In theory, most people are situated well enough in this miserable reality that any outright terror has subsided in favor of a more manageable sense of constant anxiety, but there are a few things that would set any of us off and reignite any concerns we may have about the end of the world as we know it. Things like, say, hearing the siren from The Purge ringing out across the empty streets of your town. It’s hard to convince yourself that things will someday go back to normal when confronted with the thing from the movie where everybody kills each other once a year.
Unfortunately, that’s pretty much what happened in Crowley, Louisiana, where the city has instituted a curfew to keep people inside and try to prevent the further spread of the coronavirus. The local police department used a siren to signify when the curfew went into effect, but as reported by Entertainment Weekly, the siren ended up sounding a hell of a lot like the one from the Purge movies. Here’s the one they heard, followed by the one from the movie:
Apparently “numerous” people complained, either about the fact that they used a siren from a horror movie or about the fact that they used a siren at all (which is creepy all on its own), and Crowley’s police chief released a statement saying he was unaware that the siren sounded like one from a movie and that there would be no siren used for subsequent curfews. No word on if the siren will continue to be used for Purge night, though, which is when all crime is legal and the government uses secret murder-squads to execute dissidents and poor people.
Is it too dark to joke about the Purge movies being real now? A little bit, yeah, but we’re going to undercut it with this chatty epilogue that acknowledges we were just joking and that the Purge movies are not real. Well, the movies themselves are real, but the events they depict are really just a metaphor for the way the government abuses underprivileged citizens and how some people will take any excuse to reveal the absolute monsters they are on the inside. Whoops, it’s getting dark again!