Halloween Horror: The Most Dangerous Game (1932)

Based on Richard Connell’s 1924 short story (which I read in high school), RKO Pictures’ 1932 film version of The Most Dangerous Game is most often mentioned alongside King Kong (1933), and for good reason, as the two films share an entwined production history. The Most Dangerous Game was directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel, and produced by Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper (with David O. Selznick as executive producer). Schoedsack and Cooper also produced and directed King Kong, released the following year. Both productions shot scenes on the same jungle sets. (Many accounts report that The Most Dangerous Game was shot at night on the same sets as King Kong, but the AFI Catalog says Kong was shot at night, and American Cinematographer disputes the claim, arguing that Cooper shot test reel scenes for King Kong on the sets for The Most Dangerous Game). Fay Wray also plays the damsel in distress in both films. With his shrill voice, Robert Armstrong, who plays Carl Denham in King Kong, shows up as Wray’s character’s brother. 

The plot of The Most Dangerous Game is simple yet memorable. When his ship wrecks on the coast of a mysterious island, big game hunter Bob Rainsford (Joel McCrea), finds his way to a castle populated by the Russian emigrant Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks) and a few servants. There, he also meets the Trowbridges—sister Eve (Fay Wray) and brother Martin (Robert Armstrong)—who have also been shipwrecked on the island. Eventually, the subtly menacing Count Zaroff reveals the kind of prey he hunts as “the most dangerous game.”

The comparisons to King Kong go beyond production history, however, as both films contain effective, classic features of both the horror and jungle adventure genres. The film functions best as a slow-burning horror movie, more tense for its suspenseful situation and disturbing undercurrents than anything it shows the audience. Overall, the film’s strength is its atmosphere. Its greatest pleasure is the suspenseful revelation—fully revealed about halfway through the crisp one-hour runtime—of what the Count is really up to and what the most dangerous game is.

The Most Dangerous Game boasts many classic horror movie elements. There is an Eastern European count and his mute giant henchman, and a dark castle that just happens to be located where strangers in need might seek shelter. In the castle, there are secret rooms, and in the film they contain the movie’s major jump scare: a shock cut to human heads mounted on the wall, and the casual reveal of a head in a jar. Tension is built in the second half of the film around an extended sequence showing the villain and his hounds pursuing his victims.

As a jungle adventure, The Most Dangerous Game is less stimulating but still satisfying. It remains simply a collection of classic jungle adventure tropes, including a relentless chase, a make-shift booby trap, a waterfall, and a tree-and-vine-filled soundstage jungle. Few of the scenes in the extended jungle chase are as memorable as the tension leading up to the Count revealing his designs. The jungle pursuit is more significant as a kind of cinematic archetype, to be reused and reworked and reinterpreted in later works such as Predator (1987) or Apocalypto (2006).

However, The Most Dangerous Game also contains shots, images, and lines of dialogue that suggest deeper meaning. For example, the opening credits run over a supremely Gothic image of a big wooden door with a door knocker depicting a centaur holding an unconscious woman; he roars as an arrow sticks out of his chest. A hand reaches into the frame and knocks—a stranger arrives at the castle, as in countless Gothic tales. It is significant that the film adds the centaur, and features it prominently during the opening credits. In contrast, the short story does not begin with the door, which it later describes as a “massive door with a leering gargoyle for a knocker”—it does not mention a centaur. (Intriguingly, American Cinematographer explains that the design of the door knocker was improvised during the production, but I don’t know who should be credited for its addition.)

The centaur in the film is obviously a reference to classical myth, but the specific reference is unclear to me. It could be to one of the centaurs who battled with the Lapiths, after they tried to take the Lapith women. The arrow also suggests Hercules, who killed the centaur Nessus with a poisoned arrow, after the centaur attacked his wife, Deianira. In both stories, centaurs have captured women. In the film, the centaur is depicted again on a giant tapestry that hangs beside the large open staircase in the castle hall; the camera even pauses on the tapestry for effect as Bob goes upstairs. Centaurs, with their half-man-half-horse bodies and their lustful and violent behaviour, are often associated in mythology with the animal side of human nature. 

In a conversation with Bob, whom the Count hopes will join him as a hunter, Zaroff describes both himself and Bob affectionately as “barbarians.” Describing inflamed male desire for women after violent conflict as a natural instinct, Zaroff quotes the saying of a hunter tribe: “Hunt first the enemy, and then the woman.” Is the centaur on the door knocker in The Most Dangerous Game a barbarian like them, or is he being punished because he didn’t follow the “natural” order of hunt before love? Or is Zaroff, as a hunter, more of a parallel to Hercules, who slays the centaur and takes back the woman (we see a man shooting the arrow on the tapestry)? Both the door knocker and the conversation raise the question of what Eve’s presence on the island is for (her name evokes the quintessential woman, after all). After the hunt, Zaroff takes Eve back to his castle. Nothing is shown, but the suggestion is clear. The associations between these elements, which the film takes time to ponder yet never clearly lays out, remain ambiguous and intriguing.

The Most Dangerous Game remains a layered, atmospheric pre-Code Hollywood horror-adventure that deserves attention, even if it’s the leaner, lesser cousin of King Kong. The film’s intimations, in its depictions, imagery, dialogue, and narrative concept, of dark and deep themes about human nature, fill out this lean horror adventure, making it not only a sustaining work but also one worth returning to. 

8 out of 10

The Most Dangerous Game (USA, 1932)

Directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel; screenplay by James Ashmore Creelman, based on the short story by Richard Connell; starring Joel McCrea, Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, and Leslie Banks.

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