In recent years, one of the more interesting concepts to be brought to the big screen is the basis of James DeMonaco’s Purge franchise. With a fourth movie previously confirmed, DeMonaco has now given some new details on when and where that movie will take place.

Speaking to Vulture about what’s now titled The Purge: The Island, DeMonaco has reiterated that the film will be a prequel and that it will take place on Staten Island and showcase the very first experimental Purge night. “I said it’s the first experimental Purge,” he explained, “which I don’t know if I was supposed to say, but now I’ve said it, so you have it. I was wondering how you get people to stay for the first Purge, and what they do is they start monetizing it. People from Staten Island can easily go to Brooklyn for the evening, so what they do is start promising very decent sums of money for the very poor people in the neighbourhood. It becomes a monetization of murder and violence, incentivizing killing and keeping people around for them to be victims. So you see the inception of how grotesque the idea of the Purge is, and the manipulation upon the society.”

Despite a clearly dark premise for the film, DeMonaco went on to describe the movie as the biggest crowd-pleaser of the series so far, explaining, “It’s so kick ass in its third act. What’s fun, too, is there’s an anti-hero. More than the previous films, there’s a singular hero in this movie. This is one man’s journey, Williams, an anti-hero who was inspired by Eastwood in Unforgiven, so it’s this very cool, modern kind of badass who redeems himself through the story.”

While he himself is on writes duties for The Purge: The Island, DeMonaco is handing over directing duties to Burning Sands‘ Gerard McMurray. In addition to this, there are still plans afoot for a Purge TV series, which will reportedly take place in between the happenings of the first movie and The Purge: Election Year. That show, as DeMonaco had explained to STARBURST previously, will use a flashback narrative at times in order to look at how people got to the position where they’re eager for Purge night to roll around so that they can kill off certain others.

The Purge: The Island is currently set for a July 4th, 2018 release, with the to-be-titled TV series also set to arrive at some point in 2018. As ever, expect more on both of these projects as they continue to develop.