The Most Dangerous Game

This article is about the short story by Richard Connell. For the film, see The Most Dangerous Game (film). For the novel by Gavin Lyall, see The Most Dangerous Game (Gavin Lyall novel).

"The Most Dangerous Game", also published as "The Hounds of Zaroff", is a short story by Richard Connell. It was published in Collier's Weekly on January 19, 1924.

Widely anthologized, and the author's best-known work, "The Most Dangerous Game" features as its main character a big-game hunter from New York, who falls off a yacht and swims to an isolated island in the Caribbean, and is hunted by a Russian aristocrat. The story is an inversion of the big-game hunting safaris in Africa and South America that were fashionable among wealthy Americans in the 1920s.

Sanger Rainsford and his hunting companion Whitney are traveling to the Amazon forest to hunt the fabled big cat of that region, the jaguar. After a discussion about how they are the hunters instead of the hunted, Rainsford hears gun shots, drops his pipe, and falls off of their boat while trying to retrieve it. After he realizes he cannot swim back to the boat, he swims to an island, Ship-Trap Island, that is the subject of local superstition. He finds a palatial chateau owned by a Cossack hunter named General Zaroff and his gigantic deaf-mute Cossack servant Ivan. General Zaroff, also a big-game hunter, has heard of Rainsford and read Rainsford's book about hunting snow leopards in Tibet. Over dinner, General Zaroff explains to Rainsford how he became so good at hunting that he became bored and unchallenged with it. He then decided to live on an island where he captured shipwrecked sailors and sent them, with only food, a knife, and hunting clothes, into the jungle. Three hours later, he would follow them to hunt and kill them. If the captives eluded him, Ivan, and a pack of hunting dogs for three days, Zaroff would then let them go, but Zaroff has so far managed to kill them all. Zaroff invited Rainsford to join him in his hunt but Rainsford refuses. Zaroff then tells Rainsford that he will be the next person to be hunted (if he refuses he will be knouted to death by Ivan).

Rainsford runs into the forest and climbs a tree. Zaroff finds him easily, but decides to play with him like a cat with a mouse. After the failed attempt, Rainsford builds a "Malay man catcher" which injures Zaroff in the shoulder. Next he sets a Burmese tiger pit, which kills one of Zaroff's hounds. Finally, he sets a trap that was a native trick he had learned in Uganda with his knife that kills Ivan, but not Zaroff. As the hounds approach, Rainsford jumps off a cliff into the ocean. Zaroff assumes Rainsford has killed himself and returns home. As soon as Zaroff locks himself in his bedroom and turns on the lights, he screams, as the light reveals a man hidden by the bed curtains. Rainsford is there, having swum around the island. Zaroff congratulates him on winning the "game", but Rainsford decides to fight him, and says "I'm still a beast at bay." The General accepts the fight, saying that the loser should be fed to the dogs and the winner would sleep in the master bed.

The fight is not described in detail, but the story ends with a comment from Rainsford, saying "I had never slept in a better bed", implying that Rainsford had defeated Zaroff. It was also have homoerotic connotations as Rainsford and Zaroff could be suppressed homosexuals who commited sexual acts that night.

Adaptations

Film

The story has been adapted for film numerous times. The most significant of these adaptations (and apparently the only one to use the original characters) was RKO's The Most Dangerous Game, released in 1932, having been shot (mostly at night) on sets used during the day for the "Skull Island" sequences of King Kong. The movie starred Joel McCrea as Rainsford (renamed "Robert" instead of "Sanger") and Leslie Banks as Zaroff, and added two other principal characters: brother and sister pair Eve Trowbridge (Fay Wray) and Martin Trowbridge (Robert Armstrong). (Wray and Armstrong were also filming King Kong on the same sets during the day.

The story was adapted three times as a radio play for the series Suspense, on 23 September 1943 with Orson Welles as Zaroff and Keenan Wynn as Rainsford, on 1 February 1945 with frequent Welles collaborator Joseph Cotten portraying Rainsford, and on 1 October 1947 for the CBS radio program Escape. In the first two of these productions, Rainsford narrates the story in retrospect as he waits in Zaroff's bedroom for the final confrontation.

A second movie adaptation, a remake of the 1932 movie and also produced by RKO, was A Game of Death, released in 1945. Directed by Robert Wise at the very beginning of his long and distinguished directing career, the movie was regarded poorly. Footage from the original was recycled, and one actor from the original, Noble Johnson, was cast in the remake. In keeping with events of the time, A Game of Death changed Zaroff into "Erich Kreiger", a German Nazi, and was set in the aftermath of the Second World War. In 1956 a second official remake was made, Run for the Sun, starring Richard Widmark and Jane Greer.

List of film adaptations

2

• Battle Royale, a Japanese film, could be viewed as an adaptation of the concept, where a class of students is abandoned on an island and only one is allowed to leave alive.
• The sf/horror films Predator (1987), Predator 2 (1990) and, more obviously, Predators (2010) can also be seen as loose adaptations of this plot, although they differ by having a non-human hunter.

Television

The story is a common plot used in many dramatic television series episodes where the regular characters find themselves the quarry of an insane hunter. Here are some notable examples:

• A spoof of "The Most Dangerous Game" on Gilligan's Island, Episode 3.18 "The Hunter" 1625-0519 16 January 1967, big game hunter Jonathan Kincaid (Rory Calhoun) and his trusty sidekick Ramoo (Harold Sakata) land on the island. Disappointed to discover no game to hunt, he decides to hunt "the most deadly game", also known as Gilligan. If Gilligan can elude him for 24 hours then he will rescue them.
• In episode 11 of the second season of Get Smart, "Island of the Darned", Max and 99 are hunted on an island.
• The third season (1967) episode "Hunter's Moon" from the television series Lost in Space, Professor John Robinson is hunted by an alien game hunter named Megazor, in a similar fashion.
• In the Star Trek episode "The Squire of Gothos" Captain Kirk is the prey for a crazy alien.
• In The Incredible Hulk episode, "The Snare", David Banner finds himself trapped on an island owned by an insane big game hunter, forcing him to use his wits to stay alive as well as transforming into The Hulk when he is in great peril.
• In the made for TV movie, "You Bet Your Life" (2004), an eccentric millionaire bets potential prey 2.4 million dollars versus their lives.
• In the "Survival of the Fattest" segment of The Simpsons episode, "Treehouse of Horror XVI" (2005), Mr. Burns hunts Homer, Lenny, Carl, and others.
• A 2007 episode of Criminal Minds, "Open Season", features two hunters with a penchant for releasing victims into the Idaho wilderness to find and kill them with compound bows.
• In season 1, episode 15 of Supernatural, "The Benders", features a family of humans who kidnap people only to release them and then hunt them during the night.

Real-life parallels

Robert Hansen, a serial killer who was active in the early 1980s, would kidnap women and then release them in the Knik River Valley in Alaska. He would then hunt them, armed with a knife and a Ruger Mini-14 rifle.

External links

• Full text at Classic Shorts
• Full text at E-Server
• Watch 1932 film Most Dangerous Game