It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

You believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be true with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome to The Next Picture Show, a movie of the week podcast devoted to a classic film and the way it's shaped our thoughts on a new release.

I'm Tasha Robinson, here this week with Scott Tobias, Rachel Handler, Keith Phipps, and behind the scenes, producer Genevieve Koski.

You may remember us from the late-Lamented film site The Dissolve, where one of our guiding principles was that no film exists in a vacuum and that all culture is more interesting in context. So every other week, we're getting together to look over a new release and see how it relates to a major movie from the past. Keith, why don't you tell us about this week's movie pairing? After taping this, the four-film Hunger Game series is about to come to an end with Mocking Jay Part 2, directed by Francis Lawrence, who took over the

series from Gary Ross after 2012's series kickoff The Hunger Games. So it seems like the right time

to survey those films and look back on one of their clearest predecessors, Battle Royale. When the first

of the Hunger Games novels came out in 2008, author Suzanne Collins took plenty of flack for the similarities

between her story and Japanese author

Koschun Takami's 1999 novel Battle Royale. And the two stories do start in a similar way,

with high school students pitted against each other in a winner-takes-all death match

for the entertainment of a corrupt and oppressive society that punishes them publicly to keep

the population in line. Tasha, do you want to lay out what we'll be

talking about? Well, in the first half of this week's discussion, we'll look at our comparison points between the films, what they have to say about politics and society, and what touchstones might have inspired them both. In the second half, the discussion, we'll take a deeper dive into how the films deal with violence and trauma, and we'll look at their cultural impact. and finally, we'll end with your next picture show, where we discuss some of our recent film-related

experiences that should be on your radar. So grab whatever weapons you can carry and stay out of

the forbidden zones as we volunteer ourselves as tribute in this discussion of Teens Against Teens

Dystopia films and where they've taken us over the last 15 years. It's worth noting that Susanne Collins has denied that she had ever heard of Battle Royale when she wrote her book The Hunger Games.

And as her series continued, it staked out its own ground, especially through the series of film adaptations,

starring Jennifer Lawrence's unwilling figurehead and rebel leader, Katness Everdeen.

Meanwhile, Battle Royale's own film adaptation, directed by Kinji Fukusaku in 2000, takes a different tack on the kids' fighting kids' story.

The Hunger Games films, which helped launch a whole new wave of young adult novels about teenagers fighting oppressive dystopias,

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