It hardly takes a mastermind to figure out how the fight-to-the-death film genre works as an allegory for our cultural moment. The Edgar Wright remake of The Running Man just played in theaters a few months ago, and the South Korean series Squid Game was among the most-watched television series internationally from 2021 to 2025. We know why.

When it comes to the particular subset of these films in which adolescents are pitted against one another — think Battle Royale, The Hunger Games, and The Maze Runner — the meaning is even more obvious. We live in a modern society that sacrifices everything, most heartbreakingly children, to the brutal workings of the free market. We watch most of our young people being fed into cruel systems that chew them up just as we’ve been chewed up ourselves. They’re schooled in educational institutions that train them for mostly dehumanizing jobs in the workforce. The most desperate are shoved toward enlistment in the military, which sometimes means crippling injury and mental trauma, if not death. If they fall out of these systems into crime, they’re incarcerated in prisons, starting with juvenile detention centers built for children.

At the end of a long day, we can relax while watching the entertainment version of this story. And in many of these films and shows, the public watching of such deadly contests is typically an important part of the plot. It’s quite a hall of mirrors.