Make no mistake by the title, Jeremy Saulnier’s latest film, in what is sure to be an insight to a promising long career, would not be considered your standard “Dead Teenager Movie” as Roger Ebert would say. There are no rambunctious teens going out looking for trouble only to find themselves skewered on the end of a big pitchfork helmed by some hulking nearly supernatural menace. But the foundation is there: We follow a metal band made up of four friends, Anton Yelchin, Alia Shawkat, Callum Turner and Joe Cole (all great, all sympathetic), who are so independent and unheard of they lack any kind of clout or a social media presence, disconnecting themselves from the world in order to allow their music and themselves to live in the moment. After a botched gig, they’re redirected to a backwoods club for skinheads in the middle of the woods, housing a lot of very intimidating people. It only takes one instance of putting themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, that is, walking in to the green room to find a young woman stabbed in the head therefore quickly triggering one hellish and hopeless night for our young band.

One cannot help but be reminded of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre while watching Green Room, if not for the vaguely similar setup but more specifically for our core characters. While Chainsaw Massacre is one of the forefathers of the slasher subgenre, it actually does away with a common trope that would be found in later films where the characters are designed for us to not empathize with, thus making their inevitable deaths enjoyable on a visceral level but not an emotional. Again, the band in Green Room is too normal and logical to ever stumble upon Camp Crystal Lake, but it is not unlikely in the realm that they probably picked up a creepy hitchhiker or two in their travels. And while we only know them for a short amount of time before the initiating event of the plot kicks in, you understand that they are real people. Chainsaw Massacre did the same thing, gave us little to work with as far as backstory, but the kids acted completely rational and in a way could be considered blank enough for the audience to project themselves into them, making the torturous events that happen to them actually difficult to watch. When a character gets their arm nearly ripped to shreds to the point where their wrist is barely attached to their arm, and they are screaming and crying, it is hard not to find yourself crying with them. The immediate danger that the characters in Green Room find themselves in is absolutely heartbreaking, there is nothing enjoyable about the shocking violence they are thrown into and there is nothing to take away from their experience other than one of the concluding lines to the story, “This is a nightmare.”

The other thing is that the villains of the movie (led by an unwavering Patrick Stewart and returning Saulnier player Macon Blair), this clan of supremacists who proudly sport “White Power” stickers and iconography all over the walls of their buildings and party with trained attack dogs, they’re too real even in the safety of being an audience member watching a movie. Chainsaw Massacre suggests that it is based on a true story, the story of Ed Gein which obviously the film was inspired by but is not a fair representation of the real man or the atrocities he committed. However the threat of inbred cannibals isn’t completely out of the realm of possibility, and being stranded in an area where there’s no sense of escape is definitely possible. The point being however, is that the characters who inhabit Green Room are closer to people in real life than you are comfortable with admitting. As hard as it is to watch our protagonists suffer, you would not trade places with them, because you know something this awful has happened to people in reality. There is an extreme lack of that mythical fantasy element that surrounds the horror genre, of which the slasher genre inhibits as well, that makes these kind of movies bareable. The resolution will be unclean, the actual killer of the movie, the guy who did all this, gets sent home early on and gets away with his actions; the bunker they find doesn’t house an escape, just a trap; their plans to make a break for it goes horrible wrong; there is nothing comfortable about watching this. This is a slasher movie in the broadest sense that doesn’t play with the tropes or the character archetypes but it’s easy to see how the genre is shaped the way it is.

It is also worth noting how for movies like this, and the horror genre as a whole, to still function, there needs to be an absence of social media. Phone communication is still relevant, but it is very clear that the script’s dialogue about the band being hard to find because they’re not online, only for Stewart’s Darcy to still assume that they are on the off chance someone reports them missing, is all intentional. As mentioned earlier, Anton Yelchin’s Pat makes a case about they want their music to be appreciated in the moment and that once the moment’s over, it’s finished. This somewhat acts as the film’s thesis and by removing the main characters from society and putting them in the moment of survival. In a sense then, there is a disconnect of emotional and immediacy when you put yourself between the moment of horror and a small little window on your phone or computer, an Internet connection, and hundreds if not thousands of miles of distance in between where this isn’t happening to you. Gimmickry will try to prove that this is scary, but this is a subject horror films have still not tackled properly. And as for Saulnier’s movies, they tend to stay away from modern flourishes instead honing in on humanistic brutality. He’s not wrong for choosing this, it is still much scarier to see what horrible things people can do to each other in a small remote space, especially when placed under strong ideologies (which Green Room never truly goes into, because you know, it isn’t really hard to depict white supremacists as people you don’t want to associate with).

If the scene with the arrow in Blue Ruin made your toes curl, prepare for an entire movie of that. But if anything, that’s all the more reason to watch it.