Your weekly break-down of a popular movie or television episode to see what a screenwriter—or any writer, for that matter—can take away from what’s on screen: what worked, what didn’t, and how you can use what’s popular to craft better stories.

It’s trigger warning time, so get ready to be offended – regardless of where on the political spectrum you lie.  That’s the point of Blumhouse’s latest release, The Hunt – a razor sharp, ultra-bloody and social justice spin on modern horror.

What first appears to be a tale of Red States vs. Blue States turns out to be subversive satire that’s more fun than it has any right to be. It’s plenty of old-school horror tropes meet new school references in a battle royale for the Trump era.

This is a movie made specifically to push buttons (which it succeeded at before it was even released. Read about that here. And here. And here.).  Having been pulled from its initial release in theatres over outrage drummed up before anyone had even seen the movie, the panic boycotting was a little premature. The Hunt is an equal opportunity offender, it turns out.

 Still, this gruesome and giddy story by features plenty for screenwriters to take note of.  So, grab your pens, your knives and your copy of Animal Farm.  Let’s hunt for some screenwriting takeaways.

*WARNING: Spoilers Ahead! Trigger Warning! Sensitive Material!*

1. Satire will never die.
   The plot of The Hunt is simple. A bunch of rotten, self-righteous liberal elites kidnap a bunch of Red State, middle Americans (they call them ‘deplorables’ right in the first scene) and they take these everyday folks to a giant manor in the woods of Croatia and hunt them down with guns, grenades, knives and arrows. But, it turns out that the Red State Americans are no better – they’re conspiracy hatemongers, gun nut whackjobs, big game hunters, sexists, racists, etc. Everyone is terrible and (almost) everyone dies. The end.

   OK, take a deep breath. This is an offensive movie.  It really is. It goes for the jugular, daring you to turn it off or pass judgement.  But relax, it’s satire. What The Hunt is doing is nothing new.

   Satire is a style of storytelling used to criticize, expose and comment on society, people and events. Fictional characters are stand ins for real people.  It points out corruption, stupidity and shortcomings.  Because the characters aren’t real, a storyteller can avoid things like slander, libel and copyright infringement.  Everything from Don Quixote to South Park is satire. The Daily Show, Gulliver’s Travels, Tropic Thunder, Catch-22, American Psycho, Weird Al Yankovic.  All satire. It’s a style of storytelling that leans on irony, juxtaposition, analogy, parody, and double entendre to drive its point of view home. The Hunt succeeds as pitch-black, controversy baiting, wicked satire for the short-attention spans of today.  It opens with trigger words, jumps into horrible violence and doesn’t let up for ninety minutes. Plenty of satires before have flirted with violence and hatred – The Hunt is just the latest take to us this storytelling tool. The scary thing? Satires tend to have a long shelf life.  They live on past their contemporaries, both as commentary and reflections of the time they were made.  So, The Hunt may matter more looking back more than it does now.

2. Modernize A Classic.
   The Hunt draws heavily from The Most Dangerous Game, a short story by Richard Connell, first published in 1924. It’s a pulpy story of a rich man who hunts people on his private island. Movies like The Naked Prey, Hard Target, The Hunger Games, Surviving the Game and Battle Royale all deal with humans hunting humans. It’s a classic trope, reinvented for each age in which the story is retold. Taking familiar story concepts and building a brand-new point of view gives a screenplay that subtle familiarity every executive and producer wants (even if they claim they want 100% originality). Just like The Hunt has nothing to do with a Russian aristocrat who hunts shipwrecked people on his island, movies like this year’s The Invisible Man rethought the H.G. Wells’ classic to tell a story about domestic abuse. The Hunt uses The Most Dangerous Game as its spiritual inspiration to tell a story of modern politics and ideology. You can use the past as a building block for your ideas in the future. FYI, if you are looking for a list of what kinds of classic characters and stories are floating out there in the public domain, take a look here.

3. Play against expectations when you can.
   The Hunt knows what clichés and tropes we are expecting, and does a great job at subverting our expectations – or, more accurately, it blows them into gory, bloody chunks. Let’s list a few areas where The Hunt subverts the standard horror movie playbook:
   Instead of slowly revealing what is going on, the movie explains its plot right in the first scene, never really bothering to hold back on the reveal. The Hunt’s largest, bloodiest scene happens right around ten minutes in – not in the finale (in actuality, the finale fight is great – but it’s by far the most predictable part of the movie). At the top, we are treated to a semi-comedic blood bath where half the cast is killed off like red shirts. After that, well known talent like Ike Barinholtz, Sturgill Simpson, Ethan Suplee and Justin Hartley (Kevin from This is Us) each appear like they may be our leading men, behaving like the heroes of the film – only to be dispatched within minutes via knives, bombs and poison gas. It’s a real carpet pull, and does an amazing job at keeping us guessing as to who will survive.

   When we finally do lock down who we’re rooting for, it turns out our hero is a female Clint Eastwood type of few words, while our head bad guy (Hilary Swank) doesn’t really show her actual face until the final showdown. It’s anchored by two strong women. There isn’t a competent man in the whole bunch – and only a few women have any competency (though the movie never devolves into man-hating, so calm down).  The Hunt knows what you’re expecting, and refuses to give it to you.

4. Making both sides terrible makes it harder to care.
   So, after the smoke and the blood clear from a show-stopping first act, The Hunt turns into a high-stakes chase through the woods. Character-wise, we find ourselves stuck rooting for terrible deplorables or even more terrible rich folks. It’s a clever plot point, but it lacks the emotional stakes that a good story needs. It’s a bit of torture porn. See, once your pace slows down, it is tough for a screenwriter to keep us invested if the characters are just, fundamentally, not that likable.  Sure, some of us will stay around for the gore, the special effects and the twists.  But we keep coming back for the characters. The screenwriters of The Hunt - Nick Cuse & Damon Lindelof (Watchmen and Lost, respectively) - have a solution for this character problem.

   Enter Crystal. Betty Gilpin is the star of this movie, and she nails it.  She plays Crystal (though villain Hilary Swank has decided to name her Snowball from Animal Farm, resulting in the movie’s most thoughtful dialogue as two characters lay dying.) Crystal is a twitchy, quiet and unassuming former US military member who balances confidence and confusion with a roll of the eyes. She might be the coolest action hero since John Wick.  What’s more, she doesn’t show up in any meaningful way until about twenty minutes in (another subversion, see takeaway #3).  She does what I thought would be impossible for this movie; she made me care. Somebody give her an action franchise. Gilpin takes The Hunt’s B-Movie material and elevates it, which might be the greatest plot twist of all.

5. A weak why can ruin things.
   As a story unfolds, eventually, your audience is going to want to know the “why.” It’s the reason, the motivation, the purpose. You can occasionally get away with not giving a “why” (i.e., we don’t need to know why the shark in Jaws eats people.) – but most people will want a hint or at least a bit of an explanation.  The problem is, a weak “why” can demolish your audience’s good will. It will make us throw our popcorn at the screen or change the channel. At the very least, we will roll our eyes and feel cheated. Not something a storyteller wants.

   The Hunt has some really smart things to say about hypocrisy, violence and the political divides that separate us.  It’s clever and subversive and nasty and funny.  But… great satire can’t save a weak “why”.  In this film, once we find out the motivations of Hilary Swank and her hunters – it turns out they’ve lost their jobs because of an insensitive text message chain and from PC outrage culture on the right. Therefore, these millionaires/billionaires decided to take revenge by having a human hunt using the people they feel have wronged them.  So… a text message leads to killing rural conservatives?  It’s a jump, and a pretty weak one at that.  To top it off, the liberal elites aren’t even regularly killing Red State folks who’ve wronged them – this is their first time. Their incompetence borders on Three Stooges-levels of stupid.  This robs the bad guys of any sort of expertise.  In short, these hunters have the aim of stormtroopers, and the common sense of them, too.  Even the reason poor Snowball has been taken turns out to be a misspelling, sort of diluting the plot down to simple mistakes with grave consequences.

   But... perhaps that is really the message of The Hunt – that stupid little things we do can spiral out of control and make us hate other people we don’t know for no reason whatsoever.  We’ve all heard the message that we’re more alike than we are different – and The Hunt backs that up with its ultimate message: We are all alike.  We’re all idiots. Idiots who deserve what we get.  Hey, you didn’t think this was a Hallmark movie, did you?

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Final Takeaway: Relax, Karen. It’s satire. Gen X types, swing voters and nihilists will find plenty to love in this funny, ugly take on classic source material.  The first amendment was rarely this gruesome – and sensitive types will surely be disgusted or outraged. But maybe that’s the point.