The Lottery (1996)
Directed by Daniel Sackheim
Returning to his small hometown of Icara, Maine, a man discovers its horrible secret -- a bizarre, clandestine ritual that led to his mother's early death and his father's insanity.
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What critics compared The Lottery to
Rather, the film recalls the broad-strokes surrealism of a Shirley Jackson story, like that high-school standby “ The Lottery .”
Unlike Shirley Jackson, whose classic short story “The Lottery” was an obvious inspiration, writer-director James DeMonaco overemphasizes his violent shocker’s political content (“Things like this are not supposed to happen in our neighborhood!”
James DeMonaco’s The Purge has a great short-story concept, the kind that would fuel a nice 10- to 12-page shocker in which we observe what we think is an ordinary day only to slowly discover that there is something horrible about to take place (think Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”).
What should be a taut thriller stretches into an overextended slog with periodic scolding lectures, an exercise in metaphor akin to Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, but with far less faith in its audience.
Enough of them have read Shirley Jackson's horror story "The Lottery" to devise an annual day of shocking ritual to solve America's problems with poverty, violence and homelessness.
Writer-director James DeMonaco clearly hopes to make a significant moral statement on the level of Shirley Jackson’s literary masterpiece The Lottery.
Comparisons will inevitably be made to The Wicker Man (1973) (with shades of Shirley Jackson's haunting story The Lottery) and on a surface level they share similarities, but on a subtextual level they differ greatly.
The setup — civilized visitors among the eldritch agrarians — is overly familiar from films like “The Wicker Man,” and there are echoes of stories like “The Lottery,” songs like XTC’s “Sacrificial Bonfire,” documentaries like “Wild Wild Country.”
Likewise, Shirley Jackson’s classic short story “The Lottery” seems an obvious reference point as well.
When one of them pees on what turns out to be a sacred tree, well, you can guess we’re headed for a Wicker Man /Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” situation (to name just two folk-horror influences).
Adults will be familiar with the skeleton of the storyline, which echoes not only Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" but also the much-maligned but creepily prescient Stephen King story/Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, The Running Man.
Running through this futuristic tale, about youths ordered to hunt each other in a life-and-death reality show that is staged for the pampered ruling elite by corrupt political leaders in retribution for a failed revolt, are echoes of Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" and films like "The Running Man," the Japanese film "Battle Royale" and even "The Truman Show."
It also has close ties to “Lord of the Flies,” “The Running Man” and Shirley Jackson’s well-known story “The Lottery.”
It’s a nasty but transfixing idea, and Shirley Jackson got there first with her unforgettable classic “The Lottery.”
This first feature written and directed by Gary Ross (who co-wrote "Big") starts out as a satirical fantasy about a teenage brother and sister (Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon) projected into a black-and-white '50s sitcom and winds up as a somewhat heavy-handed parable of totalitarianism and racial discrimination, with deliberate echoes of "1984," "Fahrenheit 451" and Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery."
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Ready or Not mashes up “The Most Dangerous Game” with another highly influential short story, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” by imagining a wealthy family protecting themselves and their gaming empire by superstitiously observing a potentially deadly ritual.
Incidentally, Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" covers the same territory in a more literary and poignant manner by featuring an idyllic New England town which holds an annual ritual to stone one of their citizens to death.
Blame PG-13, for starters: Suzanne Collins’ nightmarish conceit—Battle Royale meets Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” with a reality-TV twist—was sanitized for multiplexes, resulting in a weirdly bloodless blockbuster about kids killing kids.