Horror movies have been a part of metal culture since the veritable big bang of the music genre. It’s right there in Black Sabbath’s iconic moniker, which conjured an occultish vibe to match the creepy tri-tone melodies they were brewing up in Birmingham, but likewise paid homage to Italian director Mario Bava’s pulpy horror anthology of the same name. It proved a winning formula, and metal bands have been referencing cinema’s scariest offering ever since.
Though there are a ton of songs out there based on blood-soaked, chills-inducing horror classics, what separates the true killers from the rest of the macabre pack? Is it lyrics that hit explicit plot references? A particularly shrieking vocal performance? A guitar solo that shreds like a rusty chainsaw into an unsuspecting slasher victim?
We asked you to vote for the sickest horror-movie-themed hit of all time, and here’re the top-five vote-getters.
Ice Nine Kills – “Hip to Be Scared”
Considering Ice Nine Kills have spent their Silver Scream era saluting a veritable murderer’s row of iconic slasher villains and spooky movie series — via deep cut dialogue references, campily theatrical melodies and gore-glopped breakdowns — it’s kinda hard to pin down the ultimate INK tribute to their favorite movie genre.
While the band themselves voted in their new Terrifier-themed “A Work of Art” as a truly killer horror homage, a good many of you said the satirical screamfest of their American Psycho tribute was truly a cut above the rest. The dark-swung murder ballad features an all-time swerve in the form of a Huey Lewis pseudo-cover, but also dials up the drama with an anthemic chorus and a metal climax that bludgeons like an axe blade into poor ol’ Paul Allen’s forehead.
Of all the first-gen death-metal OGs we were worried might actually swallow our souls back in the early Nineties, few candidates seemed as equipped for the job as Deicide vocalist-bassist Glen Benton. The imposing, brazenly anti-Christian hulk cut an imposing figure as his band was starting out, between the Satanic lyrics and that wicked inverted cross branded into his forehead. That overall menace naturally looms large in the Evil Dead-inspired “Dead by Dawn.”
The track, an epic mid-album mash-out from Deicide’s 1990 self-titled debut album, isn’t a groovy recap of Ash Williams’ bad cabin trip, but rather a sinister nod to the horror series’ human-flesh-bound Nercronomicon, and how reciting incantations from said book of the dead might damn humanity. The extended thrash bridge chants out a key phrase from the Evil Dead films, while the extra eerie, pitch-shifted vocal processing makes it sound like Deicide have their very own Deadite growling into the mic.
Alice Cooper – “He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask)”
Alice Cooper is one of rock’s defining horror icons, having established his nightmarish vision through both a macabre live show of mock beheadings and sneering lyrics about defiling corpses or how stoked he’d be to rip your guts out from under his tire tread. Metal’s first supervillain was taking stock of another ruthless killer, though, with 1986 single “He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask”): Friday the 13th’s Jason Voorhees.
Driven most chiefly by a squelchy-sounding synth-bass, the track pays homage to the general vibe of Jason rather than act as a beat-for-beat spoiler for Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives. Cooper does hammer in, however, that horny teens getting freaky by the lake might get a machete to the dome courtesy of our favorite hockey-mask-adorned slasher.
Cooper clearly didn’t feel — ahem — constricted by leaning into franchise lore. Instead, he created an enduringly ghoulish pop-metal bop for the ages.
Dokken – “Dream Warriors”
“Dream Warriors” wasn’t the first nocturnal rocker to come blasting out of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise (give 213’s closing credits “Nightmare” from the 1984 original a spin sometime), nor was it the series’ most lore-building tribute (see the Fat Boys’s Dream Master-era “Are You Ready for Freddy” rap). Nevertheless, Dokken’s hair-metal masterpiece for the third movie is an enduring and anthemic Eighties classic, with Don Dokken’s gloriously soaring vocal conjuring the never-give-up spirit of the young psych-ward inmates — the titular Dream Warriors, as it were — battling Freddy Krueger throughout the film.
Dokken’s music video also finds six-stringer George Lynch smashing through a wall holding a supremely boney shredder guitar, which honestly should have become as iconic as Krueger’s rusty-razor-loaded glove.
Stephen King’s Pet Sematary is one of his most heart-aching horror works, and its 1989 film adaptation accordingly explores the trauma of a child’s untimely demise — and a parent’s desire to bring them back from the dead — to chilling effect.
Punk quartet Ramones’ titular theme song — which appeared in the film, as well as on the group’s Brain Drain album — gets a little more first-person on the resurrection angle, with Joey Ramone’s iconically lazy drawl begging us not to bring him to the backwoods’ “sacred place,” because, of course, sometimes dead is better (“I don’t want to live my life again”).
“Pet Sematary” is a creepier crawl than some of the Ramones’ biggest and fastest hits, but it’s dread captures the spirit of the source material perfectly.
