Squid Game was released two months ago and became one of the biggest streaming series ever. People were obsessed. They wouldn’t stop talking about it. The bingers got there early, watching it all as soon as it got released. The hype train started rolling. Then the people who started watching immediately, but couldn’t do it all in one sitting… They finished pushed the hype to new levels. People like me put it off for a few weeks, then eventually got around to it to see what all the hype was about.
It was a show about four-hundred-something people who were taken to an undisclosed location to participate in children’s games. The twist was that they died if they lost the games. It began with a game of red light, green light where people who moved during the red light would be shot by snipers. Things got progressively more violent from that point on. Or, maybe not. A couple games got more violent.
Squid Game wasn’t the first time a story like this was told. It had a similar structure to a bunch of movies, books, and television shows that preceded it. That similarity was part of the discussion when it was released. The idea of a competition where a bunch of people would die, one-by-one, until only one person remained wasn’t anything new. It wasn’t something that people didn’t already know about. But the set design, the performances, the costuming, and the use of children’s games helped set Squid Game apart from the others. They helped make it the success it was.
Again, the story of Squid Game was built on the foundation of other stories that came before. I want to take some time to go through a few of the others, including this week’s movie, and bring up different tropes and structures within them. I want to show what elements within them led to Squid Game. Or, how they paved the way for the other movies and television shows that used similar formats.
The Long Road
You probably thought I was going to start somewhere else because there are other, more popular, stories out there. However, I thought I should at least bring up this Stephen King novel that depicted a strange future. An annual competition was held where one hundred teenage boys walked as far as they could at a steady pace of at least four miles an hour. If they dropped below that pace, they received three warnings before being shot by military personnel from a vehicle accompanying the boys. The last boy standing would win a large sum of money and a prize.
This is the oldest story I’m going with, having been published in 1979 under King’s pseudonym, Richard Bachman. What I want to focus on is the character work. One important part to any deadly competition story is that there should be characters to care about. Not just the main character, but the side characters, as well. Some of them are fodder. Sure. The happens when you have a competition like this. There should also be characters with backstories that you, as an audience, care about. There should be characters that the main character cares about, even though they know that the characters will die. That way, the audience will feel emotion as these other characters begin to die, wondering if the main character will actually survive.
Stephen King gave a few of the characters in The Long Road backstories that made them more sympathetic. The main character was the main character. He wasn’t the best character, but he was the one whose well-worn shoes the audience walked in. One of the boys was married, leading the others to make a pact to financially protect his wife with the prize money. Another boy had a scar from an ex-girlfriend. He revealed that story during the walk. Yet another boy was trying to get into his father’s good graces by doing the walk. They each had stories that built the characters so the audience, and the main character, cared when they died.
This structure exists in most of the deadly competition stories. There are supporting characters who get proper backstories and emotional arcs. It fills out the story and gives more people to care about than just the main character. Squid Game had that in the form of the North Korean girl trying to bring her family to South Korea, the childhood best friend who got into business trouble, the Pakistani guy trying to support his family, the gangster in debt, and the old man suffering from a brain tumor. There was depth to the supporting characters as much as there was with the main character. It made it much easier to feel the consequences of the deadly game when the characters were fleshed out in this way.
Battle Royale
You probably expected me to start here. It is one of the two deadly competition stories that people frequently reference when they talk about this subgenre. The other one will be coming up soon enough, don’t worry.
Battle Royale was about a class of students brought to an undisclosed location and tasked with killing each other. Only one kid could survive. All others had to die. They were given a bag of supplies, sent out in intervals of time to not all get bunched up in one spot, and given a map. As time went on, different areas were out of bounds. If any students broke any rules of the game, an explosive collar would trigger to kill them. That was if they hadn’t already been killed by another student.
I’ve both read the book and seen the movie. They differ from one another in ways, but not enough in the structure to warrant a big discussion. What I can say, though, is that Battle Royale had one major difference in the competition from The Long Road. Well, two, I guess. One, and not the one I want to discuss, is that the characters had to do the killing themselves. For the most part. But the major one was that the characters didn’t sign up for the competition. They were thrown into the death and mayhem without knowing what was coming. They were unwilling participants.
Fast forward twenty years and you have the first game of Squid Game. The adult participants knew they were in for a nice children’s game where they might be able to earn some extra cash. That’s what they signed up for. What they didn’t know was that they would be killed if they lost. That was a discovery they made on the field, while playing red light, green light. The shock of that mayhem initiated a vote to end the games. People didn’t want to die. They just wanted to make money by playing games from their childhood. Of course, that would change. Most of them went back to the games, thus becoming the willing participants who put their own lives on the line for money. What a way to have it both ways.
The Hunger Games
The other obvious one that frequently comes up is The Hunger Games. I haven’t read the books, so anything I say is solely based on having seen the movies. Much like Battle Royale, which came before it, The Hunger Games and its sequels pitted a bunch of kids against each other in a game of kill-or-be-killed. Yet, there were some major differences that set the movies apart from the story that people say clearly influenced it.
The Hunger Games wasn’t solely about the competition. That was the big thing, it was what got people hooked in, but it wasn’t the substance of the story. The young adult story actually wove in a bunch of societal elements that played out during the deadly competition. There were different districts, based on wealth and status, that broke up the nation in which the story took place. District 1 was the richest, while District 12 was the poorest. Each year, one boy and one girl were chosen from each district to participate in the games. Of course, the richest districts could train for the games. This meant they were more prepared and more likely to win. It was also easier for the richer districts’ participants to find sponsors to help them in the game because sponsors were more confident in their chances to win. Wealth leads to better opportunities. The way of life.
Many of the deadly competition stories weave in some kind of societal commentary. Much of the time, it has to do with the wealthy having better protection because of their wealth. They get more opportunities. They have safety that the poorer people don’t. Of course, these types of stories aren’t the only times that you’ll see commentary on the wealth gap in movies, television, or writing. They’re just a place where that commentary becomes more obvious.
Squid Game also involved that sort of commentary. Each of the participants in the children’s games were going through financial trouble. They were all in serious debt. A man lured them into the competition by playing a children’s game in a train station and offering them money if they won. They could win more money if they competed in other children’s games. When they got to the unknown location, they were kept in the competition by the amount of money they could win. Their need for money made them ignore the bloodshed.
Why did the people end up in serious debt? There were many reasons for it, but the most apparent was inflation in prices while wages weren’t increased. That’s something we’re going through in our everyday lives. The inflation of groceries, gasoline, and housing is far outstretching the inflation in minimum wage, or wages in general. People are going further into debt because they can’t afford anything with the pay of their jobs. Some people work two or three jobs just to stay afloat. Sometimes, even that isn’t enough. Squid Game commented on that sort of unevenness through the competitors’ debt and need for money.
The Tournament
Another element of the wealth gap that comes into play can be seen in the 2009 action flick, The Tournament. The movie followed Father MacAvoy (Robert Carlyle), a church minister who got caught up in a deadly competition between thirty killers and assassins trying to kill each other. He teamed up with Lai Lai Zhen (Kelly Hu), an assassin trying to make up for killing an innocent woman prior to the tournament’s start. Also involved in the tournament was Joshua Harlow (Ving Rhames), a notorious hitman who was married to the innocent woman Lai Lai killed. He was out for revenge.
For the most part, The Tournament was your standard deadly competition story. There were thirty people going head-to-head to see who could come out as the only survivor. Sure, there was an innocent bystander thrown into the mix, by way of Father MacAvoy, but it was a movie about people killing each other until only one stood alive at the end. That was the majority of the story. However, there was some behind-the-scenes stuff that played into a similar area as the wealth gap stuff in The Hunger Games.
The tournament in The Tournament had to be held by someone. There had to be some sort of infrastructure for the tournament to happen. Someone had to recruit. Someone had to scout locations. Someone had to oversee it to make sure there was a winner. Powers (Liam Cunningham) was that overseer. He was the host of the tournament. He was the person who put it together. And he also brought in a bunch of rich people to watch the tournament play out and place bets on who might win. It was a gambling ring by way of assassins assassinating one another. They were watching people die for their own amusement.
This behind-the-scenes element was also present in Squid Game. In the later episodes, VIPs were brought to the undisclosed location to watch some of the later games. They placed bets on the people they thought would live, and those they thought would die. It was all fun and games to the rich people, who thought they could do whatever they wanted with no consequences. They were rich, the competitors weren’t. Their lives mattered, the competitors’ didn’t. That’s all there was to it. It was more commentary on the wealth gap through the means of gambling.
The Belko Experiment
The final story I want to bring into this discussion is The Belko Experiment. This one felt very derivative of other deadly competition stories, except it was set within an office building. The American people working in the Bogota field office were locked inside with someone on the speakers telling them they couldn’t get out until there was only one person alive. The only reason I want to bring this one up is that there’s one element present within the movie that hasn’t yet been discussed.
There was an extra rule in the deadly competition that would lead to more death. The voice on the speakers said that if a certain number of people hadn’t been killed within a certain timeframe, a device would be set off within the competitors which would explode and kill them. That device was a tracking implant placed inside each employee under the guise of protecting them if anything happened in Bogota. Really, it was just a way to control the participants through threatening their lives over the lives of others. Pushing their will-to-live buttons. That sort of thing.
Squid Game took a different approach to the threat of death in a game in which death was likely already. To force people to do things, there was a military-like presence. There were people in costumes who would lead participants to and from games, guard the large bedroom when people were supposed to be asleep, and kill people when they lost certain games. Games like marbles and the honey cookie game, or whatever that was, involved these people killing the participants who lost.
If the competition involves people killing each other, there typically needs to be a reason why they would want to. Someone pushes people to kill each other. There can either be military-like people, such as in The Long Walk or Squid Game, to threaten participants to keep participating. There can be fail-safe killing devices, such as those in Battle Royale, The Belko Experiment, and The Tournament. Either way, the threat must be imminent, or else people would just choose not to participate.
Squid Game was an amalgamation of elements from many stories that featured deadly competitions. There were the obvious comparisons that everyone made to other popular deadly competition stories. But there were also elements that it shared with lesser-known works, such as this week’s movie, The Tournament. If it weren’t for the foundations that these other stories built, and the influences they provided to the creative team behind the show, Squid Game would never have been what it was. It never would have been the sensation it became.
Squid Game took the world by storm when it hit Netflix. It was the talk of the town. Masses of people felt the need to check it out. It quickly became the most watched show on the streaming giant. But its influences were clear. It didn’t try to hide that there were similar elements to other stories. It also didn’t bring attention to them. Squid Game found its own place within the world of deadly competition stories, and perhaps opened the door for people to check out some of the other examples out there.
I just want to end this by saying that this post seems to be about Squid Game, and it kind of is, but it was inspired by a watch of The Tournament. I wanted to discuss other stories that shared the very basic idea behind The Tournament, and I just ended up hanging the post on a recent example that people watched. So that’s how a post that was inspired by The Tournament ended up only somewhat featuring the movie.
Now for some notes:
- The Tournament wasn’t Ving Rhames’s first rodeo in Sunday “Bad” Movies. He was in Death Race 2 (week 9), Death Race: Inferno (week 9), and 7 Below (week 137).
- Kelly Hu also made a fourth Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in The Tournament. She was previously in Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (week 294) and The Scorpion King (week 380), as well as in archive footage used in The Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption (week 380).
- The Tournament featured Bashar Rahal, who was also in The Legend of Hercules (week 77) and In the Name of the King: The Last Mission (week 220).
- Three actors from The Legend of Hercules (week 77) were in The Tournament. They were Scott Adkins, Borislav Iliev, and Kitodar Todorov.
- Kaloian Vodenicharov was in The Tournament and Getaway (week 135).
- J.J. Perry returned from Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (week 140) to appear in The Tournament.
- Die Another Day (week 153) featured Rachel Grant, who was also in The Tournament.
- Finally, Tom Wu was in The Tournament. He could also be seen in The Scorpion King: Rise of a Warrior (week 380).
- Have you seen The Tournament? Have you seen or read anything else I mentioned in this post? What do you think of the deadly competition stories? Share your thoughts with me on Twitter or in the comments.
- Let me know what movies I should watch for future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts. Drop your suggestions in the comments or hit me up on Twitter. I’m open to all suggestions.
- There’s currently a tournament going on through Twitter to determine which movie I’ll be watching for the ninth anniversary of Sunday “Bad” Movies. Go vote for your favourites.
- Check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram for more Sunday “Bad” Movies fun.
- What’s up next for Sunday “Bad” Movies? I’m heading back to the 1930s for another one of those cautionary-tale, exploitation movies. Yeah, another movie like Reefer Madness (week 339) or The Cocaine Fiends (week 424). I’ll be watching Gambling with Souls. I’m sure I’ll have something to say about it. Come back next week to find out what. See you then!
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