[CFF 22 Review] ‘The History of Metal and Horror’ boasts a vulgar display of cameos
Filmmaker Mike Schiff kicks off The History of Metal and Horror with a wraparound story set in a nightmare world. Harnessing the apocalyptic sensibilities that form the basis of the two mediums, and heavily indebted to George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead, we see artifacts from a bygone time litter the streets of an abandoned city ravaged by a plague. These items are rescued by our protagonist Christopher (Alex Rafala), who finds VHS tapes among the rubble. Played simultaneously, the metal and horror tapes summon Michael Berryman’s eerie narrator and create the body of the documentary.
The doc is essentially a giant hang out session. If you’re familiar with either subject you’ll be delighted to see a few famous monsters giving enthusiastic interviews about their personal histories. Schiff is also thoughtful in how the doc is structured, devoting individual segments to music and film before delving into the crossover effects between the two. The final stretch is particularly interesting—it merges the role that fandom plays in maintaining a culture of outsider entertainment with a sociological look at how horror and metal impress themselves on the public at large.
It’s difficult to see The History of Metal and Horror as anything but a passionate meta film. Schiff covers Wendy O. Williams and Alice Cooper’s grand guignol stage shows and musical horror masterpieces like Phantom of the Paradise to give the viewer a sense of how closely these two worlds have developed together throughout time. Horror icons like Doug Bradley and a posthumous appearance from Gunnar Hansen are particularly insightful, alongside a murderer’s row of metal’s greatest musicians. As a fan and a writer, hardly a second went by without seeing the image of an artist who fundamentally rewired my brain (for better and worse). Which is why it pains me to say that the film seemed a bit too comfortable for its own good.
If you have no formative memories of being scared shitless by a horror film or a metal album and want to see what all the fuss is about, this is a good place to start. Especially since both subjects have been documented extensively. Metal/rock has its own documentary auteurs like Penelope Spheeris and Sam Dunn, while horror docs seem to be all the rage in the wake of the In Search of Darkness series. This isn’t quite a merging of the two, however. And for seasoned viewers, what the film has in choice-cut interviews it lacks in terms of progressing the concept beyond what has already been said in prior works.
The way horror and metal intertwine psychologically, emotionally, and politically is a topic well worth exploring. I ultimately came away with a positive opinion on the doc. And I found the Heavy Metal Parking Lot style of fan interviews for the credits totally endearing. I suspect that having titanic genre figures stuffed in a relatively short runtime factors into the overall approach of the film. Its tone is celebratory first and foremost. And while the same arguments and stories begin to run cyclically early on, there is still insight to be gleaned from them. I now leave you with what is, no lie, one of my favorite lines to reconcile humanity’s insatiable urge to consume extreme media: “Violence gets people's dicks hard.”
