Credit: Far Out / Roadside Attraction / Publicity

Scott Campbell

Fri 25 July 2025 9:18, UK

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As the creator of The Purge, writing all five instalments and directing the first three entries in a franchise that’s earned more than half a billion dollars at the box office, it’s understandable if thrills, spills, and horror are the first thing that comes to mind when anyone thinks of James DeMonaco.

However, the filmmaker’s three-decade career has been nothing if not eclectic, spanning everything from Francis Ford Coppola’s Robin Williams dramedy Jack to the 2005 remake of John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 via his lo-fi feature-length directorial debut in 2009’s Staten Island and his last film, This Is the Night, a coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of Rocky III‘s release.

That said, his latest film, The Home, is definitely a horror flick. Pete Davidson stars as Max, a troubled and wayward man who gets a job at a retirement home and soon discovers the ominous facility is keeping its share of dark, dangerous, and deadly secrets. The setup sounds familiar, but DeMonaco takes several increasingly gnarly swings as the story progresses to ensure it’s anything but predictable.

With that in mind, when Far Out (complementarily) told DeMonaco that he’d made a “fucking weird” movie, he wore it as a badge of honour. “Yes, yes, it is,” he agreed. “The weirdness hopefully stems organically from the idea, but it got weird. It got fucking weird.”

It’s been a long road to the screen for The Home, which releases on July 25th, 2025. DeMonaco has been toying with the idea for years, but a combination of factors outside his control caused a significant delay, with production initially wrapping in April 2022, although he always maintained a positive outlook.

“We had a long editing process,” he explained. “It was a tough movie to edit, I’ll say that. I had a lot of footage to work through, to do some surgery.” Beyond that, studio politics reared their ugly head, with a regime change at Lionsgate coming after the writer and director had sold the project.

“The president left, a new president came in, and the new president had a deal with some of the older projects, and we got caught,” DeMonaco elaborated. “I knew him from The Purge. Adam Fogelson was actually the guy who green-lit the first Purge movie, so I kind of knew Adam, which was nice. And luckily, he liked The Home, but he was very honest.”

His film was temporarily placed on the back burner, but despite the long wait, DeMonaco is thrilled the movie will be released in cinemas, especially in the current climate. “We live in a time where theatrical is no longer guaranteed,” he offered. “I don’t think it’s a stigma to go straight to demand anymore. But when I grew up, going straight-to-video wasn’t a good thing.”

“I guess I always have that in my head, even though that doesn’t really count anymore. I try to make myself aware of that. I always want to be theatrical in some way. So it was a great relief when I got the call saying, ‘We picked a date. You know, it’s a tough summer, but we’d like to be in the summer with Pete Davidson.’ So I think I feel great relief, my friend, great relief.”

DeMonaco’s last picture found itself in a similar situation, with This Is the Night filming in 2018 and not releasing until 2021, even if the pandemic was culpable on that occasion. “Until it’s released, you still live with the movie in your soul,” he suggested.

“It’s like a kid who’s caught in jail. It’s like, ‘I want my kid released from jail,'” the filmmaker continued. “I want people to see it. It gets really under your skin.” It’s something he’s grown used to, though, with DeMonaco revealing The Purge was also delayed repeatedly before its release, which resulted in “Jason Blum trying to calm me down every night” until it was given the all-clear for a theatrical rollout.

While that movie recouped its budget more than 30 times and spawned a money-spinning franchise, This Is the Night wasn’t so fortunate. DeMonaco confessed that the limited release of the latter “still breaks my heart, and I feel like people still haven’t seen it, and I know I love the film.” As heartbreaking as it was, he’s not one to dwell on the past. Well, he is to a certain extent, with The Home indebted to some classic psychological thrillers and supernatural chillers from decades past.

“Rosemary’s Baby was a huge influence,” he shared. “That was one of my favourite movies as a kid. And a lot of those ’70s psychological horror films like Burnt Offerings and The Sentinel.” It wasn’t just horror either, with Robert Altman’s 1977 drama 3 Women providing an unexpected influence on DeMonaco’s slow-burning tale of sinister goings-on beneath the quaint facade of an old folks’ home.

“It’s a beautiful film, but it’s very haunting. It’s incredibly atmospheric,” and Altman wasn’t the only unexpected auteur to impact The Home, with DeMonaco also name-checking Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive as touchstones during the creative process.

When casting the lead role, he didn’t think of anyone other than Davidson and wrote the part of Max for him to play. The two Staten Island natives have been friends for a long time, with their first meeting coming in a local Italian restaurant when DeMonaco was celebrating the release of The Purge and Davidson was clearing tables, years before the actor and comedian’s Saturday Night Live breakthrough.

“I knew Pete before the public persona of Pete,” DeMonaco shared. “Everybody knows Pete is this SNL funny guy. I knew the very soulful guy who’s been through a lot in his life, and we became really close friends. We actually had no one else in our heads. We knew he could do it. When we offered him the role, I think he was very eager to do something very different from what he’s normally given.”

Davidson has done horror before, most notably in Bodies Bodies Bodies, which leaned into that public persona DeMonaco alluded to. However, The Home is a dramatic performance that doesn’t feature any gags whatsoever. There are several lighter moments that are entirely situational, with the director adamant that his leading man lets his acting do the talking.

“He knew what it was. He knew the intention,” DeMonaco said. “Every once in a while, he’d run over to me. He’s like, ‘Dude, let me try something.'” The director was happy to oblige, even if most of Davidson’s improvisation didn’t make it into the final cut, although it sounds like it wouldn’t be too difficult to reassemble The Home into an entirely different film.

“There is a version of the movie where I cut all his jokes in, and it probably is comedic,” DeMonaco confirmed. “But we keep it straight and narrow. All his instincts kick in that see humour to be mined in this situation, because it’s a very absurd situation, right? It’s him and all these old people. He saw a very great potential for humour, but he held it in. I’ll give him credit.”

Not only that, but DeMonaco was mightily impressed with how Davidson held his own against his co-stars, many of whom are celebrated Broadway veterans. The Home‘s supporting cast includes Tony winner John Glover, Tony-nominated Coen brothers regular Ethan Phillips, three-time Tony nominee Jessica Hecht, and Stuart Rudin, who was part of Jonathan Demme’s experimental theatre company.

“We had amazing actors, and Pete Davidson is just moving right in with them, and not fearlessly,” DeMonaco celebrated. “I would have been so intimidated. Pete’s got a fearlessness to him, which is amazing.” Hiring that calibre of actors was key to the director’s vision, who wanted to keep the performances as authentic as possible for when the shit eventually hits the fan, which it does.

Throughout The Home, particularly the first act, audiences and horror aficionados will think they know where it’s heading. The story hits many familiar beats, but as much as DeMonaco wanted to embrace the tropes of the movies he loved growing up, he was always keen to cut them off at the knees when he got too close.

“That’s a perfect way to put it,” he concurred. “Give them a couple of jump scares, because I know half the audience likes jump scares, half hates them.” He wanted to “play the conventional game” up to a certain point, knowing he would eventually “twist the whole movie upside down.” That’s probably an understatement, with DeMonaco acknowledging that some people involved in The Home were concerned that the third act was a little too extreme.

“There were certain people, I won’t say who, who were like, ‘Oh, we’re going too far,'” he said. “I always knew, starting somewhat conventionally, slowly building and then blowing it out, was always the intention, just going bananas, balls to the wall, and not holding back.

With the freedom of a smaller budget and fewer corporate overlords, DeMonaco was allowed to go for broke. “This is stuff I don’t think I would have gotten away with at a studio,” he conceded. “The idea was to play a little looser, a little crazier. Get inside my own psyche and let it fly a little.”

One shot, which was featured prominently in the trailer, will have audiences squirming in their seats. It’s not even bloody or gory, but an intense close-up of Davidson’s eye being pried open with medical clamps. It was born from DeMonaco’s lifelong fear of people touching his eyeballs, and while his star was game to do it himself, the professionals insisted that he capture the footage as quickly as possible.

“He was very tense. We were all very tense,” the filmmaker divulged. “It’s very uncomfortable, and as we’re doing it, the eye dries up. Not to get too deep into Pete’s physiology, but he doesn’t have great moisture in his eye. So we’re doing the closeup, and the doctor comes up and whispers to me very calmly, ‘Oh, in about 20 seconds, we’re going to do irreparable damage to Pete Davidson’s eye.'”

Needless to say, they got the shot in the can and moved on. The Home isn’t just another mindless horror film, though, with DeMonaco continuing his career-long trend for weaving sociopolitical subtext into his movies. It’s not as pronounced as it has been in The Purge, but a combination of care homes and global warming gave him a thematic anchor on which to hinge his increasingly deranged narrative.

One influence came from the pandemic, and another from global warming. “Adam [Cantor, co-writer] and I both had weird experiences growing up with uncles and aunts that we had in elder care facilities. They weren’t high-end. They were the lower end, which is kind of creepy. So when they were in the news cycle, so much in the early pandemic, we knew we wanted to set something there.”

“We started to see the parallels, the parable that we want in the metaphors with climate change, the treatment of the elderly in society, and the treatment of foster children. A lot of these things started to emerge naturally from the story, which was good because then I didn’t feel like we were forcing the metaphors. I like to smuggle some sociopolitical thematics. There’s always that fine line where you don’t want to preach to the audience.”

The way society often ignores, neglects, and mistreats the elderly is reflected in The Home, using a care facility as the setting for an isolated and unsettling story where everyone employed to look after the residents harbours a haunting ulterior motive. Similarly, old people being manipulated by their younger charges to safeguard their future tied into DeMonaco’s climate change parable.

“Previous generations, to me, are leaving future generations with a very hurt planet,” he explained. “The whole movie was a metaphor for that, about what we’ve taken from the planet, and now what this previous generation is taking from the youth in the movie. So it was this generational battle that I wanted to bring to the movie; the boomers versus Pete.”

‘Pete Davidson versus boomers’ is one way to sell The Home to the actor’s fans, in a film that marks a departure for DeMonaco as a behind-the-camera talent. While it’s easy to categorise The Purge as horror, the franchise’s creator doesn’t see it that way, instead viewing them more as “Escape from New York, The Warriors, Road Warrior” thrillers that hadn’t let him indulge his fondness for spine-tingling terror.

“I always say the Purge films are more like a punch in the face,” he neatly put it. “Those sirens ring and we’re off and running. Here, I was trying to build tension in a way that I don’t really do in The Purge. The Purge is more of a punch. This was more of a ballet. We’re moving at a different pace, if that makes sense.”

Speaking of The Purge, the series has lain dormant since 2021’s The Forever Purge, but no property that lucrative stays on the shelf for long. Talk of a sixth entry has been bubbling away almost as long, with DeMonaco revealing that his previous script has been rewritten, with a new and improved Purge 6 screenplay hot off the press. Or his printer.

“I was really proud of the script. We didn’t fully iron it out because the budget was just too high,” he expounded. “They liked the script, but they were like, ‘We don’t want to go there. We want to keep The Purge in that lower-budget area,’ so we had to can that script, sadly.”

Nothing keeps a good franchise down forever, with DeMonaco refining his concept for Purge 6, which is currently on its second draft. “Not to give too much away, we’ve got some returning people that I think people will be very excited about,” he teased. “Which excites me. To work with this one person specifically, who, to me, represents the franchise very well.”

“And it’s a crazy one, though it has some sociopolitical underpinnings, but it’s got that kick ass, hopefully, Purge drive and action and all that stuff that people like.” Of course, one of the biggest questions surrounding a new Purge movie is how do you even write one in today’s climate, when the things that unfold across the social and political landscape on a daily basis would have read as satire when the first film was released?

“Yeah, you’re right, man, it’s weird,” DeMonaco nodded. “I used to get the question from people all the time, like, ‘Do you think the Purge can happen?’ And I’d be like, ‘No, it’s just a crazy conceit I came up with one night.’ Now, sadly, I think the way the world is moving, it feels more realistic. The Purge is starting to mirror events in real society, and I wish it were the complete opposite.”

“It breaks my heart that anyone could think that something like that can happen,” he mourned. “I’m not the most hopeful person, but I’m going to pretend to be hopeful right now. I hope that there’s a light at the end of this tunnel, and somehow we find harmony in society. I hope in a couple of years, The Purge seems like a sci-fi, outlandish conceit that is not at all conceivable by anyone in the world. I hope we get very far away from those thoughts.”

Moving away from sequels and onto remakes, it seemed like a good time to ask him for his thoughts, if he had any, on director Herman Yau’s Crisis Negotiators. The Hong Kong crime thriller is a remake of 1998’s The Negotiator, which starred Samuel L Jackson and was co-written by DeMonaco and Kevin Fox.

Even though he had no idea it was released in 2024, he was at least aware of it. “It’s so weird,” he began. “I got a call about that five years ago. I didn’t know it actually got made! We got a call saying they want to do it, and I had to sign some papers. They never told me it got made! Wow, that makes you feel old, my friend, but that’s kind of cool. I take it as I’m happy people liked it enough to want to remake it.”

“I’m very curious how they handled that,” he mused. “I gotta go find it and watch it! That was a fun one to make, and I was so young at the time. That’s a great bit of news. It makes you feel old, but I feel somewhat honoured that they felt it was worthy of a remake. So that’s cool.”

With remakes already on the brain, it felt like the right moment to inquire if there were any movies DeMonaco would love to repurpose for the modern era, which caused a mini existential crisis: “The remake question is so interesting because you don’t want to remake something that is great already, right? It’s got to have its flaws.”

After much deliberation, DeMonaco ruled out The Great Escape because “it’s the perfect movie” and he was sure he’d “just fuck it up.” Things even reached a point where the filmmaker had to abandon the conversation to stare intently at his nearby DVD collection for a few moments, but once the floodgates opened, they struggled to stay closed.

“You ever see Hard Times with Bronson?” he finally asked. “It’s a wonderful film about a street fighter. He’s a bareknuckle brawler in the south. I love Charles Bronson. That would be great to remake because I think we’d get a little more budget than they had, and we’d be able to update it a little bit with the UFC world, the MMA. I think that would be a fun one: Hard Times.”

“There’s another one I watched recently called Prime Cut. Now you got me going! Prime Cut is a wonderful film with Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman that no one knows about. And it’s wild. It’s a great crime movie about a city gangster versus a country gangster, who kind of know each other, but then they go to battle over a woman. Sissy Spacek is wonderful in it.”

According to Demonaco, Michael Ritchie’s 1972 crime thriller is “creepy and weird,” and it sounds like it. “The opening scene is Gene Hackman. He sells steaks. He’s got a slaughterhouse and a farm, but the opening scene is so demented; all these nude women are lying on bales of hay at an auction being bought by disgusting men. And I was like, ‘Wow, this is just subversive and ’70s and a hell of a film.”

With one of his own movies having already been remade, if DeMonaco follows up his next foray into The Purge with a new version of Hard Times or Prime Cut, remember: you heard it here first.

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