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Vorlage:Otheruses4 Vorlage:Infobox short story "The Most Dangerous Game" or "The Hounds of Zaroff" (1924) is a short story by Richard Connell.

Widely anthologized, and the author's best-known work, "The Most Dangerous Game" features as its main character a big-game hunter from North America, who becomes shipwrecked on an isolated island, and is hunted by a Russian aristocrat. The story is about a sardonic/ironic gothic inversion of the big-game hunting safaris in Africa and South America that were fashionable among wealthy Americans in the 1920s.

Characters

• Sanger Rainsford, an accomplished hunter from New York.
• General Zaroff, a man of pre-Revolutionary Russian aristocratic background. Utterly fixated on hunting.
• Ivan, Zaroff's large Cossack slave and bodyguard. He is deaf and has no tongue, this makes him ideal to Zaroff, because Ivan cannot tell anyone of Zaroff's murders if he escapes the island.
• Whitney, one of Rainsford's boatmates who wonders what it would be like to be the hunted instead of the hunter.

Plot

At the start of the story, Sanger Rainsford is steaming south to Brazil to hunt jaguar in the Amazon with a fellow hunter named Whitney. Rainsford is presented as stereotypically heartless hunter, unconcerned about the life or feelings of his prey. As they pass through the Caribbean, Rainsford accidentally falls over the side of the yacht, but saves himself by swimming to the rocky shore of a mysterious island. Moving inland he discovers a large manor-house on a cliff. He knocks at the door and is welcomed by General Zaroff, a gentle and elegant man of noble Cossack heritage who apparently lives on the island alone with his powerful servant, a terrifying deaf-mute named Ivan.

Zaroff explains that he is the ultimate big-game hunter; he lives for his hobby, and has traveled the world and hunted every possible game animal. Now he has become so good at it that he's bored with his beloved pastime. In search of the only prey that can make the hunt challenging, he has begun to hunt humans. He lives in luxurious seclusion on the island, tricking ships into wrecking near his island with misleading navigation lights. When the surviving crew swim to his shores, he offers them a choice: they can be murdered by Ivan or choose to be hunted on the island by Zaroff. If they survive three days, he promises to set them free. Rainsford professes horror at the hunting of humans, and it isn't long before this hunter must himself be hunted. Zaroff offers Rainsford the same choice: become prey, or die.

Rainsford must set out to survive his three days as a game animal with only a sack of food and a knife. The conclusion of the story focuses on what happens when these two skilled hunters finally match wits.

Adaptations

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: Eve Trowbridge (Fay Wray) and Martin Trowbridge (Robert Armstrong), who are brother and sister (Wray and Armstrong were also starring in King Kong on the same sets during the day).

The story was also twice produced as a radio play for the series Suspense, on 23 September 1943 with Orson Welles as Zaroff and Keenan Wynn as Rainsford, and on 1 February 1945 with frequent Welles collaborator Joseph Cotten playing Rainsford. In 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, 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 WWII. In 1956 a second official remake was made, Run for the Sun, starring Richard Widmark and Jane Greer.

Other versions include Bloodlust! (1961), The Woman Hunt (1973), Turkey Shoot (1982) and Surviving the Game (1994).

The concept of The Most Dangerous Game has been reused in numerous works of fiction, including:

Films:

• Predator
• Surviving the Game
• Jumanji
• Hard Target
• Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity
• The Pest
• Octopussy, scene when Khan is hunting Bond through the forest.
• Apocalypto

Television:

• the Star Trek episode "The Squire of Gothos"
• the Star Trek: Voyager enemies Hirogen particularly the episode The Killing Game
• the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Homecoming"
• theThe Simpsons episode "Treehouse of Horror XVI"
• the American Dad! episode "The Vacation Goo".
• the Gilligan's Island episode "The Hunter"
• the Johnny Quest episode "Shadow of the Condor"
• the Get Smart episode "ISland of the Darned"
• the Johnny Bravo episode "Hunted!"
• the Dexter's Laboratory episode "Dial M for Monkey: Huntor"
• the Kids Next Door episode "S.A.F.A.R.I"
• the Incredible Hulk 3rd season episode "The Snare"

Influences

The character of General Zaroff may have been influenced by the character of Prospero in William Shakespeare's The Tempest. Both characters live on isolated islands, and cause shipwrecks in order to bring unsuspecting sailors there, where they manipulate them to their own ends.

Zodiac Killer

The Most Dangerous Game is also said to have possibly been an inspiration to Arthur Leigh Allen, the one time primary suspect of the notorious Zodiac murders.

External links

• Full text at Classic Shorts
• Full text at E-Server