Jeremy Saulnier
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Connections, in both directions
The resourceful Ain’t Rights fend off the onslaughts of a terrifying, determined enemy, echoing other classic versions of defend-the-castle films such as Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” and John Carpenter’s “Assault on Precinct 13.” It’s almost like one of those “escape room” venues where you actually die if you can’t figure out the puzzle in time.
When John Carpenter made Assault on Precinct 13 in 1976, he readily acknowledged the influence he drew from George A. Romero in crafting the homogeneous zombie-like horde of gang members laying siege to an L.A. police station.
It’s a simple, pulpy set-up—reminiscent of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), which were themselves derived from various westerns involving characters trapped inside forts and farmhouses—and Saulnier, who both wrote and directed, revels in the primal nastiness of what the will to live looks like in the most dire of circumstances while also infusing the film with a level of visual artistry and black humor that suggests he is capable of much more.
What ensues is very much reminiscent of Carpenter’s “Assault on Precinct 13.”
Straw Dogs (1971)
Directed by Sam Peckinpah
influenced Green Room (2016), Blue Ruin (2014)
Themes Plot Characters
This movie also borrows from Peckinpah’s school of dark revenge, but this time recalls the likes of the more sordid “Straw Dogs.”
He has designed this film to pay homage both to splatter films and to the better, more complicated movies that he first experienced in youth, such as John Boorman’s emotionally harrowing Deliverance and Sam Peckinpah’s complex, seminal Straw Dogs.
The resourceful Ain’t Rights fend off the onslaughts of a terrifying, determined enemy, echoing other classic versions of defend-the-castle films such as Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” and John Carpenter’s “Assault on Precinct 13.”
Saulnier cites Sam Peckinpah's classic Straw Dogs as an influence, and both movies share a knack for taking a very limited space and mining it to full, brutal capacity.
Later, following an encounter with a razor and a stolen wardrobe, he emerges as a fragile nebbish, an uncommunicative antihero alongside whom Dustin Hoffman's nerdy mathematician from Straw Dogs (to which this pays passing homage) seems like a man of muscular action from the outset.
That’s only part of the excitement of “Blue Ruin,” a film that veers from Coen brothers territory straight to the siege hell of Sam Peckinpah’s landmark “Straw Dogs” when Wade holes himself up in the Cleland family’s home in the woods.
Blue Ruin has a grubby, low-life mood that—especially with its theme of unresolved inter-family tensions—reminded me of Jeff Nichols’s debut Shotgun Stories .
“Blue Ruin” joins “Shotgun Stories” and “Joe” as vivid reminders that however homogenized American culture seems, there are still pockets that are distinct, with people who live by their own rules and their own bloody code.
Set among the beaches and backwoods of the South, "Blue Ruin" has an eye for local color and dog-eared realism that may remind you of the recent "Mud," or the lesser known (and even superior "Shotgun Stories").
Blue Ruin is all about escalation, and while its sensibility is Coen, its plot is very much like Shotgun Stories (which is still my favorite film directed by Jeff Nichols ), twisting about in the absurdity of a feud.
(In this sense, Blue Ruin brought to mind Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories .)
In temperament, Blue Ruin calls to mind Nichols’ Shotgun Stories, which also examined how a personal feud escalates into bloodshed.
He has designed this film to pay homage both to splatter films and to the better, more complicated movies that he first experienced in youth, such as John Boorman’s emotionally harrowing Deliverance and Sam Peckinpah’s complex, seminal Straw Dogs.
And when the actors respond to that violence, they do so not with gritted-teeth steeliness, but the full pain and panic one might expect from any ordinary person caught in this situation; a scene involving some exposed meat and a sharpened machete brings to mind Deliverance , specifically the way John Boorman let a femoral fracture shatter every macho bone in a young Burt Reynolds’ body.
Before you can say River’s Edge meets Assault on Precinct 13 (via Deliverance ), dressing room doors are locked, unregistered firearms are drawn, red-laced troops are assembled, and the management are on the scene in the shape of Patrick Stewart’s sinisterly silver-tongued Darcy Banker.
"Green Room" is such a gonzo knockout of siege cinema — "Deliverance" meets "Assault on Precinct 13" — that you hope it finds an appreciative audience beyond horror lovers already itching to embrace it.
…have crafted a gleefully merciless update on Deliverance, except instead of city folk vs. hillbillies, it’s punk rockers vs. neo-Nazis, and it is one of the most brutal, visceral films to come along in quite some time.
Joel and Ethan Coen's past crime oeuvre?most notably, 1984's "Blood Simple," 1996's "Fargo," and 2007's " No Country for Old Men "?appear to be definite inspiration, but Saulnier's tribute remains just that, going off in its own direction once the connection has been made.
Some have already compared the film to the work of the Coen brothers, by which they must mean No Country For Old Men ; the bloodshed comes nearly as fast and hard as it did there, and there’s a comparable focus on the details of life on the run—on staking out a location, or acquiring a weapon, or getting away from somewhere fast.
Critics, meanwhile, drew comparisons to the Coen brothers’ noir début “Blood Simple” and their magisterial chase film “No Country for Old Men”.
Dwight's encounter in the restroom near the beginning of the film is violently intense and similar to something straight out of " No Country for Old Men ."
The film has the sort of exquisitely-staged moments of violence and suspense that provoke comparisons to the Coen Brothers’ “Blood Simple” or “No Country For Old Men.”
Joel and Ethan Coen's past crime oeuvre?most notably, 1984's "Blood Simple," 1996's "Fargo," and 2007's " No Country for Old Men "?appear to be definite inspiration, but Saulnier's tribute remains just that, going off in its own direction once the connection has been made.
Certainly there's something of the Euro-inflected American gothic of Blood Simple (and, indeed, Fargo ) in there, although the bleak Israeli anti-revenge satire Big Bad Wolves is perhaps closer in both tone and intent.
El realizador Jeremy Saulnier ha sido comparado con los hermanos Cohen, por Simplemente sangre (1984) o Fargo (1996).
But writer/director Fede Alvarez (2013's "Evil Dead") has more horror references stashed away in his locked house horror, his premise not too far afield from this year's earlier "Green Room."
As the thieves scramble around like frightened mice, there’s little logic to their escape plans, and the geography is too hazily mapped out for Alvarez to build sustained tension through proximity (as Jeremy Saulnier managed beautifully with “Green Room” and Dan Trachtenberg did with aplomb in “10 Cloverfield Lane”).
Add Fede Alvarez’s “Don’t Breathe” to the canon of instant-classic horror movies of 2016, joining “Green Room,” “Lights Out” and “The Conjuring 2.” Like “Lights Out,” “Don’t Breathe” revolves around an ingenious concept – a team of Detroit teen burglars rob the house of a blind man who isn’t so helpless – and like “Green Room,” it taps into devastatingly contemporary cultural undercurrents.
The Uruguan-born filmmaker shows no signs of changing his ways with his followup feature, Don’t Breathe, which is destined to battle it out with the likes of Green Room and 10 Cloverfield Lane for the title of Top Hollywood Fright Flick of 2016.
But the film has just as much in common with Jeremy Saulnier's recent room-escape movie Green Room and Dan Trachtenberg's similarly claustrophobic 10 Cloverfield Lane , and it joins them as one of 2016's tensest horror films.
Even the horror hardcore may discover that Don't Breathe pushes their buttons in ways they didn't expect - only Green Room has served up the same kind of claustrophobia and chills this year.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Directed by Tobe Hooper
influenced Green Room (2016)
Plot Themes
Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s “Green Room” is a wonderfully nasty, gruesome, jagged-edge gem of a horror film, with echoes of “The Cabin in the Woods,” “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and “The Evil Dead,” and so many other films about a group of smart and cynical young people who find themselves cut off from the civilized world and in a bloody mess from which there just might be no escape.
Previous horror movies — 1974's "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," most famously — have demonstrated that young people who travel in vans to remote locations may not live to regret it.
Like the films of Dario Argenta or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Green Room will persist in the imaginations of coming generations.
Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s “Green Room” is a wonderfully nasty, gruesome, jagged-edge gem of a horror film, with echoes of “The Cabin in the Woods,” “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and “The Evil Dead,” and so many other films about a group of smart and cynical young people who find themselves cut off from the civilized world and in a bloody mess from which there just might be no escape.
The movie’s second half is deadly simple and consistently compelling, rivaling Sam Raimi’s classic “The Evil Dead” in both violence and suspense.
“Green Room” is just as masterfully controlled and just as loaded with black humor and plot twists, but it belongs to a more recognizable genre: This is a cabin-in-the-woods film, not dissimilar to “The Evil Dead” or “From Dusk Till Dawn,” except that our band of roguish heroes are besieged by wannabe commandos from the Fourth Reich rather than literal zombies or demons.
That inspired bit of casting is almost enough to inscribe “Green Room” alongside “Sexy Beast” in the pantheon of against-type British thespian screen villainy.
Like his chrome-domed countryman Ben Kingsley in 2001’s Sexy Beast, Stewart is way scarier when he’s neither barking nor biting but just purring controlled threats.
Stewart's performance isn't the landmark it's being sold as; certainly not at Ben Kingsley's Sexy Beast degree of difficulty.
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Directed by George A. Romero
influenced Green Room (2016)
Plot Themes
It’s a simple, pulpy set-up—reminiscent of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), which were themselves derived from various westerns involving characters trapped inside forts and farmhouses—and Saulnier, who both wrote and directed, revels in the primal nastiness of what the will to live looks like in the most dire of circumstances while also infusing the film with a level of visual artistry and black humor that suggests he is capable of much more.
If your own misspent youth involved watching Assault on Precinct 13 or Night of the Living Dead on a loop, then you'll feel 16 again throughout.
Saulnier wears influence lightly, not limited to “Night of the Living Dead,” “Assault on Precinct 13,” “Die Hard” and “Straw Dogs.”
At this point, the movie becomes a siege film in the vein of "Straw Dogs," "Night of the Living Dead" and "The Purge," to name just three popular examples, with the Ain't Rights and another witness (Imogen Poots) trapped inside the room with a corpse, a hostile skinhead hostage and few notions on how to escape, much less survive.
Was "Green Room" inspired by an episode in 1980's "Motel Hell," in which a van of punk rockers is run off the road so the members of Ivan and the Terribles can join the "all kinds of critters" found in "Farmer Vincent's fritters"?
Similar to Saulnier’s Green Room and Blue Ruin , the violence is fast, swift, and unforgiving, though unlike those two films, it’s never connected with dread.
Although there is nothing remotely original or nuanced about Becky – a formulaic thriller that hybridizes Straw Dogs, Home Alone, and Green Room – there’s an undeniable grindhouse pleasure in watching a 13-year-old girl murder the hell out of some Nazis.
This kind of casting against type can be effective; think of Patrick Stewart, subverting his regal dignity to play a Nazi kingpin in Green Room (a film roughly 20 times as intense and visceral as this one), or of Albert Brooks proving his range as the decidedly non-humorous, razor-wielding crime boss of Drive .
As a merciless depiction of a fascist monster by an affable figure, it's right up there with Patrick Stewart and his gang of Oregon fuckheads in Green Room in the unexpected stakes.
Again serving as his own d.p. (his other lensing credits include Matthew Porterfield’s “I Used to Be Darker” and “Putty Hill”), Saulnier cleverly establishes a man-on-the-run theme in his opening shot, before the action proper has even started.
You may know Saulnier as the director of something called Murder Party (07), but more likely you’ve seen his atmospherically scuffed lo-fi cinematography for Matt Porterfield’s Putty Hill and I Used to Be Darker .
Saulnier, who directed his first film, a horror farce, seven years ago (“Monster Party”), broke through as an artist by photographing Matt Porterfield’s cutting-edge movies about working-class Baltimore life, “Hamilton” and “Putty Hill.”
Rebel Ridge is a smart action thriller in the First Blood mode and is elevated by Pierre’s terrific central performance.
With a palette reminiscent of the loved-but-forgotten neo-noir Westerns of the 90s such as Red Rock West and Kill me Again, he paints the story of a resourceful everyman who becomes an avenger who finds himself out of his depth.
It’s a story at least as old as Spaghetti Westerns like A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)—albeit here it’s given a frightening new urgency in a 21st century context.
But to see the difference between using a setting for “color” and uniting it with content, you only need to look at Walter Hill’s Trespass (1992).
The film’s baby-faced, Brooklyn-based 36-year-old director Jeremy Saulnier was deeply flattered by the response (especially since he counts the Coens, along with Michael Mann’s 1981 film “Thief”, as influences), telling FRANCE 24 that his first outing at Cannes has been an exhilarating whirlwind.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
Directed by Marcus Nispel
influenced Green Room (2016)
Themes Visuals Plot
From here, Green Room escalates into a cacophony of tension and spilled viscera as the group try to escape from the skins, their struggle recalling the tagline on the original poster for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: “Who will survive and what will be left of them?”
The Ain’t Rights are a hardcore quartet who’ve been touring the country in a beat-up van straight out of Scooby-Doo (or, perhaps more fitting for this blood-soaked film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre).
The film follows The Ain’t Rights, a punk band that’s touring the country in a beat up van — similar to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.