Despite being the fifth movie in the decade-long franchise, The Forever Purge is set to be the most different of the bunch. And that’s by design. Creator James DeMonaco knew that after four movies and two seasons of a TV series, the saga needed a jolt. And not just with the premise, but also with the look and locale.
The Forever Purge follows Purge America as an underground movement of hate-mongers, spanning coast-to-coast, refuses to stop their Purge carnage after the morning sirens bellow. It becomes pure madness. And Ana de la Reguera’s Adela, and her husband Juan (played by Tenoch Huerta), get trapped right in the middle of the carnage and chaos near the Texas border. In a huge shift for the movies, no one is safe come morning.
We spoke to both DeMonaco (who also directed the first three movies in addition to creating the series and writing all of them) and star de la Reguera (Army of the Dead) about how The Forever Purge is unlike any other Purge movies fans have seen and whether or not it’s actually the final Purge movie.
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The Forever Purge, and the Future of the Purge Movies
So is this a curtain call for the franchise? Reports from a few years back, all the way up to ones from a few months ago, had pegged this fifth installment as the big ending. But now, things seemed to have changed.
“If you asked me this four months ago, I probably would have said it was the end,” DeMonaco explained. “I would have been like, ‘Yeah, I think this is the final one.’ And then I woke up, for better or worse, with a new idea three-and-a-half months ago and I pitched it to everyone and I think it’s another way to flip it. It would be taking America in a new direction. If they wanted it, that is. If the audience wants it, we’ll be ready to give it. But they have to tell us they want it before we go ahead.”
The Forever Purge stands apart from the Purge pack in many ways. First, it’s set in a rural setting, far from the bustle of the city. Secondly, a lot of the movie’s violence takes place in broad daylight, which is a new angle for this dystopian horror series. DeMonaco stated that he wanted this movie to be an outlier from the get-go.
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“I thought, ‘If we’re going to go into a fifth movie, it has to just look different, it has to be different visually,'” he said. “It was just one of those things where you’re thinking outloud to yourself and I was like, ‘We’ve got to get out of the city. We’ve got to get into a more rural place and we have to go to the desert.’ I kept seeing the desert in my head. I saw horses and ranches and just weird images popped in my head. I kept seeing the colors orange and yellow. So all these things were there early on, even before story came up. I remember telling Sebastian [K. Lemercier], the producer, that visually this movie can’t look like the previous movies. We’ve done four night Purges.
“And then the other thing, the next step, was I said, ‘We’ve got to flip the Purge on its head,'” he added. “We just can’t do another Purge night. We have to flip it.’ And that became the idea of let’s keep it going. This is an uncontainable virus of hatred and violence that can’t be contained to just 12 hours. This was kind of where we were off and running.”
Daytime Purge, Neverending Purge
Ana de la Reguera also agreed that switching the Purge location to a place we’d never seen in the films before was a great idea.
“It’s very interesting to have a Purge movie in a Border Town first of all,” she said. “Also in Texas. Texas is such an American and Mexican place. It has the most contrast. It’s super American and also it used to be Mexico. There are these two worlds that, in a Purge situation, are going to have to work together. They have to become a team. It’s people who maybe don’t really like each other, or you wouldn’t naturally put together, but in this case they’re going to be working together for the same goal.”
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Don’t expect de la Reguera’s Adela to take the Forever Purge laying down though. Having fled the Cartel in Mexico, she can carry herself in a crisis and handle herself in a shoot-out. “She is very prepared for a Purge because of her background,” the actress added. “Because of how she lived in Mexico and what she did in Mexico. Having to defend herself in her country has made her strong and independent and not afraid of having to go out and confront bad guys.”
Shifting Purge violence into the daylight adds a new terrifying texture to the franchise. The morning of March 22 used to bring peace and safety but now it just brings more mayhem. It’s something DeMonaco definitely wanted to explore.
“There’s something odd about purging during the day that it just makes it more scary,” he said. “We’ve gotten so used to the purging happening at night that it became normalized. So once we broke that, and broke the parameters of nighttime, it became, ‘Shit, man, anything goes.’ All bets are off. If they’re doing this during the day, out in the open, this country’s fucked. So this country becomes like a parade ground of madness. I’ve always said it’s more like a zombie movie. It’s just people running wild. This uncontainable hatred and violence just ripping through the country.”
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The Purge series has always been a twisted look at the dark side of America, but how does it feel for DeMonaco when his movies actually become… predictive? “It’s shocking and sad,” he revealed. “You know, even after we previewed the film, and this is the strangest thing… we previewed the film in March, two months after January 6, and people at the preview thought we shot a lot of the movie after January 6. “‘You had to have shot it afterwards,’ they said. And I was like, ‘No, no, we shot it a year-and-a-half ago.’ It’s insane that this insane conceit I came up with almost 20 years ago is at all parallel to the world we live in. It’s incredibly disturbing that we live in a society where we can have parallels to this insane idea of The Purge.”
The Forever Purge premieres in theaters on Friday, July 2, 2021.
