Ahead of its release on Blu Ray, we got the chance to speak to writer/director Michael Kuciak all about his feature film debut Death Metal.
You have mainly directed shorts up until this point, how much of a step up is Death Metal?
It’s the classic sprint-vs-marathon. For example, the last short I directed, STAIRS; I wrote the script and broke out the shot list on Friday, shot it on a Saturday, did all my post on Sunday, and was submitting it to festivals by Monday. From concept to release it was boom-boom-boom-done.
Whereas DEATH METAL involved a core 13-day shoot across four main locations, plus maybe 4-5 days of pick-ups, and then a post-production process that could be described as “significant.” I went through a couple of pairs of boots in the process.
We have seen films such as Deathgasm and Lords of Chaos in recent years about the death metal scene, how is Death Metal aiming to stand out?
The “heavy metal horror movie” is common enough to be its own subgenre. Pretty much every single one of these films is a horror-comedy, especially the films that came out of the ’80s and did more to embrace the kinda over-the-top hair-metal/Spinal Tap-ish aspects of the music… we’re talking about Trick or Treat, Black Roses, all of those.
More recently, we have films like Deathgasm and Studio 666. They’re good, well-made movies that give the audience a fun time. And they are also horror comedies.
You can find “serious” horror movies that include metal in the soundtracks. For example, Argento stuck Iron Maiden’s “Flash of the Blade” in Phenomena and a W.A.S.P. tune in Opera, there’s a Morbid Angel song in Night of the Demons 2, Here Comes the Devil has a Massacre song playing over the ending credits, and so on. But these aren’t “heavy metal horror movies,” they’re horror movies that have some metal.
Death Metal is a heavy metal horror movie that is not a horror-comedy. It’s a horror movie, first and foremost.
Death Metal has lighter elements, mostly from the band members bantering with each other and so on. But I tried to emulate the original Blair Witch Project in the sense that… the movie is funny right up until it’s not. When we shift gears into horror, we stay there, in terms of tone.
The primary influence for Death Metal is the original Evil Dead (plus a lot of Italian filmmakers, Fulci foremost). While there are some similarities to Deathgasm in the sense that both films involve an evil piece of music giving a metal band a hard time, I’d say Deathgasm is the Evil Dead II version of the story, while Death Metal is the Evil Dead take, if that makes sense.
What can you tell us about the writing process?
The original idea came from a recording studio. Back in Chicago, I was playing bass with my friends in this punk rock band. We went into this studio to record a demo, and it was in this really creepy brick building that was old enough to have survived the Chicago Fire. The whole time we were cutting this thing I was thinking, “Man, it would be cool if this place was haunted.”
Now… since then, I’ve actually been haunted, and in real life hanging around a haunted building pretty much just kinda sucks. But that’s another story.
Anyway, after recording that demo, the idea of a band recording an album in a haunted studio stuck with me. I threw it in the mental filing cabinet, and that’s where it stayed for a long time.
Flash forward years later. I’d shot some shorts and music videos, and I was prodding my management (at the time) to get me out for directing gigs. But they came back and told me I needed a feature credit to have a decent shot at scoring the kind of directing work I wanted, so… okay, I have to shoot a feature.
As fate would have it, one of my producing partners, Ian Holt, did a guest spot on a radio show with Dan Gutschmidt. They got to talking, and apparently, in the course of that conversation, Ian brought up the fact that I was looking for an opportunity to make a horror feature. Dan mentioned that he had a recording studio and a farm, and…
Ah-ha! A recording studio. My old haunted studio idea. It all clicked together.
Even the farm; with another band, we did our mix-down in the engineer’s fishing cottage. The idea of a recording studio being in a hidden, remote place is actually pretty realistic – I’d lived it. So everything worked.
So I dusted off the old haunted-recording-studio idea. I banged out a first draft and threw it to everyone. Ian and I did a long notes call on speaker phone while I drove from Phoenix to LA; I got home, opened my laptop, and hit the notes over the weekend.
Dan had sent me a bunch of photos of his locations, but there’s pictures and there’s actually walking the space. So I flew out to Ohio to meet with cast and crew, and Dan and I drove out to the farm to check it out. I came back to LA, did another rewrite to better reflect the actual physical locations as we would be shooting, and… that was it, that was the script.
That is, until we actually got on set to shoot this thing. And then I was just crossing out scenes, tearing out pages. Because it’s one thing to write a script and throw all of your ideas on the page. And it’s another to actually be on the day and know that you have X budget and Y production days and Z scenes that have to be shot. And that’s when you bring the story down to its most necessary elements. I went back later and starting adding and shooting more stuff with pick-ups, but the spine of the A-story was nailed down during the initial 13-day run.
What kind of actors were you aiming to secure for Death Metal?
I started with Shadia Martin, as I had worked with her on a horror-comedy short we did called Sweet 16. Shadia has one of the most important elements that anyone working in film can have, and that’s a sense of can-do/let’s-rock. I asked if she would be interested in going out to a farm in rural Ohio and shooting a horror movie, and she was down for it. So I had a protagonist. I just named the character “Shadia” out of laziness; I couldn’t think of a better name, anyway.
From there… I had no idea what the casting or crew pool was like in Ohio. So I pretty much just got off a plane, hired a local casting director, and thought… okay, let’s see what’s up. And lemme tell you, Ohio brought it. We had a lot of great actors come in.
In terms of casting, the bullseye would have been people who could play death metal and also act. But ultimately I realized I wasn’t putting on a metal show, I was making a movie, so I had to pick acting over musicianship. Of everyone in the final cast, a couple of people are talented vocalists, but I think only Joe Gaal actually plays metal; he plays guitar with Mushroomhead.
Here’s the interesting thing about casting: You can see a hundred people who are all good, and perhaps great. But then someone walks in and they just have something that makes you sit up. Every single person I cast for Death Metal had that something – the part was theirs halfway through the initial conversation. For example, E. Ray Goodwin walked into the room carrying an axe over his shoulder. From moment one, the part was his to lose.
Everyone in the cast has that same let’s-rock thing going on. Jonny and E. Ray both come out of the stunt world; E. Ray was also our stunt coordinator, and Jonny did some stunt doubling in fight scenes. Chris Richards was doing a stage play at the time; he would get off stage, drive to set, and shift gears to horror-movie-mode. Nico is wonderfully ready to just crank emotions up to 10, which is a great quality for playing a character I liked to make suffer. KateLynn is also a trained singer, and she did a lot of the vocalizations I used for the sound design. And so on… Everyone just brought it.
So yeah, when the fictitious band Abyssinister “plays” in the movie you never actually see them play their instruments. But it’s fine; that’s why I open the film with Incantation on stage and stuff the soundtrack with all of these killer bands – I let the actors act, and the bands bring the metal.
Being in a band can be tough, is this a commentary on how desperation can lead to darker paths?
It is a story about curdled ambition. That’s one of the two major themes, the other being Shadia’s path toward self-actualization.
But it’s through virtue that evil finds purchase. Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, “Boy, I can’t wait to be a bad guy today!” No matter how terrible or heinous their actions, people think they’re doing something good… or if they know it’s bad they come up with rationalizations for why it’s okay, anyway.
So that’s how this evil music gets its hooks into first the unnamed Composer, and then Ivan. They are both very talented, ambitious people. Talent is good, and ambition is laudable. But sometimes people can get frustrated with the process of finding their definition of “success.” They think… hey, I’m talented, I work hard, I’m doing everything “right,” why aren’t I rich and famous, etc?
So then that little piece of your mind asks, “What would you do to make it happen?” The answer always seems to be, “Anything!” And that’s when this dark force asks… Anything? Really? By “anything” do we mean… anything, no matter how terrible? For some personalities, like Ivan and the Composer, the answer is — yes, anything. Name it, I’ll do it.
And thus do we get evil. And a horror movie.
We have seen Satanic Panic engulf society in the past, is Death Metal linked to this type of motif?
I was a kid when all of that was going on, and I still remember when playing Dungeons & Dragons and listening to Slayer were subversive activities that could get the normies all in a huff.
One time, my friends and I saw Iron Maiden, and after the show, there was a church group protesting in the parking lot. So this giant crowd of metalheads surrounded them and started chanting “FUCK! YOU! FUCK! YOU!” Which looking back I’m not crazy about it; it’s better to just leave people alone. But even at the time, it baffled me that there were people who really, truly thought there was this conspiracy of Satanists going on – that they took this stuff seriously. But I guess that’s the nature of a moral panic, this acceptance of absurdities.
I do have kind of a winky reference to the Satanic Panic in Death Metal. Spoiler alert: the evil music is dispelled by playing it backward. And that’s kind of drawn from the urban legend about playing metal records backward and hearing evil stuff; I thought it would be ironic to do the opposite, to play the music backward to make the evil go away.
How excited are you for audiences to see it on blu ray?
The obvious answer is “Very!” It’s been a long road to get this film finished and released; that’s a weird, twisty story all of its own. But finished it is, and since we shot it on super-cool Red cameras, we can offer a version of Death Metal in 4K, 5.1 audio glory.
On top of that, we have some public screenings coming up. The first is at Knucklehead Hollywood in LA on 5/30. The second is at the Horror Hotel Film Festival on 6/11. And then we’ll be playing at Gen Con in Indianapolis, IN on 8/5.
Much as I would love to get back to Ohio and see everyone, unfortunately I’m going to have to miss the Horror Hotel screening. But it’s my understanding that several members of the Death Metal cast and crew will be in attendance. And I’ll be on hand for the Knucklehead and Gen Con shows. So come on out and I’ll be happy to sign your Blu-Ray.
Pre-order your copy of Death Metal today.
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