Sinners, Saints, and Angels on Fire: The Curiously Religious Soundtrack of The Hunger Games’s Secular Dystopia

Two albums of original pop songs were produced to accompany The Hunger Games (2012) and Catching Fire’s (2013) film adaptations. Over half of the contributing musicians employed religious vocabulary and motifs foreign to their source material. Possible influences discussed include religious paradigms associated with the Appalachian-inspired music of the first album, the apocalyptic impulse of contemporary dystopia, and the evolving role of religious imagery within postmodern pluralism. Ultimately, it is argued that despite the areligious content of The Hunger Games, the series’ literary genre and cultural context facilitate the blending of the sacred and secular in ways unexpected but not incongruous.