How ‘The Purge’ led to a real-life shooting in 2021
From the very beginning of the medium, movies have helped audience members purge some troubling internal conflicts… It may be an urban legend now that people who saw The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station ducked under their seats as they thought a real-life train was going to burst through the screen, but it’s only become a legend because it feels so true.
We’ve all been that person in the audience, especially when we were young and didn’t know any better – the cinema is a place that, at its best, we feel completely immersed in the story being told… The theatre nearly gets there, but ironically, the presence of real people on stage forces us to consider the humanity of the actors before we can consider them as characters. Not so with the movie theatre, where we can completely, and in some cases literally, lose ourselves in the movie.
In most cases, this can be a joyous experience. Then the 1950s happened, and unruly teenagers started destroying the cinema screens that the Bill Haley movie Rock Around the Clock played at. Honestly, this probably wasn’t the “riots” that authorities claimed they were, they were probably just, y’know, teenagers dancing, yet the idea that movies could infiltrate the minds of kids and cause them to re-enact the violence they saw on screen was one that was terrifying to parents.
Ideas that sound terrifying to parents often infiltrate the mainstream, and this one was no different. With everything from A Clockwork Orange to Scream to Child’s Play being accused of influencing the behaviour of its viewers for the worse. Few films had a more terrifying version of this happen than in 2021, during a screening of the lesser spotted The Purge sequel The Forever Purge, a deeply bone-headed film for an only slightly less bone-headed franchise.
The Purge, if you don’t already know, imagines a future where, for one day of the year, all crime is legal. It essentially works as a way of getting all the crime people want to do out of their system (purged, if you will) without any legal risk.
As I said, dumb as a bag of hammers and only slightly more effective as a comment on the state of America, but an idea that has taken root in the popular conscious nonetheless. However, a tragic event has coloured the reputation of the franchise ever since.
In 2021, six people bought tickets to a late-night screening of The Forever Purge at a movie theatre in Southern California, and by the end of that film’s screening, one of them was dead… The morning afterwards, that number had doubled to two. 23-year-old Joseph Jimenez Jr had got up from his seat, walked up to the remaining two people in the screening and shot them in the back of the head: 18-year-old Rylee Goodrich died on the scene, and 19-year-old Anthony Barajas, a budding TikTok star, died in the hospital later that night.
Jimenez was arrested the same night and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity at first. He stated that he’d been medicated for schizophrenia, but ran out of pills earlier that day. He’d supposedly heard voices in his head that had told him the other two people in the theatre would murder his family if he didn’t get them first. This was backed up by the testimony of his three friends, who had joined him at the movie theatre that night but left after his tics and disturbing behaviour (including returning to his car to get a gun) got too much for them.
However, Jimenez was ruled sane in December 2023 and thus was sentenced normally. He got life in prison without the chance of parole.