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The halls of heavy metal have always been filled with legitimate horror heads — think Alice Cooper feeding his Frankenstein, Mortician hacking slasher dialogue onto their death-metal barbecue, or how a group once named the Polka Tulk Blues Band were so inspired by the bleakness of a Mario Bava flick that they remodeled themselves after its ominous title: Black Sabbath. Few musicians, however, have celebrated horror villains and their on-screen bloodlettings as fervently as Spencer Charnas did on Ice Nine Kills’ 2018 breakthrough, The Silver Scream.
You see, the group’s founding vocalist is a lifelong fright obsessive, a kid who couldn’t help but recite his favorite lines through every rewatch of Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. He fittingly slips into the roles of many famous monsters on The Silver Scream, a celluloid-and-gore-trimmed album where screamed-and-sung plot beats are intercut with a unique hybridization of brutal breakdowns and theatrical songcraft befitting a Broadway review.
Name-dropping Freddy Krueger’s razor glove or the quippy killer doll Chucky is mere child’s play, though. Ice Nine Kills further splice a mix of instantly recognizable and deep-cut music cues from slasher scores into their music: Charnas’ performances channel the eerie inflections and vocal tics of on-screen baddies like IT’s tittering nightmare clown, Pennywise.
Beyond that, The Silver Scream’s intertextuality even includes the rise of a new villain for the ages — namely Charnas, or at least a fictional version of himself. Starting with The Silver Scream, INK’s music videos presented a series of interconnected vignettes from the singer’s therapy sessions. Throughout, an opportunistic psychiatrist wonders whether the violent fever dreams his patient is describing — each a viscera-flinging homage to a different horror franchise — are actually a killer’s confessions.
The is-he-or-isn’t-he angle has been kept up through 2021 follow-up The Silver Scream 2: Welcome to Horrorwood. It’s all turned Ice Nine Kills into a multimedia juggernaut piercing the psychesof metal and horror fans alike, while also putting the rising outfit in league with Metallica —who have taken INK out on a series of global tour dates — as well as esteemed horror genreveterans like The Devil’s Rejects’ Bill Moseley — who took on a role as Charnas’ chief antagonistin the Horrorwood videos.
“We’re not just regurgitating the movies. We’re making it part of our own universe. I think that helped draw people in,” Charnas sums up of how they’re keeping things both familiar and fresh for INK devotees.
Just as it’s difficult to separate Charnas’ love of horror and music, it’s impossible to fully sever the history of The Silver Scream from its splatterfied sequel. So, our conversation with Ice Nine Kills’ charismatic leader gets into all kinds of gory details from the series thus far.
Tina Korhonen
In the Eighties, it felt like horror movies had soundtrack songs that really dialed into the mythos of their characters, or at least drove into plot points through each verse: Alice Cooper’s “He’s back (The Man Behind the Mask)” from Jason Lives, Dokken’s “Dream Warriors” from Elm Street 3, Fastway’s whole damn Trick or Treat soundtrack. Is any of that music’s approach in the DNA of The Silver Scream?
Spencer Charnas I obviously loved Jason Lives and [A Nightmare on Elm Street 3:]Dream Warriors, but it didn’t seep into my subconscious like that. I became more aware of the [lyrical] connections later on in life. Horror was so associated with metal, though, all the way through the early 2000s — like when Freddy vs. Jason came out [in 2003] and the soundtrack featured Slipknot and Hatebreed. The Crow had an amazing soundtrack with Nine Inch Nails and Stone Temple Pilots. I think as metal kind of moved out of the mainstream, though, we lost that connection. Metal songs aren’t really at the forefront of those soundtracks anymore, it’s more whatever is trendy at the moment. Maybe The Silver Scream marks a nice little return, by bringing the genre to those movies again.
The Silver Scream isn’t actually the beginning of Ice Nine’s overt Horror fandom. How far back do the references go in INK’s music?
The first thing was making flyers for our shows that would have Michael Myers on a handbill. And even before the band became really horror-centric, [2006’s] Last Chance to Make Amends — the record where we had officially changed our name to Ice Nine Kills — had references to American Psycho on the song “Murders and Acquisitions.” It’s a nod to when Patrick Bateman tells someone he’s into murders and executions, and they mishear it as “mergers and acquisitions.”
We also ripped Dr. Loomis’ famous speech about Michael Myers on that album. Our The Burning EP was a reference to a 1981 slasher of the same name — it was [Seinfeld actor] Jason Alexander’s first movie, back when he had hair. So, yeah, we were definitely sprinkling things in before we went full-bore on The Silver Scream.
The songs on your Every Trick in the Book album took on a similar framework to The Silver Scream — though through the use of literary works instead of horror films. What did you glean out of the experience of making that earlier record?
Just the overall idea that, at a cellular level, we had great stories to work off. They’re classics for a reason. It was fun trying to live up to how good those works are — though obviously I don’t think we’re putting ourselves in the same category as George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
Also, other books we referenced like Carrie and The Exorcist are inherently scary and work well with metal music. Animal Farm certainly isn’t what you would say is a horror-based work, but it is scary the way a government can be corrupted. It was a nice challenge to tie that into our style, while also trying to expose classic works to kids who might not be into reading.
Horror films are a visual and visceral experience, and like you’re hinting, here, a kid might be more prone to streaming A Nightmare on Elm Street than picking up a copy of Animal Farm. Is it easier for people to connect with movies?
I think that’s true. The average person on the street watches a lot more film and TV than they read books, for better or for worse. So, it probably is a wider-appealing platform to base the Ice Nine Kills material on.
What were some of the other benefits of basing songs on films, rather than books?
When it came to the music, we definitely wanted to pay homage to how good those film scores were. You can’t talk about John Carpenter’s Halloween without bringing up that haunting score and how widely known it is — kids nowadays probably play that Halloween theme on the piano more than “Chopsticks.”
So, you have that palette to work with. [The Chordettes’ 1954 doo-wop single] “Mr. Sandman” is pretty synonymous with Halloween at this point, too. That’s why we chose to put that vocal motif in our “Stabbing in the Dark.”
For “Rocking the Boat,” we took that John Williams Jaws score — dun-dun, dun-dun — and thought, How could that not be the breakdown? It’s so perfectly set up. And, like… I don’t know that anyone else referenced the Jaws theme in a metalcore breakdown. It’s fun for people to sink their teeth into… no pun intended.
Same with American Psycho. You can’t think about that movie without Patrick Bateman’s Huey Lewis monologue. Even before I really sat down to write that song [Welcome to Horrorwood’s “Hip to Be Scared”], it was obvious that we had to do some kind of “Hip to Be Square” homage during the Paul Allen kill scene.
A funny story about that: I’d gone to great lengths to interpolate that hook so it wasn’t the exact same progression as “Hip to Be Square,” but [the label] said it was still too close. Huey Lewis had to actually listen to our song and sign off on it. He’s credited as a writer on the album.
Reaching out to Huey feels like another deep-cut music and fright flick connection, considering he won his lawsuit against Ray Parker Jr. and the makers of Ghostbusters for plagiarizing the News’ “I Want a New Drug.”
Exactly! I didn’t find out about that case until years later. I was listening to his music one day and was like, “Holy shit… this sounds like the Ghostbusters theme!”
How did you go about picking movies to homage on The Silver Scream?
Well, I knew that I wanted to cover my favorites. It was pretty easy to create a big master list on a whiteboard. Quite a few had to hit the cutting-room floor before we even started, though, because you can’t do a 40-song album unless you’re the Smashing Pumpkins or something. Some of those were saved for Welcome to Horrorwood.
From there it became, “Which ones do we think can actually make for great, unique songs?” Like, there are a lot of similarities between the Halloween and Friday the 13th franchises — even Sean Cunningham, the director and producer of Friday the 13th, has stated many times that he was just trying to rip off Halloween. So, when we made our songs about those two movies, “Stabbing in the Dark” was done from Michael Myers’ perspective, while “Thank God It’s Friday” is sung from the perspectives of the ghosts of the camp counselors slain at Camp Crystal Lake.
It tracks that “Thank God it’s Friday” would be from the counselors’ perspective, since Jason Voorhees is a mute character. Seems fitting that you wouldn’t hear his voice, specifically.
Absolutely, though on that same note, Michael Myers doesn’t speak either. We thought that it would be cool to document what was running through Michael’s head, though. It was a cool challenge. As far as the way I sang those songs, I tried to give every song a different voice. For “IT Is the End,” I tried to take some inspiration from both Tim Curry’s and Bill Skarsgård’s respective performances of Pennywise, though I was also thinking about what it would be like if Pennywise was a character in Les Misérables.
In the beginning of that track, you replicate the warbling, childlike tone of Skarsgård’s Pennywise from the recent film. What did you take out of Tim Curry’s 1990 performance of Pennywise?
It was just the menace that he brought to Pennywise. As you pointed out, Skarsgård is a little more jovial. Tim Curry sounds like a cigarette smoker — his voice is deeper and scratchier. The way I look at it, that comes out in my screamed vocals. Skarsgård is in the sing-songy part that opens “IT Is the End.”
You’re embodying some of horror’s greatest ghouls on The Silver Scream. What was it like to jump between these characters?
It took a little while to find the right inflection on certain parts, but already being such a fan of these movies meant it mostly came naturally to me.
I’ve collaborated on lyrics with Steve Sopchak for the past four albums — he’d also produced our early albums — and we work so well together. We want every line to be tattooable — when we started to see people getting our lyrics tattooed on them, we felt obligated to make the lyrics really good. [Laughs] So, it’s not just putting in a reference to Freddy’s glove with knives for fingers — everyone knows that. We put in the deeper cuts, referencing stuff that the really hardcore fans will get.
That’s another reason why I think horror fans appreciate what we do, because you might not get all of the references and Easter eggs the first time around. Like, it was only very recently that I realized that in this one scene in Halloween, you actually see Michael Myers drive by in the background as Donald Pleasence is talking to a police officer. It’s little stuff like that.
Some of these icons are straight-up villains — evil incarnate. Others, like Billy from Silent Night, Deadly Night, are more victims of circumstance. Like, there’s great tragedy to how they became the monsters. How much consideration did you put into the varying backgrounds and psychologies of these figures?
We try to tie that in. The Silent Night, Deadly Night story is obviously a tragedy. As a kid, Billy witnesses his parents being murdered by someone in a Santa Suit. He’s traumatized by that and becomes a killer Santa as an adult. At the same time, a movie like that is not supposed to be taken too seriously. Whether intentional or not, it can be a very funny and tongue-in-cheek film. So, we walk that line.
At the end of the day, it was our goal to capture the spirit of the films. Silent Night, Deadly Night is kind of funny. A movie like Pet Sematary has no humor to it, though, so “Funeral Derangements” [from The Silver Scream 2: Welcome to Horrorwood] had to maintain a very serious edge to it.
Tina Korhonen
What was the vibe like in the studio as you were making The Silver Scream? On that particular album, it was pretty much just me and our guitarist JD [Justin deBlieck] in the studio at any given time with our producer, Drew Fulk. I remember Drew being really animated and energized.
I think that we, as a band, wanted to take a lot of risks and do weird shit. We wanted to do things that we knew were going to get a reaction, whether it was loved or hated. With “IT Is the End,” for instance, that meant dropping a clown horn in a deathcore song, and then getting a classic ska-punk band [Less Than Jake] to play horns on top of it. We weren’t afraid of being uncool. That was the spirit of the first Silver Scream recording.
The connections can be quite layered on this album, even outside of the movie references. How did you end up getting Sam Kubrick — Stanley Kubrick’s actual grandson — to scream on your tribute to The Shining, “Enjoy Your Slay”?
When we were touring in Europe in 2016, I was tasked with picking out some regional openers, and one of the bands we came across in the submission pool was called Shields. They sounded really cool, and our booking agent had worked with them before, so it just made sense to tour together.
We had no idea of any kind of connection, but on a day off their singer Sam invited us to his place just outside of London — “Why don’t you guys come stay with me, we’ll have a little party.” Then as we were approaching the address, our tour manager goes, “You know who Sam is, right?” We thought he was just fucking with us when he told us, but as we pull up to this beautiful piece of property with several houses on it, we realize we’ve been invited to stay on the Stanley Kubrick Estate. It was amazing! Sam was kind enough to give us a tour of the house.
We got to see Stanley’s library where he had all his 2001: A Space Odyssey awards. He had all of the masks from Eyes Wide Shut hung up on the walls. We actually stayed in a converted stable where Stanley Kubrick apparently cut his films. I found the original reel of Full Metal Jacket!
When it came time to do The Silver Scream, and because The Shining is such a fantastic novel and film, I thought it would be so cool to have Sam on the record. He has such a great scream. And we knew we could throw in a different sort of Easter egg into the song, since someone connected to the director of the film was singing on it. So, I added the line “I’ll hit your whole bloodline” as a little nod to that.
What was it like to bring your Ice Nine Kills co-founder, Jeremy Schwartz, back into the fold to sing on “Rocking the Boat”?
That was great in many ways. You know, when Jeremy left the band in 2009, I kind of held a grudge. Wrongfully so! We had been friends for so long, and I was mad at him for leaving. This was our dream, you know? Over time, that lifted away, so being able to connect with him and become friends again after being out of touch for so long was a great experience. I was actually just texting with him, because I want him to collaborate with us on some new music.
There’s a big mix of horror subgenres within the album: you’re covering slashers like Halloween; there’s the supernatural and psychological horror of The Shining; you hit creature features like Jaws. On a personal level, though, do you gravitate more towards certain styles of horror when you’re streaming at home?
Slashers have always been my favorite. Something about the simplicity of a guy in a mask with a knife has always scared me. Probably because it seems the most grounded in reality.
Beyond their classic film references, the music videos around The Silver Scream also tell an original horror tale that’s built up the mythos of Ice Nine Kills. How did you go about developing the fictional story of Spencer Charnas, alleged psychopath, and his psychiatrist, Dr. Ian Black?
I feel like The Sopranos might’ve played a role in my idea, because Tony was in therapy for the first few seasons, right? And I thought that the therapy session framework could be a cool way to get in and out of the music videos. I went to school with Andrew Justin Smith, the guy that plays the newscaster, Roy Merkin. We’re very tight — I was the best man at his wedding. He’s a phenomenal writer, so he and the director, Daniel Hourihan, basically took my plot points and we all created an overarching story.
The process for The Silver Scream and Welcome to Horrorwood was very much like writing episodic television. It’s obviously very meta and self-referential to play myself. I wondered what it would be like if a horror musician like Alice Cooper or Rob Zombie was arrested for a murder, yet there wasn’t a lot of hard evidence to tie them to the crime. Then, I started to think about the West Memphis Three, which was a real case where attorneys really didn’t have much physical evidence to convict them, but they used the metal music they were listening to against them. So, if Rob Zombie or Alice Cooper were arrested for murder, their public persona and the depraved art they created would be used as evidence of their guilt. In terms of character building, that’s where the idea started.
F. Scott Schafer
You continued to build out the story of The Silver Scream with a tie-in novel written from the perspective of Roy Merkin, which then turned into an audiobook narrated by Candyman actor Tony Todd. As a horror fan, what was it like to get a genre icon involved in the world of Ice Nine Kills?
It’s completely surreal. I’ve heard from so many actors: “Man, I see so many Ice Nine Kills shirts at these horror conventions.” Because of that, I think we’ve shown up on a lot of those actors’ radars. Or there were people tweeting Tony Todd saying, “Have you heard ‘Farewell II Flesh’?” [INK’s Candyman tribute from Welcome to Horrorwood]?
On a personal level, it’s an honor. It also gives us this credibility and gravitas. A kid who never watched horror movies listens to “Farewell II Flesh,” figures out it’s about Candyman, and now he’s in line at a convention to meet Tony Todd while wearing an INK shirt. It’s very full circle.
Speaking of full-circle moments, you got Miko Hughes, who played the toddler Gage in Pet Sematary, involved in your music video for Horrorwood’s “Funeral Derangements.” But you recast him as the big rig driver that ran over his original character in the 1989 film. It’s like he’s killing his three-year-old self, in a strange way.
That might be the best cameo we’ve thought up. Like you said, we got him to kill his old character on camera. My convention agent, Sean Clark, called Miko up, and [Miko] was so into the idea. It was surreal having him behind the wheel of that truck.
You know, he actually did the driving! He’s since become a good buddy of mine. I don’t know if too many people will catch it, but when he goes down to reach for his drink in the truck cab, you can see VHS copies of a few of his other movies, like Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and Kindergarten Cop.
There’s a meta line of dialogue in Scream 2 that suggests sequels should have a bigger body count, and that the deaths need to be more elaborate. Whether it was through the feel of the music or the gruesome kill scenes in the music videos, was it important to make sure The Silver Scream 2: Welcome To Horrorwood was a nastier affair?
Absolutely. We wanted to take it up a notch, in every respect. We had a lot to prove with Silver Scream 2. You don’t want that sophomore slump — even though it’s not technically our sophomore album. It’s also a different lineup of the band, so there was a lot riding on it. That pressure made us — myself, Joe [Occhiuti], Steve [Sopchak], Drew [Fulk] and Patrick [Galante] — write what I feel is a superior album. We weren’t going to succumb to the adage that sequels always suck.
The on-screen kills get a lot more intense in Horrorwood, which led to some of your videos getting heavily censored on YouTube. Do people ever confront you about the depravity of Ice Nine Kills in real life?
It’s only my sister and father that bring it up, really. They’re supportive, but they’re definitely worried when we do videos where there’s extreme violence — like killing police officers with semi-automatic weapons. But no, we’ve never really had people picketing outside of our shows.
Nothing like people protesting Silent Night, Deadly Night screenings in ’84?
No, no… But it would be cool if they did! I’ve got ideas to hopefully get us there. The only thing that happened in that regard was when Disney banned us from playing House of Blues Orlando, which is on Disney property. Us and Cannibal Corpse are on a shortlist of bands that aren’t allowed to perform there. That yielded some fun merchandise that poked fun at the whole thing — Mickey as Freddy Krueger, Goofy as Leatherface.
So, your violent imagery got you banned by Disney. But what’s actually the most violent part of your live show?
It’s hard to top the Paul Allen/American Psycho kill during “Hip to Be Scared” — when I come up with a severed head. There’s another gag we do for “The Shower Scene” where you don’t see any blood, but it’s really effective. You just see a silhouette of a girl being stabbed, which I think is pretty brutal.
It’s one of those things…They say that special effects guys can’t create anything worse than what’s in your own imagination.
That feels true to Psycho. Theres something like 50 cuts in that 45-second shower scene, but you never actually see the knife stabbing into Janet Leigh. The stage presentation of “The Shower Scene” is a beautiful complement to Hitchcock’s original vision.
Why thank you, I appreciate that.
Bringing it back to the first Silver Scream — there’s a key line during the wraparound portion of the “it is the end” video where your character is discussing the connection between horror films and Ice Nine Kills’ music, and you tell someone “We built our career on that rot.” It’s a funny line, but also quite poignant. There have always been people trying to discredit the two mediums, but horror movies are a billion dollar industry, and in some ways, metal is bigger than ever. At the end of the day, what does it mean to work within genres that are reviled and revered in the same breath?
I think it’s awesome. Getting bent out of shape about the fact that these moviesdon’t get Oscars? Like, who gives a fuck about the Academy Awards anymore?
To me, it’s almost a compliment that metal and horror are thought of as pornographic. It’s an honor to be able to incorporate the two things that I am so passionate about into my job.