Horror Punks

This week, punk and horror, a rule-bound sequel, and a descent into the underworld (light spoilers  below) . . .

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

◆ Green Room, dir. Jeremy Saulnier, 2015.

1. Not punk. There's a question raised by Saulnier’s punk world-set horror movie: How punk is horror?  Punk is an aesthetic and an ethic—and its most obvious visual culture revolves around posters and zines more than feature films (though The Decline of Western Civilization series comes to mind). Green Room is about punks, but it's a commercial, $5 million A24 film. Its script is slick and neat. It's glossy, not DIY. An authentic depiction of punks is just that—a depiction. It's not punk itself.
2. Punk. And yet there is horror/punk overlap. They have common values and aesthetics that are not only distinct from mainstream culture, not only marginal, but that are off-putting, offensive even to prevailing tastes. Green Room does have a blunt clarity that might be called punk. It's violent and intense, and, while not gratuitous, it is a movie that shows people mauled by dogs and shot in the head. There is maybe something punk about a movie that is so unafraid of making you uncomfortable.
3. "Nazi Punks Fuck Off." Green Room takes its place in a line of siege horror movies—descending from classics like Assault on Precinct Thirteen and Night of the Living Dead. Two aspects of the siege stand out. First, this is a siege of a room, not a building. A green room is private room for performers within someone else’s space. Our protagonists have really very little to work with. Second, Nazis make fascinating antagonists for a siege movie. Fascism traffics in pretend victimhood, always claims that its imagined constituency is under siege, when in fact the opposite is true. We’re all besieged by Nazis now, making Green Room feel topical, a horror microcosm of our social reality. The worry then is that, if we do find our way out, the price will be as heavy as it is here.

Right Behind You.

A thought on horror's present.

◆ Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, dir. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, 2026.

4. A good sum. Sometimes a movie is exactly the sum of its parts. Ready or Not 2 repeats the plot of the original, with a bit of extra rules and world-building (there’s a prominent, rule-explaining lawyer played by Elijah Wood in this one)—a plot that functions mostly as a set piece engine. There's no depth here, not a lot to chew on, but there is a lot of surface appeal (more than in the first installment). Ready or Not 2 features an oil painting of David Cronenberg; a stunning, sparkly, veiled, black, goth-as-Hell wedding outfit for Samara Weaving; an intense pit fight; a cute goat; and a delightful fight-scene needle drop of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” (though the best use of the track remains in Five Devils). And it serves fun performances by Weaving, Wood, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Kathryn Newton. This is the movie. It's as appealing and as limited as it sounds.

Living Deliciously.

A recommendation.

◆ "Black Bark," from the collection A Collapse of Horses by Brian Evenson, 2016.

5. Nightmare. “Every time you think you have the world figured, trust me, that’s just when the world’s got you figured and is about to spring and break your back.” We make comparisons to dreams, to nightmares, all the time, but then you encounter a story that actually feels like a nightmare, and you realize those comparisons are far off. A story about two outlaws on the run, seemingly for the last time, “Black Bark” conjures horror from mystery. There’s something of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" here, maybe, but it’s nowhere near as tidy. A story about stories and illogic, about knowledge and its limits, we accompany our protagonist Rawley as his world becomes a shadowy, uncertain, less-than-solid thing. There’s more to feel here than to understand.

Dead of Night publishes weekly on Tuesdays (with occasional deviations like today's Wednesday release).

This past week, ICE goons were dispatched to airports across the country. The time to resist fascism is now.