Heavy metal and horror movies were made for each other. I’m saying that as somebody who’s spent way too much of his life watching horror movies and listening to loud guitars, and I mean it as the highest compliment possible. During the ’80s, those two worlds started crashing into each other in the best possible way. Sometimes it was a song written for a movie, sometimes an entire soundtrack, and sometimes the band got dragged right into the music video with the monster.
Horror was getting bigger, louder and more colorful while metal was all over MTV, so Freddy started looking like a rock star, Alice Cooper wrote about Jason, W.A.S.P. hung out with the Ghoulies, Ozzy showed up in a horror movie to complain about heavy metal, and at one point Lemmy sat across a table from Pinhead playing poker. Nobody seemed embarrassed by any of it, and that’s a big part of why this era was so much fun.
So how did Freddy wind up sharing a music video with Dokken? Why did Jason Voorhees end up with Alice Cooper as his unofficial hype man? And how the hell did Lemmy end up gambling with Pinhead? Crank this one up, because these are the times horror and heavy metal got together and cranked the terror to eleven.
Jason Voorhees getting an Alice Cooper theme song makes so much sense that I’m almost surprised it took six movies. Jason Lives is already one of the most fun entries in the Friday the 13th franchise because writer/director Tom McLoughlin knew exactly what he was making. Jason gets resurrected by lightning like Frankenstein’s monster, the movie has a sense of humor about itself, and Jason is still tearing people apart.
It’s also the movie that gives us the undead, unstoppable version most people picture now, so Alice Cooper announcing his return is pretty damn appropriate.
“He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask)” is ridiculous and completely perfect. Cooper said he was asked to write a song for the movie, and the hook came from the idea that it’s not really the mask that’s scary, it’s the guy behind it. The song is slick, very ’80s and loaded with keyboards. It sounds less like a horror song than Jason getting entrance music.
Cooper is all over Jason Lives, too. “Teenage Frankenstein” and “Hard Rock Summer” are in the movie, so this isn’t one of those cases where a famous artist shows up over the credits and everybody calls it a collaboration. His music is baked into the movie.
That fits McLoughlin’s approach because Jason Lives knows the audience is excited to see this guy again. The movie isn’t pretending we’re shocked that Jason came back. We bought a ticket because Jason came back. Cooper had already built a career out of horror imagery, fake blood, executions, monsters and theatrical violence, so pairing him with Jason just makes sense.
And even though “He’s Back” is a pretty corny synth-pop song by Alice Cooper standards, “Teenage Frankenstein” actually rocks. Cort is behind the wheel of the RV, completely melting his face off to the song and barely paying attention to anything else while Nikki is getting killed by Jason in the bathroom behind him. As Fassbender’s Magneto would say, “Perfection.”
This is where I have to admit that I watched Ghoulies II way more times than I probably should have. Hell, maybe even more than some of the movies on this list. Not because I thought it was some masterpiece or anything like that. It was just one of those movies that always seemed to be on.
I’d be flipping around, land on the Ghoulies and end up watching the entire damn thing again. The first Ghoulies has its moments, but the sequel figured out what these little monsters should actually be doing: put them in a carnival, let them run around Satan’s Den, bite people, crawl out of toilets and act like demonic little assholes for ninety minutes.
Then somebody decided the movie also needed W.A.S.P., which was exactly the right call.
“Scream Until You Like It” was released as the theme from Ghoulies II, and while Blackie Lawless didn’t write the song himself, W.A.S.P. completely owns it once they get their hands on it. It has that big, obnoxious, sleazy ’80s-metal energy that fits these movies perfectly.
The music video is even better because the Ghoulies actually show up with the band. That’s the kind of tie-in I miss. Don’t just cut between movie clips and a band playing on a soundstage. Put the monsters in there. Let Blackie interact with the puppets. Make it look like W.A.S.P. wandered into the wrong carnival and decided to play a set anyway.
The band already looked like they belonged in a horror movie with all the blood, chains, raw meat and stage gimmicks, so putting them next to a bunch of knee-high rubber monsters isn’t much of a stretch.
Whenever I think about W.A.S.P. in this era, I also think about The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years and that infamous Chris Holmes scene. Holmes sits fully clothed on a float in a swimming pool with his mother nearby while he’s completely wrecked, drinking from bottles and practically drowning himself in what appears to be vodka.
It’s one of the most uncomfortable scenes in any rock documentary. Whether every part of that scene was legit will probably always be debated, but the image of Holmes in that pool is the ugly side of all the excess people associate with the era. Ghoulies II is the goofy side, where a band as over-the-top as W.A.S.P. gets paired with little rubber monsters at a carnival and nobody worries about whether it’s too much.
If there’s a movie that absolutely had to be on this list, it’s Demons. Lamberto Bava directs it, Dario Argento produced and co-wrote it, Claudio Simonetti handles the score, and most of the movie is a bunch of people trapped inside a Berlin theater while the audience starts turning into demons.
That setup already gives the movie plenty to work with, but then the soundtrack starts throwing Mötley Crüe, Billy Idol, Saxon, Pretty Maids and Accept at you. “Save Our Souls” by Mötley Crüe plays early during the movie-within-the-movie, and Billy Idol’s “White Wedding” shows up later. This thing is basically dripping ’80s from every corner.
But the song I always think about with Demons is Accept’s “Fast as a Shark.”
Near the end, George jumps on a dirt bike inside the theater, grabs a samurai sword and starts mowing through demons while Accept is blasting. If somebody asked me to explain this whole horror-and-metal thing with one scene, I could probably just show them that.
A guy riding a dirt bike through a movie theater cutting demons apart with a sword while “Fast as a Shark” is playing is pretty much the entire argument for this article.
I also like that all of those songs are sitting next to Simonetti’s synth-heavy score. The movie still has that Italian horror sound, but when the metal kicks in it turns the whole thing into a party. Demons isn’t trying to be classy or restrained. It’s loud, bloody and completely insane, and the music is right there with it.
OK, maybe this one is a bit of a reach since I wouldn’t put this in a metal category, but I can’t in my right mind talk about rocking soundtracks without bringing up this gem of a flick.
Listen, Maximum Overdrive is a mess. This is cocaine-fueled Stephen King directing a movie about machines coming to life and murdering people, Emilio Estevez trapped at a truck stop, a semi with a giant Green Goblin face on the front and AC/DC blasting through the whole thing.
What exactly am I supposed to do with that other than enjoy myself?
King was a huge AC/DC fan and wanted the band involved, and drummer Simon Wright has said that was basically the reason the whole thing happened.
The result was Who Made Who, which is part soundtrack, part AC/DC compilation and part excuse to put “Hells Bells” into a movie about killer trucks. The album includes six older AC/DC tracks and three new recordings: “Who Made Who,” “D.T.” and “Chase the Ace.” The last two are instrumentals, while “Who Made Who” became the big new song tied to the movie.
If there’s ever been a film that needed AC/DC, it’s this one. Maximum Overdrive has this loud, greasy truck-stop energy where nothing is subtle. A vending machine kills a guy, a steamroller runs over a kid, trucks circle a gas station like sharks and Stephen King gets called an asshole by an ATM. The guitars fit right in.
You can absolutely pick the movie apart, and King himself has been brutally honest about the production and his condition while making it, but Maximum Overdrive has something a lot of cleaner movies don’t have: personality.
Somebody handed Stephen King a pile of money, a pile of booger sugar, a bunch of trucks, AC/DC and no adult supervision.
“Who Made Who” even fits the basic idea of the movie. Humans build the machines, the machines turn around and decide they’re done taking orders, and subtlety went out the window the second that Green Goblin truck started murdering people. The soundtrack keeps things moving even when the story stalls and makes the whole movie bigger, dirtier and meaner.
If the other movies on this list use heavy metal, Trick or Treat is heavy metal. The entire movie is built around it.
Marc Price plays Eddie “Ragman” Weinbauer, a bullied metalhead who worships fictional rock star Sammi Curr, played by Tony Fields. Sammi is everything Eddie wants to be: confident, dangerous, untouchable and completely unwilling to play by anybody else’s rules.
Then Sammi dies, Eddie ends up with an unreleased recording and discovers that playing it backward lets his dead rock idol communicate with him. Before long Sammi is helping him get revenge, which goes about as well as you’d expect.
I’ve always liked this movie because Eddie feels like an actual fan. His connection to Sammi isn’t some joke about dumb kids listening to evil music. The music means something to him and gives him a place to hide when the rest of his life sucks, so Sammi turning on him hits harder than it would if Eddie were just some generic metalhead.
Fastway does a huge amount of work selling that relationship, too. If Sammi Curr is supposed to be this larger-than-life metal god, the songs have to be good. You can’t build a character’s whole life around a guy whose music sounds like a fake band from a cereal commercial.
Fastway gives Sammi credibility, with former Motörhead guitarist “Fast” Eddie Clarke and Dave King on vocals years before King became known as the singer for Flogging Molly.
Then the movie starts having fun with the cameos. Gene Simmons plays Nuke, the radio DJ who gives Eddie the unreleased Sammi record, while Ozzy Osbourne shows up as Reverend Aaron Gilstrom, a moral-crusader type warning everybody about the dangers of heavy metal.
The casting is already the joke because you’ve got Ozzy Osbourne going on television to tell parents that metal is destroying their children.
Trick or Treat came out right in the middle of the panic over heavy metal, backward messages and whether Satan was hiding in your record collection, and it takes all of that and asks the obvious horror-movie question: what if playing the record backward actually did summon something and your favorite singer really could come out of the speakers?
That’s a big reason Trick or Treat has stuck around as a cult movie. It isn’t laughing at metal fans from the outside. It understands why a kid like Eddie would love this music in the first place, then turns meeting his hero into the worst possible meet-and-greet.
If Trick or Treat is the movie that understands the metal kid, Black Roses is the movie every panicked parent in the ’80s thought was actually happening.
John Fasano’s movie has a heavy metal band called Black Roses roll into a small town, calm the adults down with a harmless first set, then turn around and start corrupting the kids for real. The teenagers get violent, the parents start dying and singer Damian eventually drops the act and turns into a damn demon.
This isn’t a movie using the satanic panic as background noise. It takes the whole thing literally.
The soundtrack is a big part of why it belongs here. Carmine Appice helped put together the actual Black Roses band, with Marcie Free, Mick Sweda, Alex Masi, Chuck Wright and Elliot Solomon in the mix, and Appice even plays drummer Vinny Apache in the movie.
Then the rest of the soundtrack throws in Lizzy Borden, King Kobra, Bang Tango, Tempest and Hallows Eve. Lizzy Borden’s “Me Against the World” is the one that really stands out. It already sounds like it belongs in a movie where a metal band is trying to send a town’s teenagers straight to hell.
Black Roses isn’t subtle, and that’s why it fits this whole era so well. If Trick or Treat says the adults freaking out over metal don’t understand the kids, Black Roses basically tells those same adults, “Nope, you called it. The band is evil.”
I don’t know how you get much more ’80s than that.
By the time Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth came around, horror and metal didn’t need much help finding each other.
Just look at Pinhead: leather, chains, hooks, blood, mutilation and a guy with nails hammered into his skull talking like he’s about to introduce the next band. The Cenobites already looked like metal album covers walking around.
Hellraiser III is also much louder than the first two movies. Hellraiser is nasty, intimate and strange, Hellbound gets bigger but still lives in Clive Barker’s nightmare world, and Hell on Earth basically asks what happens if Pinhead goes to a nightclub and starts wrecking everybody.
It doesn’t have the same power as the first two, but it’s fun and the music fits the louder approach.
Armored Saint actually appears in the movie performing “Hanging Judge” inside the Boiler Room nightclub, so the metal connection is already right there on screen before Motörhead even enters the picture.
The song “Hellraiser” has its own tangled history. Lemmy, Ozzy Osbourne and Zakk Wylde wrote it, Ozzy recorded his version for No More Tears in 1991, and Motörhead recorded theirs for March ör Die the following year. That Motörhead version became tied to Hellraiser III, and Lemmy singing a song called “Hellraiser” for a Hellraiser movie is pretty much all I need.
Then Clive Barker directed the music video and had Lemmy play poker with Pinhead.
Doug Bradley sits there in full makeup while Lemmy looks completely unimpressed by the ruler of Hell across from him, the band plays, the damned hang around and cards get dealt. At the end Pinhead gets the Ace of Spades, Lemmy wins the hand but loses his soul, and Bradley later explained that was the idea behind the ending.
He also remembered Lemmy quietly replacing a prop decanter with the real thing and drinking his way through the shoot while Bradley sat across from him drinking water.
That sounds about right.
That video is basically the entire horror-metal crossover boiled down to a few minutes. One of horror’s most recognizable monsters is sitting across from one of rock’s most recognizable figures and neither looks out of place. Nobody was trying to make horror respectable or make metal safer. They threw the two together, turned up the volume and trusted the audience to have a good time.
And speaking of a good time…
Of course, we had to save the best for last.
If there’s one song that immediately makes me picture a horror movie, it would be Dokken’s “Dream Warriors.” You hear that opening and you’re brought back into the boiler room.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is also where the series really starts drifting into the MTV era. The first A Nightmare on Elm Street is still this dark, grimy little horror movie, while Freddy’s Revenge is pretty much its own thing entirely.
Sure, both had songs attached to them. The first movie gave us the gloriously cheesy “Nightmare” by 213, while Part 2 gave Jesse a chance to show off those killer dance moves to Wish’s “Touch Me (All Night Long).”
But Dream Warriors is where Freddy starts becoming a full-on pop-culture monster.
He’s still scary, but the kills are bigger, the one-liners are coming and the dream sequences are turning into elaborate set pieces. Freddy isn’t just hiding in the shadows anymore. He’s performing, so bringing Dokken into the mix makes perfect sense.
The band got involved through manager Cliff Burnstein, who was close with Wes Craven. Bassist Jeff Pilson has said Burnstein got them the screenplay and that he and George Lynch pulled from it while writing the song, so “Dream Warriors” wasn’t some random track slapped over the credits after the movie was finished.
They knew exactly what they were writing for, and you can hear it in the dark opening, the huge chorus and just enough cheese to fit a movie where teenagers discover dream powers so they can fight Freddy Krueger.
As a metal fan, this is the kind of tie-in I want. The song actually belongs with the movie instead of sounding like something the label had sitting around.
There’s also a fun little music-history thing with the opening. In the original theatrical version, Kristen is listening to Dokken’s “Into the Fire,” but a lot of people who first saw the movie on VHS heard something else.
Early home-video versions swapped it for an instrumental version of Joe Lamont’s “Quiet Cool” before later releases restored Dokken, so depending on when and where you first saw Dream Warriors, you may remember that opening with a completely different song.
The title track is still the one everybody remembers, especially because of the music video. Patricia Arquette shows up, Robert Englund is there as Freddy, Dokken gets pulled into the Nightmare universe, and by the end Freddy is the one having the nightmare.
It’s corny in exactly the way I want a Dokken/Freddy Krueger video to be.
That crossover helped push Freddy even further into the rock-star zone. He wasn’t just living in movie theaters anymore. He was on MTV, shirts, posters and basically everything else.
Dream Warriors is still one of the best movies in the franchise for me, with great characters, effects, a great Freddy performance and some of the series’ most memorable kills. It just happens to have a killer Dokken song attached to it, too.
And while we’re talking about music and Freddy, I have to give some love to Dramarama’s “Anything, Anything (I’ll Give You)” in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. That one is right up there with Dokken for me when I think about the music in this franchise.
Horror and heavy metal have crossed paths plenty of times since then, but that stretch from the mid-’80s into the early ’90s still feels special to me.
Maybe it was MTV being huge, maybe horror villains had become celebrities, or maybe bands and studios were just more willing to do ridiculous promotional tie-ins and treat them like the coolest thing in the world.
Whatever the reason, we got Freddy fighting Dokken, Jason with an Alice Cooper theme song, W.A.S.P. hanging out with Ghoulies, George riding through Demons with a samurai sword while Accept blasted, Black Roses literally turning the kids evil, Stephen King handing his killer-truck movie to AC/DC, Ozzy warning everybody about the dangers of heavy metal and Lemmy gambling with Pinhead.
That’s a hell of a run, and a lot of the songs still rip.
I can’t hear “Dream Warriors” without seeing Freddy, “He’s Back” without thinking of that hockey mask, “Fast as a Shark” without seeing that dirt bike tearing through the theater or “Who Made Who” without picturing that stupid Green Goblin truck.
And it didn’t stop there.
By the late ’90s and early 2000s, horror and metal weren’t flirting anymore. They were married, and metal started taking over horror soundtracks. End of Days came loaded with hard rock and nu metal, Queen of the Damned built its entire musical identity around that world, and Freddy vs. Jason showed up with a Roadrunner soundtrack packed with metal.
Even the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre got a metal-heavy companion soundtrack, which is pretty damn funny considering the movie takes place in 1973.
At that point nobody had to explain why horror and metal belonged together. They just did.
There are enough of those movies to do a whole second article on their own, but we’ll save that one for another time.
For now, give me Freddy and Dokken, Jason and Alice Cooper, the Ghoulies with W.A.S.P., George tearing through Demons with Accept blasting, Black Roses corrupting the youth and Lemmy sitting across from Pinhead.
Horror and metal figured out a long time ago that they belonged together. I’m glad neither one ever let it go.