Audio Nasties: 10 Modern Gore-Soaked Horror-Themed Metal Bands
Gorey horror flicks and extreme metal – name a better duo. While bands like Cannibal Corpse pen their own tales of savage butchery, artists like Necrophagia, F.K.Ü. and Mortician took inspiration from the graphic tales of the macabre already told in celluloid form. With album art, song titles and lyrics inspired by extreme gore films, fans of horror movies and metal regularly get a double dose of the brutal thanks to the extensive list of both to check out later.
As the spooky season continues, we’re hiding under the covers and thinking of the grisly imagery we subjected ourselves to over the years. The nightmare continues with this crop of bands who combine extreme music with extreme horror.
VHS
VHS is a Canadian band that pays homage to those big boxed, cuddly Disney classic films on VHS. (Not.)
Formed in 2005, this band is all about death n’ roll with their latest record, I Heard They Suck…Blood. As you can probably tell from the title, cult vampire films are the topic, with films such as Martin, Near Dark and those Christopher Lee-starring Hammer Horror Dracula classics being song subjects.
Trevor Strnad (Black Dahlia Murder) and Dave Ingram (Benediction) even made appearances on the album. Their previous EP, Lenzi shows their more gruesome side. Pop in VHS and crack open a warm one.
Video Nasty
From the calculative vision of former Kataplexis guitarist/songwriter Jordan Schritt comes an amalgamation of his history with horror in the form of Video Nasty. Schritt has combined the most savage form of thrash with some of the most savage slasher films of the ‘80s to make an album, and band name, that does justice to the naughty list of ultra-violent gore flicks banned in the UK.
Along with sample-filled thrash-horror tracks like “Pieces” and “Nightmare Beach,” the band also throws in a cover of Sepultura’s “Antichrist” to show their brains aren’t strictly focused on the silver screen.
Fulci
It has been a minor trend to use director names as band names in music. A few examples are Umberto (Umberto Lenzi), Romero (George Romero) and Fulci (Lucio Fulci). While Romero don’t sound like the soundtrack to zombies ripping out the intestines of an arrogant asshole, Fulci are a band who take the ultra-gory spirit of Lucio Fulci films and converts it to audio.
The Italian death metal band makes reference to films like City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, and Zombi 2 within their catalogue, with their 2019 album Tropical Sun being the apex of this horrific coupling.
Heads for the Dead
Heads for the Dead are a band who take the concept of serpentine, horror-infused death metal set forth by Necrophagia and give it an updated injection. They emerged in 2017 and the following year released Serpent’s Curse, a soundtrack to the white worm emerging from the bottomless pit.
On the Slash N’ Roll EP, the band shows their most blatant horror influences, with songs like “Maniac” and a cover of “Pet Semetary” conjuring images of those films.
Make Them Die Slowly
From Birmingham England, far from the Amazon rainforest, come Make Them Die Slowly, a band named after the Italian jungle cannibal film Cannibal Ferox (aka Make Them Die Slowly in the US).
Though they only emerged in 2020, they have wasted no time in creating audio evidence of chopping, hacking and skinning up the studio with two full-length albums, Ferox and The Bodycount Continues… Films that get the melodic black metal treatment care of the gimp mask and suit wearing Make Them Die Slowly include Pieces, Eaten Alive, Street Trash, Dead Alive and Hack-O-Lantern.
Cropsy Maniac
Jason wasn’t the only killer to watch out for in the woods in the ‘80s. Named after the burnt and very much disfigured killer from The Burning who has a penchant for using scissors, Cropsy Maniac takes the hospital-obsessed genre of goregrind and inject some influence from ‘80s and ‘90s cult horror. Of note is their single “Brainscan,” about the mid ‘90s Edward Furlong vehicle featuring the wannabe Krueger named Trickster who dances to Primus and encourages little Eddie to play naughty video games.
Liquid Flesh
Street Trash, Slime City, The Stuff, The Incredible Melting Man – the melt genre of horror is fairly niche but enjoyable when done right. Who doesn’t want to see a great effects scene of someone melting into a pile of green ooze on a toilet? With Liquid Flesh then, we get a niche horror metal band drinking from the niche bottle of slime.
Spontaneous Liquefaction is their 2016 full-length, which is a big bowl of human soup – though besides the slime related tracks, the band plays homage to other tales like “Don’t Go in the Woods” and even Lovecraft with “The Crawling Chaos.” Liquid Flesh go for a second helping on Chair Liquide.
Kandar
From Czechia, the grindcore quartet known as Kandar (Kandar the Destroyer from the Ash Vs Evil Dead lore) burst onto the scene like a deadite out of the cellar in 2015 and subsequently released a little sugar, baby – their debut album Groovy. Like limbs in Evil Dead films, songs don’t last long on Kandar albums, with each horror-inspired track going roughly a minute long. Shorter songs means more songs and more horror references, of course. Obscure favorites like “Angst,” “Nekromantik,” and “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” are but a few included.
Brain Corrosion
Taiwan’s Brain Corrosion made a headache of an impact with the Driller Killer inspired Brain Drilling Death split with fellow gore lovers Altar of Giallo in 2009. Since then, the band have released songs inspired by different elements of horror before settling on the Jiangsu, or Chinese Vampire, for their 2020 split with Ripped to Shreds, Exhumed in Eastern Tombs. The hopping vampire is aesthetically very cool, though besides a select few films, no one has brought the carnage and gore to this vampire genre like Brain Corrosion – here is a case in which I hope film is influenced by music and takes Brain Corrosion’s lead.
Altar of Giallo
Grind Musick for Giallo Maniacs. Well, that says it all, doesn’t it. The Giallo film is an Italian horror film in which a black-gloved wearing maniac kills people in ultra-stylish ways, accompanied by a sinister soundtrack by the likes of Goblin.
With Altar of Giallo, imagine the goriest scenes from Deep Red, Pieces or Tenebre filtered through a Spanish death metal band – the result is a blood-soaked love letter to the genre with albums like A Bloodfeast for the Dead worshiping directors like Mario Bava and even the Godfathers of Mondo, Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi.
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Oxygen Destroyer
There are a handful of bands influenced by Kaiju films, though Oxygen Destroyer reigns above all as being the band who have taken the concepts illustrated in those films and utilized them in a musical weapon. The Seattle based black/death/thrash band take Godzilla out of the G rated realm and build an ultra-violent Category III world around the abomination created by nuclear testing.
Often misanthropic in nature, the Kaiju monsters within the world of Oxygen Destroyer are the great liberators – “Cleansing the Earth of Humanity’s Existence” – sure, but not before we all watch the horrors spawned by thermonuclear warfare battle it out.
