'The First Purge' Has a 'Halloween' Easter Egg

Apparently Blumhouse, the studio behind The Purge franchise as well as other horror hits like Paranormal Activity, Split, Insidious, and Get Out, exists in the world of The Purge.

(We are guessing there are no The Purge movies in the world of The Purge, but who knows?)

We can say this with some confidence because, in this week's The First Purge, a poster for October's Halloween, a Blumhouse production, lurks in a number of shots.

The film primarily centers around a young woman named Nya (Lex Scott Davis) and her attempts to keep her impoverished neighbhorhood from descending into chaos as they are chosen as the testing ground for "The Purge."

If you have not seen previous installments in the franchise, The Purge is a 12-hour, annual window during which all crime is completely legal. The movies generally take a point-of-view character who is hunkering down for the duration fo the night and watch as other Purge participants try to kill them. The idea is that The Purge will reduce crime the rest of the year, and keep things more manageable. It is justified on a flimsy logic that people raised in polite society need an acceptable structure through which to get their violent natures out.

The Halloween movie poster appears in the room of Isaiah (Joivan Wade), Nya's brother, and can be seen at least three times in the first 30 or so minutes of the film.

In The First Purge, audiences see a world where traditional American politics have descended into a quasi-totalitarian dystopia, where extreme-right hate groups and militias have been subsumed by a government that preaches libertarianism but practices something much different. The very Americans who for generations have believed that the government is out to get them are, in this film, weaponized against their fellow Americans, in order to help sell The Purge as the only "reasonable" solution to society's ills.

Ironically, it appears that Laurie Strode has become gun-toting and paranoid in Halloween, providing what may be an unexpected thematic link between the two movies.

"The Laurie we're going to meet is fifty-nine years old but also is in a weird way seventeen," Curtis said in a recent interview, calling Laurie "a very paranoid woman" with a "militaristic mindset" — one out to get Michael Myers before he gets her.

The First Purge is in theaters now. Halloween opens October 19.