Every Movie In The Purge Franchise Ranked From Worst To Best
"The Purge" and its four sequels represent perhaps the greatest Trojan horse in modern horror cinema.
It starts with that indelible high concept premise: a near-future America run by a totalitarian regime that has seemingly eliminated crime by allowing crimes to be legal for one night a year. Purge Night. A chance for interested folks to work out ... everything they need to work out. But the thinly veiled subtext of the first film — that the Purge exists to allow the wealthy, powerful, and often complacent to systemically wipe out the poor, the disenfranchised, and the non-white — becomes the literal text going forward. Casual horror fans lulled in by a thrilling elevator pitch found themselves watching the angriest, most progressive, and yes, most blatantly political movie franchise of the past decade-plus. Come for the scary masks, stay for the ... civics lesson? Naturally, some fans still insist these movies are just big and dumb and that we're overthinking things, but let's be real: the films reflect our reality a lot more than we'd like to admit. And that's the chief appeal.
As the /Film team sat down to rank the five "Purge" movies, we realized that we generally like all of these movies. Most of the team agrees that if you like one film in the series, you probably like the rest. There are no bad films here — just entries that are bit more or less ambitious, entries that value action over horror, and entries that smuggle the message rather than shout it. As the team voted in secret ballots to determine the order, we were surprised by how tight it was. With the exception of the number one choice (a clear winner), the other entries were within spitting distance of each other. "The Purge" is easily one of the most consistent horror franchises of all time.
5. The First Purge (2018)
You know how everyone was blown away in 2023 with how "Oppenheimer" reckoned with J. Robert Oppenheimer's horror at realizing the world-ending monstrosity that was now possible due to his creation? That's "The First Purge" but for the Purge movies, and the reason why I (personally) am adding my co-writers on this article to next year's Purge list for ranking this film so low. Until this prequel film, it always seemed like a majority of Americans were excited for their yearly purge, with those against the purge looking like a small percentage of heroes who have their heads on straight. But as the series grew more political, "The First Purge" finally said the quiet part out loud. It is not a conspiracy theory, the New Founding Fathers want population control — and they want to put the onus on the citizens to do it.
The film centers on an enclosed 12-hour test on Staten Island, where the NFFA offers $5,000 to anyone willing to stay. When it's realized that the majority of people have no interest in killing their neighbors and instead want to use the money for paying off debts or having a wild party, the NFFA takes matters into its own hands. Purge movies are at their best when they're reminding the audience who the real enemy is, and "The First Purge" is an in-your-face battle cry about why society is better when we believe in each other, and not people in positions of power. (BJ Colangelo)
4. The Purge (2013)
This is it. This is the little movie that started it all. Directed by James DeMonaco on a shoestring budget, this was the first movie to ask the question: What if all crime was legal for a brief time once per year? "The Purge" is a movie that asked an impossibly intriguing, bleak question and answered it to the morbid satisfaction of audiences around the world. So much so that it led to a five-film franchise and hundreds of millions at the box office. But it all starts with the tale of an affluent family, the Sandins, who find themselves in the crosshairs of a vicious group on Purge night.
Probably for budgetary reasons, this film opts to narrow its focus by showcasing what can happen on this horrific, dystopian American holiday on a micro level, rather than explore the macro horrors that later entries in the series would. As a result, we get an intimate, grisly, and unapologetically nasty movie that offers little by way of optimism, save for the life of the mysterious stranger (played by Edwin Hodge) being spared. We're offered glimpses of the larger horrors taking place outside the Sandin home, but what we come to understand is that the horrors experienced in this house are happening all across the country. And this is what's happening in a wealthy neighborhood! Imagine what the less fortunate are forced to endure. Again, the sequels delve into that far more specifically.
Driven by Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey's stellar performances, which lay the groundwork for the intriguing imagery that defines the franchise to this day, this movie just works. And because it works, the franchise exists, and this list exists. This list is a group effort, but if it were up to me, this film would be much higher on the list. (Ryan Scott)
3. The Purge: Election Year (2016)
Genre fans like myself often miss the heyday of exploitation cinema, that special era when less scrupulous independent producers only needed to get some sicko butts in some grindhouse theater seats and thus could get away with a helluva lot of envelope-pushing and subversion in the process. While "under the radar" cinema means something different in an age of direct-to-video and streaming (where films can easily be lost, let alone discovered), the impulse to blatantly challenge and transgress within a genre space is still alive and well.
For a current example, look no further than Blumhouse's "Purge" franchise, with the third entry, "The Purge: Election Year," being the most topical. Released in the summer of 2016, mere months before the Trump administration would take power and turn the next four years into something resembling what the "Purge" series' New Founding Fathers would cook up, "Election Year" does a fantastic job of presenting on-the-nose satire and social commentary that was as up-to-the-minute as possible while being general enough to still resonate today.
Sure, as the third film in the series, it has its franchise bumps: its timeline within the series is a little wonky, and writer/director James DeMonaco's tendency to paint characters with broad strokes tends to strain some credulity. Yet there's something so B-movie satisfying about seeing a grizzled survivor of the previous film (Frank Grillo) run around protecting a Presidential nominee (Elizabeth Mitchell) from a rich, evil cabal of politicians that the rough edges are a feature, not a bug. In its high-concept world building mixed with drive-in thrills, DeMonaco and the "Purge" series does what greats like John Carpenter and George A. Romero did in their prime: give empathetic audiences troubled by the world's events a cinematic release valve of their own. (Bill Bria)
2. The Forever Purge (2021)
The "Purge" series could've leaned on its initial premise with each entry, going through similar motions and indulging in easy scares. But as the series grew bigger and more popular, each entry found a new avenue in which to explore its satire, its cultural commentary, and its bleak, progressive politics. "The Forever Purge" is a deeply unsettling film, perhaps the most frightening in the series (rare for a fifth entry!), because it takes the mission statement of the first film to its grandest, inevitable stage. What happens when a movement becomes a way of life? What happens when the fringe becomes the mainstream? What happens when we normalize the most awful thing imaginable and people just ... grow accustomed to it?
"The Forever Purge" will feel familiar to anyone who has glanced at a newspaper headline in the past few years, despite (or rather, because of) how far it takes the series' central dystopian premise. The Purge has been outlawed. Those who support it don't care, and use its banishment as an excuse for violent, brutal revolution on a mass scale. The film is a tour through an America gone truly mad, where the basic rules that allowed evil to operate in plain sight vanish in an instant, letting that same evil flourish without even the pretense of civilization. This is where America is going, "The Forever Purge" warns. It's been telling us this for five movies now. (Jacob Hall)
1. The Purge: Anarchy (2014)
"The Purge: Anarchy" is far and away the best Purge movie, because it explores the limitless potential of how a 12-hour night of legal violence would play out on a grand scale. Pivoting out of the well-secured suburbs and into the city streets, "Anarchy" highlights three different groups of people trying to survive the night that are brought together by happenstance and the connective tissue of the new face of the franchise, Leo Barnes (Frank Grillo). Leo is a Los Angeles Police Department sergeant on a vengeance mission to take out the drunk driver that killed his son a year prior, but he crosses paths with Eva (Carmen Ejogo) and Cali (Zoë Soul), who are being targeted on the streets by the NFFA military. Their quest for survival joins them with Shane (Zach Gilford) and Liz (Kiele Sanchez), a couple stuck out on the streets after their car was targeted by vandals.
The action is bigger, the set pieces are downright horrific, and the underbelly of society's most depraved and desperate are exposed with pride. It's a movie so good that a gifted performer like LaKeith Stanfield can be mostly silent and masked the whole time and it doesn't hurt the final product. Purge movies are often criticized for being heavy-handed, but given the state of our current world in real life, where people are constantly tricked by propaganda and societal division is at an all-time high, a film like "The Purge: Anarchy" is more necessary than ever. It forces us to consider the question "Who benefits from the pain of the people?" and lets Frank Grillo kick ass for an hour and 43 minutes. (BJ Colangelo)