A British video shop, 1983. A rack of unclassified tapes with lurid sleeves, rented by anybody with a card and no age check worth the name, most of them Italian or American and none of them approved by anyone. The Director of Public Prosecutions eventually listed seventy two titles as liable to prosecution under obscenity law, thirty nine of which were successfully prosecuted, and Parliament closed the whole thing with the Video Recordings Act 1984, which came into force on 1 September 1985 and required every tape to carry a certificate.
Now put a teenager in that shop, in Birmingham or in Liverpool, in the same year he starts a band. That is the entire relationship between death metal and horror cinema, and it is far more specific than a shared taste for gore.
Two tapes in the same drawer
The structural point comes first because it explains everything after it. Both of these things travelled on magnetic tape, in envelopes, through the post, outside any shop that would admit to stocking them. Both were dubbed rather than bought. Both had generational loss, so that the fifth copy of a film looked exactly as degraded as the fifth copy of a demo sounded. Both were on somebody's list of things that should not be available.
The same drawer held the film and the cassette, and the same fifteen year old was posting both of them to strangers. When people ask why this music is so soaked in exploitation cinema, the honest answer starts there rather than with anybody's psychology.
The same drawer held the film and the cassette, and the same fifteen year old was posting both of them to strangers.
The sample as an instrument
The most concrete debt is technical, and it has a clear first mover. Impetigo formed in Bloomington, Illinois in 1987, ran until 1993, and were among the first bands in any style to open songs with clips lifted from films, which is a device now so standard that nobody remembers it had to be invented. Wild Rags put out Ultimo Mondo Cannibale in 1990. The title is a 1977 Italian cannibal film, taken whole.
Mortician, formed in Yonkers, New York in 1989 around Will Rahmer, took the device and built a career on it. Samples run through the lyrics, the artwork and the structure of the records, and the band have never pretended otherwise. Relapse signed them in 1993 and they later moved to their own imprint. What both bands understood is that a sample is not decoration. A ten second clip of dialogue is a set built and struck before the first riff arrives: it establishes place, threat and tone in less time than an intro riff takes, and it costs the band nothing but the nerve to use it.
That is why the device stuck. A genre whose vocals are unintelligible found a way to give the listener a premise anyway.
Titles taken whole
Go through Death's debut with the films next to it and the record stops looking like invention at all. Scream Bloody Gore was cut at The Music Grinder in Los Angeles in November 1986 with Randy Burns producing, Chuck Schuldiner playing guitar and bass and Chris Reifert on drums, and Combat released it on 25 May 1987. "Zombie Ritual" comes from a Lucio Fulci film of 1979. "Regurgitated Guts" and "Beyond the Unholy Grave" come from two more of his. The title track owes itself to Re-Animator. "Evil Dead" simply is the film's name.
Impetigo went the same way with Buio Omega, Giallo and Horror of the Zombies. Necrophagia, formed by Frank Pucci in Wellsville, Ohio in 1983, opened their account with Season of the Dead in 1987 and were still doing it in 2001 with an EP called Cannibal Holocaust. Cannibal Corpse took their entire identity off a video shelf.
The band who did most with it are the least famous of them. Deceased formed in Arlington, Virginia in 1985 around King Fowley, whose stated ambition at the time was to out-thrash Slayer, and they turned horror into narrative rather than vocabulary. Fowley barks and then narrates, which is a strange thing to hear in this music, and Fearless Undead Machines on Relapse in 1997 and Supernatural Addiction in 2000 are told rather than described. Forty years on, they are still going, with a record out in August 2024.
What the films actually taught
Not the gore. Everybody gets this wrong.
What the exploitation tradition taught death metal is a tone, and the tone is comic. A latex torso packed with offal and karo syrup, filmed in a Roman warehouse on a fortnight's budget, is not an attempt at realism and was never taken for one. It is craft, done by people who knew exactly how far past belief they were, and the pleasure in it is the pleasure of watching somebody go too far on purpose. That is precisely the register of a Carcass lyric or a Locke watercolour: excess pushed until it stops being frightening and starts being funny, without ever winking at you.
It also taught the practical business of the artisan. Effects men mixed their own blood, built their own dummies and worked out their own tricks with no budget and no help, which is the identical position a death metal band was in with a four track and a rehearsal room. The two crafts recognised each other. That mutual recognition is the part of the story that never makes it into the moral panic version.
When fiction gets prosecuted as fact
The film Necrophagia named an EP after in 2001 was itself the object of one of the strangest prosecutions in cinema, and it is worth ten lines here because the shape of it is exactly what death metal walked into a decade later.
Ruggero Deodato's picture opened in Milan on 7 February 1980 and a magistrate confiscated it ten days afterwards. Obscenity and violence charges followed, and in January 1981 a French magazine suggested that some of the deaths on screen were real, at which point the case became a snuff allegation. Deodato, his screenwriter, three producers and a distributor's representative each took a four month suspended sentence, with the courts pointing at the animal killings, which were genuine and are the one part of the film nobody defends. No murder charge was ever brought. Deodato said later that he had cleared that by producing cast members in court, and at least one actor did appear, although others have since disputed his account of what they signed.
He fought the ban for three years and got a certificate for a cut version in 1984, the same year Britain passed the Act that opens this piece. Set that beside everything else in this story and the pattern is unmistakable: an invented image taken for a document, a prosecution built on the assumption that nobody could have made it up, and a finding that the only real offence was something nobody had complained about to begin with.
Where the debt was repaid
The traffic has run both ways for thirty years, quietly.
Phil Anselmo of Pantera befriended Killjoy and played guitar in Necrophagia under the name Anton Crowley between 1997 and 2002, which is how a member of one of the largest metal bands in the world ended up on records made by a band from a town of a few thousand people. Mortician's music turned up on the soundtrack to Gummo. And on the other side, horror directors now hire the genre rather than being plundered by it, because a film that wants an audience of a certain age knows exactly which records that audience owns.
Homage, and the thing that is not homage
One distinction is worth holding onto, and it is the only judgement in this piece.
A band that names its source is telling you the register. Death naming a Fulci film, Impetigo naming a Deodato one, Necrophagia naming Romero: all of that is a citation, and a citation says this is fiction, here is where it came from, go and watch it. It is the opposite of a claim to be dangerous.
The records that should make anybody uneasy are the ones with no sources at all, where the violence arrives with no tradition behind it and no joke inside it, because those are the ones where somebody has mistaken a genre convention for a personality. The films were never the problem. They were the alibi, the vocabulary and the schooling, and they are one of the reasons the scene itself has always been more literate about its own influences than its critics assumed. The magazines that argued all of this out at the time, on photocopiers, are covered in the Death Metal Fanzines.
