ready or not

How the 1 Percent Became Horror’s Favorite Villains

Ready or Not, about a terrified bride running from her wealthy, murderous in-laws, is just the latest entry in a horror subgenre that’s grown increasingly popular—for understandable reasons.

By Laura Bradley

August 23, 2019

“It’s true what they say,” Adam Brody’s wealthy lush tells his horrified new sister-in-law partway through the masterful horror-comedy Ready or Not. “The rich really are different.”

Ready or Not—from directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and screenwriters Guy Busick and Ryan Murphy—is easily one of the year’s best horror films. The story follows Samara Weaving’s bride turned final girl, Grace, as she marries into the family from hell: the ultraloaded Le Domas clan. Grace, whom one family member coolly describes as “cute, in a ‘last call at the bar’ sort of way,” is a stranger to their traditions—which, she soon finds out, include a nefarious game that’s played on every family wedding night. The film culminates with Grace screaming something that speaks to a national theme, one that’s increasingly provided fodder for movies like this one: “Fucking rich people!”

Horror has long loved rich bad guys; Ready or Not’s general conceit—the wealthy hunting other humans for sport—has its roots in 1932’s The Most Dangerous Game, a film adapted from a 1924 short story. But it’s the latest in a wave of recent screw-the-rich horror movies that have a distinctly modern twist. The Purge series, which launched in 2013 and released its latest installment in the summer of 2018, centers on an alternate America that makes all crime legal for just one night each year—even though (or, if we’re being honest, because) the damage done each Purge primarily hurts the working class. The Hunt—which would have premiered this fall, were it not for a political firestorm that killed its release—was advertised as a film in which wealthy elites (allegedly liberals) hunt down less wealthy human beings (allegedly conservatives). And now, there’s Ready or Not—a film that dramatizes class tensions, ultimately indicting the deranged Le Domases as not only evil, but incompetent.

Ready or Not’s directors and executive producer Chad Villella knew exactly what they were doing with this film. “We’re honored to be in the lineage of what we consider to be a bit of a subgenre that skewers the 1 percent,” Gillet told V.F. in an interview. “I think one of the reasons why we’re seeing this theme specifically continue to pop up in recent genre movies is that there’s a lot at work right now culturally. There are a lot of people who should have voices that don’t have voices. There are a lot of people who feel like they’re helpless, and that they want change, but they don’t know how to be a part of it. There are a lot of people that just want to fucking scream right now. There’s a lot of rage, and a lot of anger, and a lot of fear.”

Horror has an ability to address social issues by creating a heightened reality, he continued—making space for conversations that otherwise can be difficult to broach, and offering the cathartic, communal release audiences have longed for. “It’s obviously something that people are craving right now,” Gillett said. Look around, and you can see what he means: in recent years, America’s wealth gap has been bigger than ever; collectively, Congress members’ net worth is five times the U.S. median; and increasingly, it seems that those in power know they can do whatever they want, with no fear of facing actual consequences. It’s no wonder, then, that the rich are once again cropping up as a popular horror subject.

But being rich isn’t the same as being competent. The film’s cleverest touch may be its depiction of the Le Domas family—heirs to a massive gaming empire built on a decades-old Faustian bargain with the satanic figure Mr. Le Bail—as a clan of bumblers, completely incapable of actually carrying out their mission. As Atlantic critic David Sims points out in his review of the movie, most humans-hunting-humans flicks present their villains as hyper-skilled. But Grace’s coked-up sister-in-law keeps shooting the wrong people; her brother-in-law can’t figure out how to work his crossbow; and her father-in-law complains that he has an 8 a.m. tee time the next morning.

No one in the Le Domas family can even agree on whether they believe that the sinister Mr. Le Bail will actually attack them should they fail to kill Grace, though that’s why they’re stalking her in the first place—a metaphor for the way their position in society has both elevated and stymied them. “When you’re in a place of privilege, you forget why you’re there or how you’re there,” Villella explained. “You start taking everything and everyone around you for granted.”

“The movie is essentially a collision of these two very different realities,” Gillett added. “It’s Grace, who represents the audience—she’s our eyes and ears and our in into this world—on a collision course with this just insanely ridiculous other reality.” Every Le Domas reacts differently to Grace at first; her mother-in-law, Becky, played by Andie MacDowell, even assures Grace that she, too, was intimidated by the family’s status and stuffiness when she first married in. But that doesn’t stop Becky from ultimately hunting Grace when night falls. Their varied reactions to Grace were crucial, said Bettinelli-Olpin, to making the Le Domases come across as believable human beings, rather than overly cartoonish villains. Though make no mistake: as Villella noted, he and his colleagues know that their characters are “terrible people,” and that what they’re trying to do is “insane.”

They also recognize that the movie may lend itself to easy interpretations: “One of the jokes we made in development was, ‘Oh, this is the Trumps,’” Bettinelli-Olpin said. The characters in the film, though, “are real people that, even though they are bad, you have to relate to them. And you have to understand what they’re going through.”

Ready or Not also benefits from its limited scope. Movies like this can muddle their message by trying to tackle too much in two hours; for evidence, look no further than the Purge films. But by focusing on a single rich family, Ready or Not stays focused, even as its action trawls the grounds of a giant estate replete with dark wood and secret passageways.

The search for a location began with the film’s team looking at “the biggest possible fucking houses that exist,” Gillett said—some over 50,000 square feet. “Newer homes were these giant open-floor plan, cavernous,” Gillett added. “They almost look like marble warehouses; they’re just gigantic and so ostentatious. And we knew right away that wasn’t going to serve the look and the feel of the movie for a lot of reasons.” The directors and producers wanted a sense of tradition in the film’s setting—for the house itself to reflect generation after generation of accrued wealth. They also wanted the home to feel like a maze. “We never show the scope,” Bettinelli-Olpin added. “You never actually see how big the house is. You never see the top of the house; you never see the side. And that was part of the trick.... If we show you something, it becomes finite, and then the audience might understand it in a way that we would prefer they don’t.”

Gillett, Bettinelli-Olpin, and Villella all know there’s some irony to the fact that this film—which satirizes and emasculates the culture of rich white men—has been made, as Bettinelli-Olpin admits, by “three white dudes.” But for them, the opportunity to explore how their own position in society can, in some ways, mirror that of the Le Domas men was as enjoyable as it was crucial. In fact, it shaped the way the film ends—particularly the fate of the film’s groom, Alex (Mark O’Brien), which we will not spoil here. “That’s part of the point,” Bettinelli-Olpin said. “You have to sometimes be like, Well, where do we land in this?.... It’s the great thing about art.”