ART OF DARKNESS – THE GROSSEST ALBUM COVERS IN METAL

Originally published in Metal Hammer special The Devil’s Music.

AS a veteran of the most extreme manifestations of all things metal, Hammer prides itself on being hard to shock and even harder to nauseate. That changed a couple of years ago with the release of an album by US grindcore outfit Cattle Decapitation called Humanure. The cover was a painting by Wes Benscoter of a cow shitting out human remains, the face and torso still visible in the heap of excrement. We’ve seen albums that depict DIY surgery, demon rape, grossly mutated sexual organs and acts of barbarism so foul that we dare not describe them and merely sighed and chucked them on the pile to be reviewed or – more likely – used as Frisbees. But somehow that sleeve was the one that had us retching our lunch away. If they set out to make people barf then they succeeded wonderfully.

Strangely enough, the band thought twice about the cover and when their label Metal Blade gave them the option of changing the sleeve (Hammer had been sent an early promo) on the grounds that they would find it impossible to have it stocked in any record store anywhere, they chose to do so.

Cattle Decapitation are all militant vegans, and the sleeve was actually making an unsubtle point about the consumption of animals, turning the food cycle around by having the cow eating man.

“We didn’t want the sleeve to gross people out. We think our music and our lyrics do a good enough job of that already,” singer Travis Ryan told Hammer. ”But we were getting complaints that people couldn’t find the album in the shops and that’s exactly why we signed with Metal Blade in the first place.”

METAL album sleeves have offended since day one. Black Sabbath’s eponymous 1970 debut featured an inverted crucifix inside, something that raised the hackles of the great and the good eager to save our youth from the forces of darkness. Strangely enough, though, it also managed to piss off the band as well. “We had no say as to what went on the cover,” says Tony Iommi. “It was all down to the label. People keep asking us who the girl on the front cover is and I have to tell them to this day that I have no idea.”

The washed out picture is credited to Marcus Keef, the in-house designer at their label Vertigo records and was actually taken at Mapledurham Watermill on the River Thames. The girl on the cover was supposedly an  actress hired for the shoot who later met the band long after the album had been released. The image suggested a witch or a ghost and further reinforced the bands’ links to the occult. Alex Sanders, Britain’s self-styled King Of The Witches, attended several Sabbath gigs and tried to get them to attend his covens supposedly on the strength of the cover alone. Marcus Keef also designed the sleeve for ‘Paranoid’ [which was originally to have been called ‘War Pigs’ hence the blurred picture of the bloke in the crash helmet waving the sword which graced the cover] as well as a poster included with ‘Master Of Reality’.

Although it was all a bit of a happy accident, Sabbath’s first album is one of the few where the sleeve actually looks like the music sounds: malevolent in a way you can’t define, vaguely hallucinatory, the stuff of uncomfortable nightmares. But it wasn’t until the release of ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ with its skulls and demons that they got one again that you could argue was at all appropriate to the way that they sounded.

Early metal bands, in fact went through the same corporate cookie cutter as every other band be they prog, pop, soul or even easy listening middle of the road. Usually the record company’s idea of a great sleeve was a cheesy band shot or – worse – one of those vaguely surreal concept photos typically produced by the design partnership Hypgnosis. It wasn’t until the late 70s and early 80s that a definite metal style emerged, artwork for album covers, t-shirts and posters that actually gave you some idea of what the band sounded like. It was art that looked as heavy and evil as the music sounded.

The inspiration came from horror comics, science fiction and fantasy art, medieval engravings of demons and devils, the great mad renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch and cheesy porno. More often than not these ingredients were all blended together into a ridiculous whole.

Early metal sleeves came under attack from feminists, and sometimes not without good reason. In This Is Spinal Tap the band are told that their sleeve for Smell the Glove is sexist and won’t be used to which they reply ”Great, we want a sexy sleeve.” In real life, German mullet-haired metal merchants The Scorpions had the artwork for their 1976 album ‘Virgin Killer’ pulled. The sleeve depicted a naked pre-pubescent girl, with what looks like a crack in the glass of a frame obscuring her crotch. It’s a creepy sleeve not least because we can now see that it’s a piece of child pornography and while for most of us it’s hopefully going to be our only exposure to it, for some it may only be their first. There’s still some debate as to what was going on in the minds of the band at the time: some suggest that it was once again the record label pushing them through blatant controversy. If that’s the case it backfired and The Scorpions became successful in spite of the sleeve and not because of it. Whatever the reasons the sleeve was pulled in many countries and the original is now a much sought after collector’s item.

Iron Maiden were one of the first bands whose album and singles cover art had a kind of consistency, an identifiable logo and a style of their own. Maiden’s early art by Derek Riggs was raw and juvenile. They also weren’t above inventing ‘controversy’ for publicity reasons, such as the cover of ‘women in uniform’ which depicts Margaret Thatcher getting stabbed by Eddie. Maiden’s covers are too silly to be truly evil, but Riggs’ apocalyptic horror comic style was to have a big influence on later, more extreme bands.

With the emergence of more extreme music in the 80s, a new and more extreme sort of image was needed to package it in. Slayer’s ‘Reign In Blood’ depicts Hell as a knock off of Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden Of Earthly Delights (a painting that has graced many a black metal and death metal album cover, incidentally) but the truly diabolical sleeve was that of ‘Seasons In The Abyss’ which depicted the Slayer logo set in a fascist-style eagle, that seemed to confirm all those rumours about their alleged Nazi connections. Of course they shook it off with the usual “what, us Nazis?” how dare you comments.

But the most Satanic and evil sleeve of that decade wasn’t actually a metal band, it was the much banned 1985 album ‘Frankenchrist’ by The Dead Kennedys which featured the painting Landscape XX, or Penis Landscape by the visionary Swiss artist HR Giger. Giger is probably best known for having designed the exomorph from Ridley Scott’s Alien. He had designed album covers for prog bands like ELP (‘Brain Salad Surgery’) and Magma (‘Attahk’) but they were comparatively anodyne. Giger’s style is to blend organic and mechanical forms in a realistic and disturbing way. Landscape XX depicted rows and rows of erect penises inserted into disembodied vaginas. It wasn’t so much pornographic as anti-pornographic: having looked at it and figured out what was going on, you really didn’t feel like shagging for a while. The band was sued and charged with distributing harmful matter to minors. They eventually won the case, but singer Jello Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles label was almost driven to bankruptcy.

Giger’s Satanic imagery is said to derive from vivid nightmares that he has suffered from all of his life. His work has always been a major inspiration for the more Satanically inclined metallers. Celtic Frost, Danzig and Attrocity have all used his paintings on album covers and those that can’t afford Giggler often plump for the many imitators that he has spawned.

But while Giger’s art is – regardless of its subject matter – beautifully executed and technically brilliant, the same can’t be said for the visceral nightmares that began to grace the sleeves of bands like Carcass, Cannibal Corpse and Anal Cunt.

As befits a band with songs like ‘Skull Full Of Maggots’ and ‘Born In A Casket’, the art for Cannibal Corpse’s ‘Butchered At Birth’ featured cover art by Vincent Locke (of Dead World Comics fame). It shows two skeletal zombie surgeons performing a gory abortion on a corpse while all around them there are dead foetuses and the skeletons of new-born babies hanging from the walls. Although we are inured to this sort of thing, when they arrived in the early 90s they were probably the grossest things many of us had ever seen. The records still can’t be stocked to this day in Germany in the original sleeves.

This sort of painting harks back to the gory glory days of the uncensored American horror comics of the 1950s such as Tales From The Crypt and Vault Of Horror which eventually became so extreme that there was a backlash against them leading to the comics industry adopting a voluntary code of practice and effectively castrating comics for the next 30 years.

It’s kind of hard to tell people who are shocked by these images that they are actually very funny: sure, it’s dark humour and arguably it’s sick humour but it’s so over the top that it can only be a joke.

Humour, though, can land you in court. When Cradle Of Filth produced their first batch of Jesus Is A Cunt t-shirts, they knew that they would be controversial. Even a decade on there are still hapless teens in out of the way towns getting arrested for wearing them. Oddly, nobody seemed offended by the masturbating nun on the front. It was the logo on the back that got punters into trouble the world over. The t-shirt was condemned by the Catholic League of New York and the Lord Provost of Glasgow, subsequently forcing record shops to take them off their shelves, thereby making it the most sought-after and bootlegged t-shirts in the country.

Christians, despite their unwarranted power in the US politics, are really a soft target and easily offended. And they are fun to offend. You can hardly begin to count the number of ‘blasphemous’ album covers and t-shirts that proliferate in the murky depths of the extreme metal underground. One personal favourite is Christian Death’s ‘Sex And Drugs And Jesus Christ’ which features a junkie Jesus injecting heroin. Marilyn Manson’s ‘Holywood’ depicts him in a crucifixion pose which offended many of the groups whose sole reason for existence seems to be to get offended by Marilyn Manson. Even here in the arguably more secular UK, the fly posters for the album generated a small scale campaign by evangelical types to rip them down and deface them with stickers exhorting us to go to their church.

Interestingly, however, most bands stick with poking fun at Christians. Other faiths, as we now know, won’t exactly take it quite so calmly. Hammer has often quizzed bands who make a big display of how anti-Christian they are why they don’t have a pop at, say, Islam. Why don’t we see t shirts proclaiming that The Prophet Mohammed Is A Cunt or – worse – a pig? Who will be the first band to depict the Prophet on the sleeve of one of their CDs (he doesn’t have to be doing anything: depicting him is enough)? The answer is probably never.

Some bands have said that they would draw the line at attacking Islam because they are not racists (though Muslims are not a race) and that they will only attack things within their own culture. All admit that they don’t want to spend the rest of their lives sharing a hidey-hole with a Danish cartoonist.

Extreme evil art these days is confined to the underground, partly because it has become a bit cheesy but also because of the commercial might of chainstores such as Wal Mart in the US. When Nirvana released ‘In Utero’, whose sleeve depicted a vitrified female corpse displayed in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington (wings added by Kurt) the chain decided that they would not stock it as they found it offensive. Nirvana relented and issued it in a different sleeve for Wal Mart because as Kurt Cobain explained, when he was growing up that was the only place that you could buy records.

Wal Mart is notoriously puritan and since they account for millions of sales, artists and labels are only too willing to tailor their product to accommodate them.

As the standards by which we define extreme music shift, so too the power of images to shock is diluted. Every day Hammer receives envelopes full of albums by black metal and death metal bands from countries that you’ve never heard of and many of those have artwork that depicts mutilations, plates of viscera, gory killings and senseless torture. Some are mildly amusing but most are just a little bit pathetic.

Most of the artists who really convey an image of evil and terror do so through their stage shows. Gorgoroth, for example, release pretty dull albums in pretty dull packages but their live show complete with flaming torches, crucified groupies and mouldering goats heads on stakes convey a real sense that you have entered Hell.

And despite the controversy over the cover of ‘Holy Wood’, Marilyn Manson never seems link his paintings to his music. Odd, because they are powerful, dark works depicting murder and mutilation, albeit in a less figurative and more abstract way than most common or garden death metal sleeves.

And while Slipknot may serenade serial killers and the like, their albums are always released in packages that are unlikely to upset the apple-cart at the Wal Mart chain.

One of the most shocking images ever to grace an album cover was that on Rage Against The Machine’s 1992 debut. It was a classic news image of Thích Quảng Đức, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk burning himself to death in Saigon in 1963 as a protest against the oppression of Buddhists by the US-backed government of South Vietnam. it’s a powerful image because it’s an image of a real death, a snuff photo if you like. It isn’t there for a sick thrill; there is a point to it, something that becomes apparent in RATM’s politically charged music.

Perhaps because you can now see really gross uncensored images of the war via the internet and increasingly in the mainstream press – real decapitated soldiers, people burned to death in their cars – the power of a painting or a drawing of some gut-dripping zombies doesn’t really have the same effect as it once had.

Where can the imagery of evil go next? We shudder to think.

Filed under: Heavy Metal, Marilyn Manson, Metal Hammer, Music journalism, album sleeves, art, evil, Frankenchrist, gross art, HR Giger

Metal movies

This was a piece written for a 2007 Metal Hammer special The Devil’s Music. Despite what is written in the piece, I’ve subsequently discovered that LaVey did not in fact play the devil in the Rosemary’s Baby rape scene, it was in factr actor Clay Tanner.

THEY say that the devil has all the best tunes. He also has a lot of the best movies. If metal is the devil’s music then what are the devil’s films? How do we define what constitutes a heavy metal movie?

There’s a scene in The Terminator when Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) being pursued by the relentless cyborg from the future (Arnold Schwarzenegger) takes refuge in a Los Angeles industrial metal club called Tech Noir. It looks like the best club on the planet: chain link fences inside, where heavy looking pseudo-bikers and urban Vikings grope and grapple with mohicaned cyber-sluts all to a pounding 80s hair metal soundtrack. It’s all filmed through a blue tinted filter and the neon seems to leap out of the screen at you. To those who hate metal, it looks like Hell has opened up a theme bar here on Earth. It is an evil place: you can imagine that even if Arnold doesn’t walk in and start blasting at her, there are a lot of other pretty nasty things that could happen to Sarah at the hands of these depraved drug crazed leather clad barbarians.

The Terminator is a heavy metal movie: literally, since the character of the title is made of titanium with a fleshy outer coating. It’s not a film about heavy metal and the soundtrack is fairly typical 80s pop-techno, but the overall look and feel of the movie, the pre-apocalyptic Los Angeles city of night, Arnold in his stolen leathers, the gleaming skeletal creature revealed at the end, is pure metal. Even the plot could have been lifted from a Judas Priest album.

The relationship between metal and the movies – particularly horror and dark sci fi – has always been a two way street, though in the beginning it was really only the bands who took their inspiration from the big screen.

Flashback to Birmingham in the late 60s when a local blues band called Earth had a gig cancelled on them because they were apparently mistaken for a better known pop combo of the same name. They decided that once and for all the had to come up with a better name. As if in answer to their prayers, a film called Black Sabbath was playing at the cinema across the road from where they were rehearsing. They decided there and then to call themselves Black Sabbath because, according to Geezer Butler, “no other fucker in the world would have a name like that.”

Evidence suggests, however, that they never actually saw the film. A shame, though they have also gone on record as having said that they were so scared after seeing The Exorcist that they all slept together in the same room. Black Sabbath, originally entitled I Tre volti della paura [The Three Faces Of Fear], was a 1963 Italian film by horror supremo Mario Bava that was released in a badly cut and dubbed version in 1969 to cash in on the horror boom sparked off by Britain’s Hammer films. Black Sabbath was a compendium of three horror stories, the most disturbing of which was called The Wurdalak, which starred Boris Karloff as a vampire who feeds off the blood of his own family. It was no classic but it was indicative of the way that the horror movie was going in the 60s, becoming darker and more serious. In fact, the parallels between the new school of horror film and the emergent heavy rock scene were striking. It was a much heavier kind of entertainment. By the 70s, both cinema and hard rock had discovered an unholy interest in Satan and all his works.

In the 50s and early 60s, horror and sci fi movies were almost exclusively done on the cheap and were usually unintentionally hilarious. Screaming women were menaced by men in bad rubber monster suits,crew cut scientists foiled the plots of men from Mars who arrived in flying saucers that looked suspiciously like car hubcaps suspended from thread. But in 1968 Polish director Roman Polanski’s film Rosemary’s Baby scared the shit out of audiences around the world. The plot involved a conspiracy by modern day Satanists in New York City to bring the son of the devil (played in the film, incidentally, by Church Of Satan founder Anton LaVey) into the world. It was a revolutionary horror film: paranoid, dark, treating its subject matter very seriously. There was a sense that the film was cursed, too, particularly when the Manson family broke into Polanski’s home and slaughtered his pregnant wife Sharon Tate. It was, in the parlance of the time, ‘heavy’. Interest in Satanism boomed. In the late 60s and early 70s there was a spate of Satanic cinematic treats in the wake of Rosemary’s Baby such as Witchfinder General, Blood On Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man, Race With The Devil, Mephisto Waltz, The Sentinel, The Devil’s Rain, The Devil Rides Out, and, most notably, The Exorcist and The Omen trilogy.

These were not exactly pro-Satanic movies:in the case of The Exorcist and The Omen, they were informed by the worst sort of Christian rabble rousing. The Exorcist involved a case of Satanic possession in modern day Washington DC. The heroes are two Catholic priests, one a Jesuit doubting his faith and the other a veteran exorcist who has no doubts about the reality of the devil despite the fact that the rest of the church regard a personification of Satan as somewhat archaic. William Peter Blatty, the author of the novel and screenplay of The Exorcist, had once considered becoming a Jesuit and entering the priesthood. Despite the shock value that it generated, the film was well received by the Catholic church who had felt themselves to be under attack from the permissive values of the 60s. One priest said that he loved The Exorcist because it would “scare people back to church.”

The Omen draws its source material from the nuttiest Christian fundamentalist interpretations of ‘the last days’ and the Book Of Revelations. The anti-christ is born to a wealthy diplomat. It’s almost like a continuation of Rosemary’s Baby. It spawned three sequels (though the truly dire The Omen IV went straight to video) and has just been the subject of a dreadful remake.

Yet despite the fact that these were in a sense anti-occult films, their success stemmed from the public’s fascination with the supernatural.

Similarly, despite the fact that Black Sabbath were popularly perceived as devil worshippers, very few of their songs have an actual occult theme and those that do – such as After Forever – are actually pro Christian.

As well as Sabbath, though, there were lots of occult-influenced early metal bands in the 70s: Black Widow, who used to perform a fake human sacrifice onstage, Blue Oyster Cult whose upside down ankh logo suggested that they were also a Satanist sect, and Led Zeppelin, who inspired all sorts of underground rumours regarding their involvement in the Left Hand Path of magick. But while the bands may have been inspired by the movies, or were at least riding the wave of interest that they generated, there was little in the way of a metal influence in the films themselves. The characters were usually straight and suburban, the locations were often very square American small towns and the soundtracks were traditional mock-classical ominous music. Maybe the high school kids in Brian DePalma’s teen-horror classic Carrie or John Carpenter’s gory splatterfest Halloween were into mid 70s proto-metal, but they mostly looked and acted like characters from the 50s.

In the 80s, however, a new wave of horror and sci fi started to take its cues from the look and feel of punk and metal. With the rise of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, thrash and MTV and the video culture, there was a more identifiable metal look as well as a sound. The occult and Satanist influence was more overt: while Sabbath always did their best to deny any involvement in the dark arts, new bands like Venom and Slayer revelled in their notoriety.

Early attempts to put metal bands on the screen, such as 1987’s KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park, were pretty poor: it owed more to the high campness of The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Phantom Of The Paradise than anything else. Alice Cooper’s big screen acting debut Monster Dog, a spectacularly dire Spanish/Puerto Rican film is one of the most awful films ever made. One neglected gem, however, is The Incubus, a trashy Canadian film that features a cameo appearance from Bruce Dickinson, then lead singer with cult NWOBHM band Samson. 

A new type of low-budget horror movie was emerging in the 80s: so called video-nasties like Return Of The Living Dead had killer soundtracks that included the likes of TSOL and The Cramps. They also looked like the album covers of some of these new school metal bands come to life. It seemed that film-makers had at last found out who their target audiences were.

Films like the Mad Max trilogy – particularly the second and third films in the trilogy The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome – were set after a nuclear war and it looked as though the only survivors had been at a Motley Crue show when the bomb dropped. Mohicans, leather, studs and biker boots became the favoured look of these post-apocalyptic anti-heroes and villains. In the wake of the aforementioned scene in Terminator, this whole genre of films – Bronx Warriors, Robocop, Escape From New York – began to be dubbed Tech Noir.

By the 90s, this Tech Noir look and feel had crossed over to the more traditional gothic horror film. The Lost Boys, Hellraiser and, especially, The Crow mixed up characters with punk rock haircuts dressed in fetishistic leather gear with fairly traditional horror movie themes of vampires, demons and vengeful spirits. The Crow is one of the first films to explicitly recognise that large numbers of goths, punks and metal fans are also big horror fans. The Crow of the title Eric Draven (Brandon Lee) in his leather and corpse paint looked like he had just come from an audition with Emperor. The movie’s soundtrack covered the goth spectrum from The Cure to Nine Inch Nails. It was the forerunner for a whole sub-genre of goth movies that also includes director Alex Proyas’s next film Dark City as well as such direct descendants as Underworld, Van Helsing and of course The Matrix.

The big fear at the centre of horror films in the 70s seemed to be that the boogeyman would come and mess up the cosiness of America’s white-bread suburbia, the new school of metal horror was set in a goth neverland, part Blade Runner urban sprawl, part supernatural necropolis. They became less about scaring people and closer in spirit to the action adventure genre, albeit involving vampires,werewolves and similar children of the night. Today’s vampire hunter isn’t a doddering old guy with a stake and a small glass of holy water. He’s going to dress in Rob Halford-like leathers, will carry a machine gun that fires wooden bullets and will shoot holy water out of a high pressure hose. 

The Matrix has been the most important recent film in terms of a metal cinema crossover. Again, it is the look and feel and soul of the film that is heavy metal rather than anything specific about the plot or soundtrack. For no apparent reason, the good guys in The Matrix favour black leather and PVC clothes while the bad guys go for straight two piece suits. Keanu Reeves looks vaguely like Trent Reznor, his long duster coat and shades look was reputedly the real inspiration behind the misfits who went on a rampage at Columbine.

It’s a case of trying to figure out who is imitating who because The Matrix so quickly established itself as a cult that the look, the themes and ideas all started to filter back into metal videos, album art and lyrics. 

But for all the crossover that there is, it’s maybe remarkable how little there has been in other areas. Given their overwhelming influence on heavy rock from day one, you might have expected that the soundtracks of Conan The Barbarian and Lord Of The Rings might have had some input. They are both pretty metal-looking films but the soundtracks are pretty anodyne. Imagine how much better it would have been to have had the battle of Minas Tirith set to something by Slayer rather than the pseudo-classical orchestral pomp that they settled for. Of course, that would really have upset the Tolkein purists. There’s never really been a great metal sword and sorcery film, though many of those movies – Excalibur, Dragonslayer, Lord Of The Rings – have been hugely influential. We hope in future to see one of the members of Turisas sitting on the director’s chair to make the long awaited film of The Mighty Thor. We can but dream… 

Metal had always been one step ahead of cinema in terms of how shocking it could be. Films like Se7en may have been pretty grim stuff for mainstream audiences but they could hardly compare to the deluge viscera contained on a single Cannibal Corpse song or album cover. But as film-making special-effects got more sophisticated, it became possible to show almost anything on screen. And as public tastes became hardened – films like The Exorcist that were pretty shocking in the 70s looked tame 30 years on – so film became more extreme.

There were, perhaps very sound commercial reasons for making the crossover between metal and movies a more solid thing. When director David Lynch cast Marilyn Manson in a cameo as a porn star in Lost Highway and included a few of his songs on the soundtrack – against the express wishes of his one time mentor turned embittered rival Trent Reznor who was supposedly responsible for compiling the music in the film – he caught the wave of his ascent. The soundtrack album became an artefact that even people who didn’t go to see the film would want to own. And when Korn’s Jonathan Davis compiled the soundtrack for Queen Of The Damned, he made an album that was infinitely superior to that prize turkey of a film.

It was inevitable that the lines between cinema and music would blur further when rock stars began to write and direct as well as act and compose soundtracks for films. To be charitable, though, these haven’t always been wildly successful.

Despite the fabulous title, House Of 1000 Corpses never really lived up to all that director Rob Zombie seemed to promise. It’s a slick, rather too-knowing homage to classic slasher movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre but it was played for laughs and hence singularly failed to cut it as a great horror movie. The follow up The Devil’s Rejects was better,a grindhouse tribute to 70s exploitation cinema, with fewer laughs and more gore.

Glenn Danzig is currently filming Ge Rouge, based upon his voodoo-inspired comic book of the same name. “It’s gonna be a horror movie like you’ve never seen before. There will be a lot of zombies, all kinds of rituals, snake worship, too much to mention,” Danzig told Hammer before the film went into pre—production.

And Marilyn Manson is currently filming Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll, a movie based on the creator of Alice In Wonderland that Manson assures us will “redefine the horror genre”. Manson will also appear in the film as Lewis Carroll alongside teen model Lily Cole as Alice and – reportedly – Angelina Jolie as the Red Queen.

And in the darker realms of the metal and cinema underground, we look forward to Harvest Ritual from cult US death metallers Necrophagia’s frontman Killjoy. It will go straight to DVD and will be the most extreme film that you can imagine, he claims.”There will be things in this film that have never been seen on the screen before,” he says.

We await them all with baited breath. 
 
 

TEN MOST INFLUENTIAL METAL FILMS 

THE WICKER MAN [1973] 

Cult Brit horror about pagan human sacrifices on a remote Scottish island. Inspired Iron Maiden’s song of the same name, and Edward Woodward’s cries as he is led away to be burned is much–sampled by death metallers. 

WITCHFINDER GENERAL [1968] 

Fantastic under-rated British movie set during the English Revolution. Puritan fanatic Matthew Hopkins, played by Vincent Price in one of his best ever roles, hunts for heretics. A very big film for doom metallers like Cathedral and Reverend Bizarre 

THE OMEN [1976] 

How many times have you seen a band come onstage to Jerry Goldsmith’s marvellous soundtrack to this li’l devil? The movie itself isn’t really much cop but without it there’s probably the odd band who wouldn’t know what the number of the beast was. 

THE EXORCIST [1973] 

Several death metal grunters have confessed that they really tried to sing like the voice of the demon Pazzuzzu in The Exorcist. The voice, incidentally, belonged to veteran actress Mercedes McCambridge whose fag consumption gave her the sort of growl that would have got her a gig with Deicide. 

ROSEMARY’S BABY [1968] 

Unfortunately you never get to see the baby, though the scene when she looks in horror in the cradle and somebody says: “He has his father’s eyes,” is priceless. Anton LaVey loved this film as it portrayed Satanists as smart, strong and ruthless. 

TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE [1974] 

The first proper video nasty, the title basically tells you everything you need to know. Avoid the smug remake; the original will make you puke with fear. 

DRILLER KILLER [1979] 

The film that launched a million grindcore bands, a completely immoral and horrible piece about mindless slaughter for its own sake. How can you not love it? 

DRACULA [1958] 

The first outing for Christopher Lee in the count’s cape, would there be any goths in the world had he not done so? Blood and big bosoms abound. 

THE DEVIL’S RAIN [1975] 

A group of backwoods devil worshippers led by Ernest Borgnine has the power to melt their victims. Quite why they would need to do this is never explained; some great – and again much sampled – black mass scenes. 

LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT [1972] 

Two girls go to the big city to see their favourite band BloodLust. Along the way they meet up with the Charlie Manson-like Krug and his gang and end up raped and murdered. Then a bloody path of revenge follows…really nasty.

Filed under: Classic Rock, Goth, Heavy Metal, Marilyn Manson, Metal Hammer, Music journalism

A cosy confab with Marilyn Manson

This originally appeared in Metal Hammer two years ago.

THE air conditioned elevator takes us up to the heart of darkness. The curtains in the tastefully anonymous room are drawn and the lights are dimmed. Manson sits curled up in a chair, sunglasses on, sipping a glass of sickly green absinthe that actually looks a lot like that horrible chalky indigestion medicine. He has just recently risen. From bed, not the grave. Manson is nocturnal but because of the jet lag he has to create his own night in the hotel room. It is only mid-day.

Good absinthe? Hammer asks.

“Grrr, yeah, it’s a great start to the day,” sniggers the 21st century’s greatest goth icon.

Absinthe for breakfast. Well of all things…

Of course it’s all theatre, a personal performance to be reported faithfully to you folks out there in record-buyer land. And reader, even if it was the case, you don’t really want to hear that he was wearing old Adidas trackies and a stained t-shirt and didn’t have a lick of make-up on his face? If you were ever in any doubt, Marilyn Manson is now Marilyn Manson 24 hours a day every day.

During a previous stint – almost in a previous life – when Hammer met Manson while he was struggling to promote ‘Portrait Of An American Family’ there were a few people in the band and the entourage who referred to him as ‘Brian’. Today there are none who would dare to address him as such. But given that his activities now encompass painting, film-making and writing, is there any possibility that some of this work may come with a Brian Warner signature rather than a Marilyn Manson one?

“I think that is all just a matter of semantics,” he says thoughtfully. “For a while there I had no sense of my own identity, or rather I felt that I had lost sight of who I actually was. That was a struggle but now I feel that I have a very clear idea of who I am and what I do.”

He sips the absinthe.

Brian Warner exists in the same way that our appendix still exists: as an unused and forgotten vestige of a less evolved past. Manson’s transformation is total.

We meet on the day after that Korean nut-job Cho has massacred a whole bunch of his fellow students at Virginia Tech. Maybe the Manson fan-base is now a bit older and goes to college and university rather than high school. We ask Manson how long he reckons it will be before the media hang the blame upon him.

“When I was watching the coverage of it I kept asking myself ‘Well what is the agenda here?’ It’s always interesting to look at what else is happening in the world at the moment: a lot of people killed in Iraq today, a lot in Afghanistan, that hasn’t really made the news,” he muses. “I also kept thinking about that film – which I haven’t seen yet but friends of mine are talking about a lot – 23. Y’know, he killed 32 people, he was 23 years old…”

Are you still regarded as a figure of fear in the US though?

“I don’t know,” he sighs. ”It’s not something that I can spend a whole lot of time thinking about one way or another and even if it’s a good thing or not.”

Alas poor Manson. One minute you are being blamed for high school massacres, the Satanic moral degeneracy of ‘generation x’ (remember them?) and the rising tide of black nail polish on the hands of lardy high school jocks. The next you are just another B-list tabloid horrorshow like Britney or Lindsey or Jade Goody. Over the past year Manson has been all over the pages of Hello and Grazia and all those other dumb ‘sleb’ mags that are read by people who move their lips while they read and that have never knowingly heard a note of his music. Manson almost slipped into that niche of being famous for being famous. There was his celeb marriage to burlesque queen and fashion designer Dita Von Teese followed by their high profile break-up and his current relationship with 19 year old actress Evan Rachel Wood, star of the underrated ‘weird’ 90s TV show American Gothic as well as recent independent hits like the disturbing Thirteen.

Manson’s creative energies seemed to be going into his paintings and into a film project called Phantasmagoria that he was planning to direct, a look at the dark side of author Lewis Carrol and his Victorian bestseller Alice In Wonderland. There were hints and rumours that he was planning to quit music altogether, rumours that he now says were not without foundation.

Manson told Rolling Stone magazine that he was moving from music to filmmaking: “I just don’t think the world is worth putting music into right now. I no longer want to make art that other people – particularly record companies – are turning into a product.”

“I was very serious because as I’ve said I had lost sight of who I was,” he says languidly. “As an artist or a performer I’m supposed to be able to make a lot of people feel a certain way. But the one person who was closest to me was the person I couldn’t seem to reach at all and it made me wonder what I was doing it all for.”

The split was acrimonious. They aren’t ‘just good friends’ or any of that crap. He seems at once eager to put it behind him and to rake over the sordid details at the same time. After a period of reassessment and – frankly – some heavy drinking and partying, Manson reached some moment of clarity around the end of last year and started work on a new album. The resulting ‘Eat Me, Drink Me’ may not be his best work ever, but the fact that it exists at all is some cause for celebration.

“It’s the most straightforward album I’ve ever done,” he says. “There wasn’t a lot of agonising over the concepts because this time the songs were being written about me. When it starts off ‘Christmas morning 6.30…’ that’s actually when the song was written.”

The title and some of the songs on the album allude to Alice In Wonderland (when Alice goes down the rabbit hole, she finds a cake labelled Eat Me that makes her grow and a bottle labelled Drink Me that makes her shrink). Hammer asks him if this is in some way connected to the film project.

“No that wasn’t in any way intentional. It’s just that these were things that I was thinking about a lot at the time that I wrote the songs and they had some resonances with my own life,” he says. “We’re going to start shooting the film in October but it is entirely unconnected to the album.”

He has also just made a video for ‘Heart Shaped Glasses’ using Titanic and Terminator director James Cameron’s 3D software. It is an extract from a 3D horror movie which apparently Manson will continue filming with Cameron.

“It looks totally amazing. It was a lot of hard work but I can honestly say that I have never seen anything quite like it. It’s also I believe one of the most expensive promo ever made. Evan is in it and she got the highest fee ever for a promo.”

How much was it?

“Ah, I’m not allowed to say.”

Was it….one million dollars?

Manson laughs: “Yeah but I see that the dollar is way down against the pound so maybe that isn’t too impressive.”

Manson has also just had a meeting with the great Russian/French/Mexican cult film director Alejandro Jodorowsky.

“We’ve already been talking about one script (King Shot)that he has that he wants me to appear in as a 300 year old pope,” says Manson, becoming animated, almost excited for the first time. “But he’s also written another script, a sequel to El Topo, that he wants me to star in.”

Manson seems to practically vibrate with glee.

“I mean I have //got// to make this happen, we have //got// to get the money to do this” he says shaking his head. “For somebody like Jodorowsky who has meant so much to me and to find that he is enthusiastic about me…it’s really mind-blowing.”

If the album is a lot more basic and straightforward does this mean that the stage shows will be toned down.

“No, the opposite,” he says. “We’re got the guy who designed the Diamond Dogs show for Bowie in the 70s doing the sets. It’s going to be spectacular. When I wrote the album I really had this stage show in mind. I had already decided that ‘If I Was Your Vampire’ would be the opening song in the set.”

Interesting that Manson has written his first vampire song: that was one aspect of the whole goth package that he consciously seemed to steer clear of.

“I think I agonised too much over that and yes I very much avoided that in the past,” he says.

He’s on record as saying that it’s the new ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ which may come as good news for the undemanding but bad news for those who see Manson as something more than just another goth cliché. It’s easily the strongest song on the album.

As much as ‘Eat Me, Drink Me’ was inspired by his break-up with Dita, it’s also about his relationship with Evan.

“I used to wonder why my life couldn’t turn into one of those movies like True Romance or Bonnie And Clyde that I loved so much, why there wasn’t that massively romantic ending for me,” he says.

“I think what amazes me about her is the fact that she finds so many of the things that I do so cool. Like, we went to the London Dungeon last night. And for the cover shoot I covered a room in my house in blood and she loved it so I’ve just kept the room that way.”

Real blood?

“Yeah.”

Your own?

“No. If I used that much of my own blood I’d be dead,” he cracks a smile. “I’m looking forward to seeing headlines about me spraying my room with blood.”

Doesn’t it smell?

“No, but the one thing that gets me…it’s all over the windows and you can see right in, yet none of the neighbours has actually sad anything,” he says. “If I saw that in one of their houses, I would definitely have called the cops by now.”

Filed under: Goth, Heavy Metal, Marilyn Manson, Metal Hammer, Music journalism