21 Days of Spooky: Green Room (Jeremy Saulnier, 2015)

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21 Days of Spooky is not about pop culture that sets out to fright you with brain-eating, viscerae-hanging, slash-killing scenes, but with thoughts that linger and persist on your life long after you've watched them. Or are just downright creepy. Tonight's spooky: Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room. Some spoilers ahead.

What's it about?: A punk band gets a last-minute gig at a Neo-Nazi skinhead bar and, when they accidentally bump into a murder backstage, their night gets bloody.

So, Nazis. That thing that you imagine it wouldn't exist anymore, and yet are as rampant as ever, especially with governments in certain countries that pretty much support their ideology. The fictional Neo-Nazis in this film happen to have a bar that's pretty much very loud about the ideology, so getting a punk band to play there, especially one that straight-up adds "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" to their repertoir for the gig, could already be a whole horror situation on itself, much to the disadvantage of our main band The Ain't Rights.

Unlike most of the previous analysis on this feature, I'm gonna try and not make this about anything other than the actual topic of a band being chased to their deaths due to something they weren't even aware of, because we all know Nazis are still out there, most of them are dangerous, and unfortunately real life isn't a movie so most people who are threatened by them don't get the chance to surprise boxcut them to safety. We do get to see headline after headline of strange deaths in secluded areas, scary people wearing red shoelaces (which mean you've killed someone for the skinhead movement), and other sad fucking shit.

Anyways... the second the band sees the fresh corpse of a girl on the backstage area, they (and we) know they're royally screwed. They are witnesses, and big bad evil figure Darcy (Patrick Stewart) is not going to let the witnesses live. They were the outsiders from the very beginning, as if they had been skinheads seeing one random death wouldn't have been an issue for Darcy, but he knows these people have integrity and moral duties, so he sics the dogs (literal and figuratively) on them. Most bad situations are just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but very few involve an enclosed space full of Nazis.

The band has literally nowhere to go, as Darcy creates a distraction for the police, they first get confined to the titular green room, and then when trying to escape some of them get happily devoured by very vicious doggos. Darcy never gets his hands dirty, he has a whole lot of stooges surrounding the place and waiting with their murder pets to take a bunch of innocent youngsters down. Of course you and I see the pointlessness of the whole scenario, but you can't expect a goon that voluntarily joined a dangerous backwards movement to think "is this really necessary?" before hacking a musician to pieces.

The whole film is one long set of bets for a dead pool, and you're not really betting on the skinheads. Hell, the band wouldn't even have a fighting chance if it wasn't for Amber (Imogen Poots), the friend of the initial corpse, who's apparently well versed in these dangerous people and highly skilled with a boxcutter. She wants to get out, and will do anything to accomplish it, band be damned. And that's great, but the real scare is finding yourself waiting to see how gnarly will each of the Ain't Rights die, because you know they can't defend themselves for shit and, well, you wouldn't either if you were in their place.

And that's one of the greatest strengths of Green Room, the fact that you're following normal people who have to hardcore adapt to survive when faced with a very real and very dangerous threat, in a place where they are surrounded by more threats, and an environment in where it isn't very easy to create a makeshift weapon or straight-up hide. It's so gloriously hopeless, and very entertaining in said hopelessness, because you never know when the strike will land. Sometimes it's a hacking, sometimes it's a vicious dog, sometimes it's just getting shot, but you never know for sure how or when is it happening.

But here comes the part in where I make you feel sad as, like I mentioned before, these places are real, there truly are murderous ideology-extremists out there who trap and murder people for inexplicable and unnecessary reasons. And, hell, sometimes it's not even Nazis, but some law enforcement officers, or neighborhood watchdogs who "feel" a kid has a gun in his hoodie, or abusive parent figures... and frequently there are no savvy ladies with boxcutters to save those people. That hopelessness surely isn't very entertaining.

Tomorrow: We close the feature as we opened it, with Kiyoshi Kurosawa! But this time, it's his 2016 film Creepy.