Editorials
Five Metal Musicians Who Should Score A Horror Movie
To say that horror and metal go hand in hand is an understatement. It’s one of those magical connections where both cultures are viewed as outsiders in their medium and yet their fans are rabid, defending and understanding the genre for everything positive and worthwhile it has to offer.
Plus, you can’t deny that metal has some serious love of the horror genre. Think of Iron Maiden’s “Eddie” or Megadeth’s “Vic Rattlehead”. Give a minute to dwell on Metallica and their great many horror-themed songs. How about Slayer and, well…being fucking Slayer.
And more and more these rock and metal musicians are getting their feet into the horror world. David Bowie did it with The Hunger, Sully Erna was in Army Of The Damned, Dee Snider in Strangeland, and the list goes on and on. There’s obviously a passion for metal heads to be a part of the horror world.
But what if they went behind the camera and used their musical talents to create the ultimate unseen character for a horror film: the score. Imagine these musicians, who know how to write incredibly heavy and intense music turning their skills to something that requires more subtlety, more finesse, and more experimentation, but still needs that intensity, that sheer in-your-face quality. The end results could be absolutely magnificent if the right musician was connected with the right kind of movie.
So let’s go with that! Let’s take that thread and explore five possibilities that would work, in my mind, beautifully.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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