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KISS may have suffered a million squealing parents trying to suggest their name stood for Knights In Satan’s Service (something far more malevolent than KISS themselves would ever put forth), but to look at Alice Cooper’s carnival-of-terror live show was to see the blueprint for a marriage of metal and horror that would rage for the rest of time, from his unofficial protégés Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie through to Rammstein, Slipknot and beyond. You know we’re right about this.Īlice Cooper is a different story. Ace Frehley, the Space Ace? Thor’s from space.

Tell us that isn’t the sound of The Hulk pulverizing your neighborhood and causing the piercing screams of all who stand in his path. If Sabbath and Alice Cooper set out to scare anybody, they could make eye contact with, KISS was all about spectacle: sassy Paul Stanley, the Star Child who could preen and pose with Tony Stark Gene Simmons’ Demon, larger than life and thudding along to “God Of Thunder.” Listen to that song. No strangers to appearing on lunch boxes themselves, KISS was a similar source of wonder for young heavy metal fans. It’s a far cry from the cuddly, cutesy Freddy who would turn up on children’s lunch boxes and novelty items further down the line, but Krueger was a terrifying yet captivating figure for children in the 80s.

Hammer horror flesh water serial#

If you look at Freddy Krueger in the original movie, he is a genuinely hideous figure with the backstory of being a serial killer burned alive at a power plant. Let’s take the film Nightmare On Elm Street for a second. There are two artists that define this era for metal and horror: KISS and Alice Cooper the good guys and the self-appointed villain.

When most people think of heavy metal and horror, though, they think less about the actual devilish, murderous side of the latter and focus on bands far more theatrical than Sabbath. Sabbath themselves may have only flirted with the Devil (Tony Iommi would wear a cross onstage and the band was keen to point out that they had only ever dabbled in occultism), but their status as the fathers of both heavy metal’s sound and its thematic focus is plain from the very beginning. The song’s opening lines, “What is this that stands before me? Figure in black that points at me,” doesn’t even need that body-chilling soundtrack to conjure images of his Satanic majesty baying for payment for whatever you looked at online last night. The song may have come to fruition in the era of flower power, peace, and brotherly love, but take a second to consider this: its intro remains ominous yet threatening, eerie yet thunderous to this day. A hipster or two might suggest Blue Cheer, and your dad might say Led Zeppelin, but the essence of what the world would come to know as heavy metal was formed by four blokes from Birmingham with a taste for the darker side of life.Ī grand statement such as that demands a grand entrance – and the opening notes to the song “Black Sabbath” are a perfect indicator of where the relationship between heavy metal and horror was headed. While the That’s Not Metal podcast is named, ironically, after the fact that nobody can agree on what is and isn’t metal in the modern era, one of the very few things metal fans agree upon is that Black Sabbath is the starting point for the genre. And while the relationship metal and horror has, in recent decades, birthed masked men, anti-Christ superstars, and pornographic, bank-robbing Germans, it’s vital to point out that metal’s unholy union with all things macabre was set in the stone from its first notes.

While the Bela Lugosis and Boris Karloffs of this world had long since had people filling their pants with last night’s dinner, their films never really had soundtracks as visceral as the action on screen. Heavy metal and horror have co-existed with one another from the former’s very inception.