If the experience of watching Green Room feels like getting knocked around the world's nastiest mosh pit, that's entirely by design. You don't know what chaotic violence is coming next.
The frontman of this bracing new horror-thriller, writer-director Jeremy Saulnier, strands a punk quartet in a backwoods club run by white supremacists. After witnessing a murder, the band is engulfed in a desperate fight to the death against machete-wielding skinheads who have them vastly outnumbered.
"I know a lot of filmmakers who try to make 'punk' movies," said Saulnier. "But most bog themselves down in ideology and punk references left and right. [Green Room] is about taking the energy, aesthetic and propulsive qualities of the music and using them in support of a genre siege thriller." Saulnier, now 39, was introduced to punk in 1985, via the Dead Kennedys' seminal album Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, and he would ask his mother to take him to the record store to buy the LPs.
"Often I'd hate them," Saulnier said. "It was about trying to be cool."
When Saulnier reached his teens, in the early '90s, the D.C. punk/hard-core scene was still flourishing.
