Heavy on the Horror, Vol. 2
A newsletter pairing up--and celebrating--heavy metal and horror. Classic, new, and all points in between.
Horror films are the heavy metal albums of cinema. Heavy metal albums are the horror films of music.
Instead of food and wine, HEAVY ON THE HORROR pairs one heavy metal album with one horror film to celebrate both.
M E N U
HEAVY: Paranoid, Black Sabbath, 1970
-with-
HORROR: It Follows, David Robert Mitchell, 2014
The first time I set out to watch It Follows, I stopped a few minutes in, put it on the “someday” list, and moved on. I can’t say why exactly. Even the opening sequence, which I now recognize as tense and terrific, paced by a throbbing, first-rate synth score that should’ve sunk the hooks in deep, somehow glanced off. I just wasn’t on the movie’s wavelength that first time.
But I kept hearing about it, and eventually came back around - and man, am I glad I did. Had I stayed away, I would have missed one of the best horror films of its decade, and one of the best of the 21st century so far.
The perils of sex were long-ingrained in horror cinema by the time Scream made a joke of it in 1995. Judith Myers met her end in Halloween moments after doing the deed; the opening kills of Friday the 13th (and some later ones, too) are teenagers foolin’ around. But with It Follows, David Robert Mitchell had the most original idea in that department in decades: in his film, having sex doesn’t just put you at risk of falling into some killer’s crosshairs, death itself is a sexually transmitted disease, in the form of a savage, bone-breaking, shape-shifting ghoul who can only walk but never stops coming after you. This STD is incurable. You can only pass it on to the next hapless victim—but if they die, it may very well boomerang back on you.
The movie opens on an unnamed young woman running frantically back and forth on a leafy suburban street, trying to escape some threat it seems only she can see. She gets to a deserted beach, leaving a tearful farewell phone message for her parents before a smash cut to her gruesomely twisted corpse, and you wonder what in the hell’s going on. The mystery only deepens before it’s explained, but the explanation only makes matters worse: to survive, the victim must always be ready to move, always looking for that silent walking figure that no one else can see. And recognizing that what we can barely imagine is the scariest concept of all, Mitchell keeps his antagonist an enigma throughout, never giving it an origin or explanation of any kind, even as Jay (Maika Monroe) and her friends get several long good looks at it. Not an easy feat at all, but one that It Follows pulls off with aplomb.
Unlike, say, Alien’s xenomorph, which clings mostly to the shadows, the great white shark of Jaws, which is only glimpsed before that film's climactic moments, or the Blair Witch (never shown at all), the threat in It Follows is frequently seen head on, at times in broad daylight (except for Ari Aster’s Midsommar, more of this movie takes place in full-on daytime than any horror film I can easily recall). But seeing it doesn’t help, because it has no name and no consistent face. Sometimes it’s an elderly woman in what appears to be a hospital gown moving with infernal patience across a college quad; at others it’s a glaring naked man astride your roof, watching you drive away only moments before it found a way in. Sometimes it’s someone you know, sometimes not - no rhyme or reason is given to its changing appearances, making it all the more unsettling - it could be anyone, anywhere, any time, but only its target will see it. There have been some remarkably effective horror films in the 21st century, many dealing on long-established tropes of the genre, but It Follows presents one of the most distinctive supernatural threats to come along in a long time, honoring the path laid by Michael Myers and the best monsters–only loosely sketched-in, but all the scarier for it.
Whether metal fans start the journey there or come around to it later, they all find Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, an album that casts such a long shadow over the heavy metal genre that generations of records thrash deep in its shade. Sabbath, of course, are the original music-as-horror (or horror-as-music) band—the apocryphal story goes that one of the band members noticed people flocking to horror films, and hit on the idea that record buyers too might actually pay for the pleasure of being scared. It took a little while in the early going to perfect their recipe, but once they were really into their groove, you couldn’t get anything harder - or scarier - in terms of music. There’s a reason every hard rock or metal band has Black Sabbath somewhere in their lineage. With their second album, the band created a foundational document and blueprint that’s still followed a half-century later, a true north of a record that’s easily one of the ten most influential of all time. Even as deeply accomplished an act as Judas Priest, Sabbath cohorts from the early days, use this record as house music for their current tour, and the crowd follows along like a hymnal.
Racing by at a brisk 42 minutes, Paranoid—like It Follows—gets you off balance in the beginning and never lets up, from the droning air-raid siren intro to the final fade out. At seven-plus minutes the opening ‘War Pigs’ heralds later metal epics from bands like Metallica and Dream Theater, but then a punk-length title track barrels in right on those heels. After that one-two punch the record detours to the oscillating vocals and conga-induced psychedelic swoon of “Planet Caravan” before Ozzy Osbourne’s thunderous bark, filtered down to a nightmarish drowning man’s gurgle, opens “Iron Man,” arguably the single most famous metal song of all time. And that’s just the first half.
As a whole work Paranoid was so far ahead of where metal was at the time, a long look down into the heavy darkness, a nightmare landscape populated by twisted, charred characters under black storm clouds. It’s a war album: from the scheming war pigs of the opener to the doomed time traveler of “Iron Man” glimpsing man’s apocalypse to the threat of nuclear annihilation depicted in “Electric Funeral,” mankind-induced destruction is a recurring theme, perfectly understandable with World War II a living memory at the time—there was still rubble in the Birmingham streets where the members of Black Sabbath grew up— and the rise of nuclear superpowers hanging a threat of destruction over everything.
If the victims in It Follows come across as paranoid, always looking over their shoulder for a new threat with a new shape, there’s another song on Sabbath’s LP that echoes that sense of inevitability, of a fate first brought on by attraction - ‘The Hand of Doom:’
Whatcha gonna do?
Time’s caught up with you
Now you wait your turn
You know there’s no return
Oh you, you know you must be blind
To do something like this
To take the sleep that you don’t know
You’re giving death a kiss, oh, little fool now
“The Hand of Doom” is about drug addiction, but the dark, destructive allure it describes could just as easily come from sexual magnetism. Once you start down the spiral, there’s never any sense that help is on the way. Parents are briefly seen in It Follows, but there’s no sign they’re aware of what’s going on, and even if they were, they’d be able to do anything to help. These kids are on their own, left to barricade themselves in their rooms or drive all night to put distance between them and their chillingly patient predator.
The film’s final moments include a hopeful, Jay and her longtime admirer Paul (Kier Gilchrist) walk together down a quiet neighborhood sidewalk, determined to move forward together from their ordeal. They may have won. But just as quickly as that breath of hope comes, things turn: as they walk, a figure begins falling into step behind them, fuzzy with distance at first, slowly gaining ground. Is it another neighbor out for a walk, or something else? The movie gives no answers even then, dissolving on a note of wonderfully agonizing ambiguity. If that figure isn’t just another pedestrian, will they see it in time? Before you can yell at the screen, the end credits roll.
Is it paranoia if they’re really after you? The unnamed narrator of ‘Paranoid’ and Jay would agree no. They’d both tell you to enjoy life - they wish they could, but it’s too late.
Paranoid (1971) Black Sabbath. All songs written by Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, Bill Ward, and Ozzy Osbourne. Produced by Rodger Bain. Released by Vertigo. 8 tracks / 41 minutes, 51 seconds.
It Follows (2014) Written and directed by David Robert Mitchell. Produced by Rebecca Green, Laura D. Smith, David Robert Mitchell, David Kaplan, and Erick Rommesmo. Starring Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Olivia Luccardi, Lili Sepe. Distributed by Radius-TWC. 1 hour, 40 minutes.