In our seventh episode of The Rise of A24 series, we revisit the pitch black thriller Green Room (2016) and its even even darker precedent Straw Dogs (1971).

Special Guests: David, comedian and musician from Chicago, check out his band Humdrum

Green Room is perhaps the most divisive film that splits apart your Film Trace cohosts. Chris loves this punk rock thriller, and Dan resolutely despises the film. For nearly a decade now, the two have squared off over this A24 stalwart from Jeremy Saulnier. What starts out as a sort of fun punk rock road movie quickly turns into a nazi funhouse of horrors. Grotesque violence mixes with fascist gang machinations as main characters get wiped out one by one. The film's tone is akin to a street paella: messy with lots of competing tastes and probably some deep and long lasting indigestion. Chris has always been a glutton for punishment.

Straw Dogs is somehow even more disturbing and unnerving than Green Room. Dustin Hoffman plays a little runt creative who has to contend with the rural anti-intellectualism of the English countryside. While the setup seems quite put on and rote, the final results are anything but. The tension rises throughout the film until its insane and hyper violent ending. Problematic is the starting point for this film. Where it ends up is entirely up to you as the viewer to determine.

In our sixth episode of The Rise of A24 series, we plunge into the cold dark heart of humanity with It Comes at Night (2017) and The Crazies (1973)

Special Guests: Bridget D. Brave, horror writer and horror film aficionado

I will admit. These are a couple of tough films. It Comes at Night is bleak. The Crazies is messy. They both share a common Hobbesian DNA. That is, human beings can be pretty awful to each other. A24's marketing misfire struck down It Comes at Night at the box office, and the film has not recovered from that diminished status despite being extraordinary work of cynicism by Trey Edward Shults. The film reminds me very much of the height of 1970s American horror, a collective realization that maybe we are the baddies.

George Romero's The Crazies has a totally different tone, but I think a very similar message. Romero shot this on 16mm and edited it like a 16 year-old YouTuber. It is a complete mess. But within that mess is a lot of pointed and poignant political satire that is easy to miss. The Crazies came out when the USA was still murdering women and children in Vietnam, because some WASPs felt anxious in DC. It was the height of American Immorality, and Romero saw that very clearly. The Crazies is his valiant but ultimately failed attempt to speak truth to power.

While both films are brutal in their own way, our wonderful conversation with Bridget D. Brave is quite the opposite. Three horror film nerds try to make sense of these unflinching attempts to capture the darkness, perhaps, at the core of humanity.

In our fifth episode of The Rise of A24 series, we go to church with Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2018) and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (1955).

Special Guests: Jen and Sarah of the great podcasts - Movies & Us and TV & Us

Paul Schrader has spent a lifetime wrestling with the question of transcendence. From Taxi Driver to Master Gardener, his protagonists are often solitary men seeking clarity and redemption in an indifferent world. In First Reformed, Schrader distilled decades of his own Calvinist guilt and expansive cinematic theory into a stark, haunting meditation on faith. The film follows Ethan Hawke's Reverend Toller as he spirals into despondency. He is unable to cope with the violence, sin, apathy, and immorality that swirls around his life. With A24's strong backing, Schrader achieved critical redemption with First Reformed. The film earned widespread acclaim and Schrader received long-overdue recognition as one of America's last great morality filmmakers.

Schrader was deeply inspired by the 1955 Danish film Ordet. This austere masterpiece delves into the inner workings of a farming family grappling with the outer edges of religious despair and madness. It is slow, serious, and pure cinema. The molasses pace proves worthwhile as the film explodes into religious ecstasy in its final act. While long considered one of the most important films in world cinema, its stature has diminished in recent years as we have loosened our grip of organized religion. Still, this work of art proclaimed a spiritual boldness that has rarely been matched in the genre.