“The Most Dangerous Game” is modernist fiction, but the plot's suspense and darkness draw clear inspiration from 19th-century Gothic fiction. As a modernist story, it pays particularly close attention to the potential darkness of the human spirit and strives for a realistic portrayal of the complexity and contradiction of the human experience.
The story may be also read as a critique of the unequal extravagance of the period between World War I and World War II, and therefore also displays the characteristics of a satire. For example, Connell uses the narrative to expose contradictions in his characters (who are themselves representative of both the newly minted WWI veterans and, to varying degrees, the ruling class). Rainsford accepts of killing humans in the context of war but not in the context of a "hunt," whereas the human hunt shocks and horrifies him—and, eventually Rainsford is reduced to animalistic traits. This fits into the broader social context of exotic big game hunting culture in the 1920s. Zaroff's over-the-top insistence that he is justified in hunting humans because "he is strong" and only hunts those people already marginalized by society—"the scum of the earth"—also serves to satirize the logic of the social darwinists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
