s disenfranchised defeat a villain who is symbolic of the social cause for their oppression.

The 21st century has seen a more speculative turn in Richard Connell’s narrative–and also one that is less easily recognizable as an adaptation of his story. For the past 20 or so years, the tropes created by "The Most Dangerous Game" have been used to create some of the most famous and most popular entries in the genre of dystopian fiction. The Hunger Games has been called the derivative of Battle Royale; and while this is true, both are indebted to the ideas in Connell’s story.

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Image via Lionsgate

One of the things that makes these dystopian novels and films so interesting is that, while they do feature humans being hunted by other humans, their group dynamic is not the part of the story that is reminiscent of the relationship between Zaroff and his prey. Since, in both books, the hunters are also the hunted, it may seem as though there simply is no relationship equivalent to the characters in the original story. However, in The Hunger Games, even though the elites of the Capitol are not actively killing the tributes, it is they who are the real hunters, having forced the tributes into a situation in which they have to kill each other.

The same, in Battle Royale, is true of the students and the Japanese government. The government takes the protagonists’ class to an island for the titular “Battle Royale,” and much like in "The Most Dangerous Game", they have three days to fight to the death before a victor emerges. While in the 20th century, the Zaroff character always remained an individual who was merely representative of societal ill, dystopian media such as Battle Royale and The Hunger Games made a revolutionary decision to visually replace the one man with a collective evil, making it even more terrifying by how removed it is from the violence it forces out of its victims. The popularity and themes of Battle Royale and The Hunger Games later manifest themselves again in Squid Game. Similarly, in this show, though the players kill one another, it is the wealthy foreigners who watch the games for fun, the games’ organizers, and the society that allows its members to fall into such desperate poverty who are the real villains of the piece.

Ali, Sang-woo, Gi-hun and Sae-byeok togetherin the naptime riot

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That "The Most Dangerous Game" continues to be adapted to this day exhibits what makes it a classic in the first place. That it lends itself to so many time periods and still remains relevant despite a rapidly changing world, speaks to the enduring nature of its various themes. No matter what time we live in, the question of why some kinds of violence are acceptable and others are not will always be relevant. Zaroff doesn’t consider what he’s doing murder, especially compared to warfare. He additionally says to Rainsford “I refuse to believe that so modern and civilized a young man as you seem to be harbors romantic ideas about the value of human life.” Why are some people’s lives treated with more respect than others?

Squid Game asks this question with regard to the poor, films from the 80s with regard to war veterans cast aside by society once their duty is complete, and so on for every other era. With every passing year, we will always wonder what it means to be modern, and what separates us from the past. "The Most Dangerous Game" is a story about empathy, terror, and perseverance in the most trying moments of a person's life. That’s some serious drama; the kind that movie-going audiences live for. Connell’s original story and its string of countless adaptations show us that even though times and fears are constantly changing, we and the ideas we respond to do not.