WEBVTT
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Welcome back to Screaming Projector.
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I'm your host Dave.
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I'm so glad you're back.
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You're here for the deep dives, the interviews, all of it, and I'm so glad you are.
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We love that.
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This is it.
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This is Screaming Projector, the podcast about two art forms that have always understood one another: metal and horror.
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This is for the horror fans, this is for the metal fans, and this is for the newcomers.
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This is for the curious.
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This is here for everybody.
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I'd like to thank Fires in the Distance for taking the time to speak with me last episode.
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It was a fantastic interview.
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You guys are awesome.
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You're welcome back anytime.
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We'd totally love a part two.
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A few quick mentions before we get started.
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I'd like to say hello to Indie Spotlight, keeping the spotlight on an independent podcast like this one.
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And to Death Metal Pug.
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Keep rocking on.
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Spoiler alert, this episode discusses the ending of a 1973 horror film.
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It's been a few years, you've had some fair warning.
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However, if you haven't seen it, go take a look, come on back, we'll be here.
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Last episode we sat with something heavier in the heart than in the riffs, fires in the distance, sacrifice, and what it costs to give up everything for the ones you love.
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If you haven't heard that one, go back.
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It's one of the most personal and emotional episodes that this show has ever done.
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Today we go somewhere different, somewhere heavier.
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Not sacrifice, but belief.
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Unquestioning, murderous belief.
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No humor, just fire, and a question that has an uncomfortable answer.
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I want to be transparent about how this is going to work, because that's the point.
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Screaming Projector is not a list of bands to say, yeah, we were influenced by this or uh we love that movie, although sometimes that may happen, but this is about something else.
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I'm making a case.
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I'm drawing a line between two things and I'm asking you to follow it.
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The connection is my argument.
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You can agree with it, or you can push back, or you can find a new line entirely.
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Whatever happens, it's always interesting.
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Let's talk about today's pairings, without naming names just yet.
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One is a death metal track born from grief, survival, and a lifetime of watching institutions weaponize belief to the people underneath them.
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It comes from a country that knows what happens when authority cloaks itself in the sacred and asks you to stop questioning.
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The other, a folk horror film that nearly ceased to exist.
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Torn apart by a studio, buried as a B movie, and possibly the original negative entombed under a British highway.
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It survived anyway, found its audience slowly, and was eventually called the Citizen Cane of Horror Movies.
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Neither one is about the other, but I think they're saying the same thing.
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And that thing is this the most dangerous belief is the one that thinks it's righteous.
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Decapitated, born pissed off in Krosno.
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To understand Kill the Cult is to understand where Decapitated came from.
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Krosno, Poland, a small industrial town in the southeast, nineteen ninety six.
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Please forgive me for butchering these names.
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Vaclav Vog Kjaltka was fourteen or fifteen.
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His younger brother, Vitold, who everyone called Vitek, was twelve.
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Two brothers starting a death metal band in Poland at the age of twelve and fourteen.
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Let's sit with that for a minute.
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Two teenagers, twelve and fourteen, sorry, preteens, started a death metal band in Poland.
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What were you doing when you were twelve and fourteen?
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When first formed, the age of the band members were between ranging between twelve and sixteen.
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They were kids, but they were kids growing up in a specific atmosphere, and that atmosphere is enormously important to the music and what it became.
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Vog talks about this directly.
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Poland is a deeply Catholic country.
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People go to church every Sunday, you're taught religion in school, there's a church on every corner, and in his words, people are always pissed off.
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That's not a throwaway quote.
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That's the soil that the music grew in.
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Decapitated released their debut album, Winds of Creation, in April 2000.
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They were just barely out of their teens, but the metal world noticed immediately.
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They were technical and precise, almost inhumanly precise.
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Vitec's drumming was something that critics struggled to describe.
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Inhuman is the closest that any of them could come.
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Then came 2007, and everything changed.
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On October 29th, while traveling to a show in Gomel, Bielarus, their tour bus collided with a truck.
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Vitech died three days later, he was twenty-three.
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Their vocalist Kovan suffered massive brain damage and didn't recover for years.
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Most bands don't come back from that.
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Vogue toured and played with other bands continuously to keep his hands busy while he was figuring out what was left of Decapitated.
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In 2011, a new version of Decapitated released Carnival Is Forever.
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The band kept evolving, kept releasing records, kept pushing, but the shadow of 2007 never fully lifted.
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By 2017, when Anticold arrived, Decapitated were a very different band from the teenagers growing up in Krosno.
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They had been through grief, loss, lineup changes, and twenty years of the music industry grinding on them.
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The album deals with the abstract of who and what we are as humans.
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It's existentialism at its finest, raging against the so-called machine, and standing up for yourself, defining your own code.
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And at the center of that album sits Kill the Cult.
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The song explores the themes of disillusionment and rebellion against oppressive ideologies, calling for the destruction of false belief systems and manipulation in society.
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They are aimed at the machinery of belief itself, the way institutions use faith as a leash, the way authority cloaks itself in the divine to avoid accountability.
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Fogg put it plainly in interviews, we've been pissed off with people who use religion, or the way they use people in general for things like war and terrorism.
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They manipulate them.
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There it is.
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The Polish kid who grew up surrounded by churches, and through unquestioning devotion, watching his brother die on a tour bus in the middle of nowhere, and kept making music through all of it.
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And when he finally writes an album about the world and what he thinks of it, it sounds like this relentless, grooved into your skull, a chant that sounds like ritual itself.
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Kill this cult, cult of lies.
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I burn your symbols and spit on your faith.
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Keep that in mind, because we're about to meet someone who understands exactly what he means.
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The Wicker Man, the citizen cane of horror movies.
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The year is nineteen seventy three.
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A Scottish police sergeant named Neil Howie receives an anonymous letter about a girl who's gone missing on a remote Scottish island called Summer Isle.
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He flies out alone to investigate.
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What he finds is a community that has completely, openly, and cheerfully completely abandoned Christianity.
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The inhabitants of the island who have abandoned Christianity now embrace a form of Celtic paganism.
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They dance around Maypoles, they have sex in fields, they sing songs in the pub that are barely disguised fertility hymns.
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They are, on the surface, utterly peaceful.
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Howie is appalled.
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He's a devout Christian, not just personally, but professionally, morally, he's disgusted.
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His entire worldview is built on faith, and everything on this island is designed to make that worldview feel small.
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Essentially it is essentially a battle of belief systems, about rigid moral code versus a society that literally dances to a different drum.
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As the investigation proceeds, something feels wrong.
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The locals are too helpful.
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The stories keep shifting.
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The missing girl, Rowan Morrison, either exists or simultaneously doesn't exist, depending on who how he asks.
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The film builds slowly.
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There's no gore.
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The director, Anthony Schaefer, specifically wanted a film with a minimum of violence and gore, but was still terrifying anyway.
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Sound familiar?
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He was tired of horror films that relied almost exclusively on viscera to be scary.
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The focus crystallized when he, quote, finally hit on the abstract of sacrifice.
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What makes the Wickerman truly terrifying isn't blood.
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It's the smile.
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Everyone's smiling the entire time.
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They'll be helpful, they'll sing you songs, they'll make you food, and the entire time the machinery is running and has already made the appointment.
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In the film's ending, which I'll describe here because it's fifty years old and you should know what you're getting into, Howie meets the criteria for the perfect sacrifice.
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He came of his own free will, he holds authority like a king, and he's a virgin.
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So?
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He's stripped, dressed up in robes, and put inside a giant wicker man cage and set on fire.
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As the Islanders surround its singing, Howie recites Psalm twenty three and prays to God as he burns.
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That ending lands like a door slamming shut, not because it's graphic, it isn't, but because of what it means.
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Howie's faith gave him absolutely nothing.
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The Islanders' faith got everything they wanted.
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Two belief systems clashed, and only one survived.
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The film doesn't tell you which one was right, it only shows you the flames.
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Film magazine Cinefantastique called it the Citizen Cane of Horror Movies.
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Christopher Lee, who played Lord Summer Isle, called it the best movie he ever made.
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This is coming from a guy who has been in over 250 films, including a certain wizard with a long white beard.
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Here's something worth knowing about the Wickerman almost not existing at all.
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It was used as a tool in a power struggle between two studios, was written off as a B movie, and the original film stock may actually be buried beneath the British highway system.
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The studio cut it down, buried it as a crappy B movie, and did everything possible to almost make sure it never existed at all.
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The film survived anyway, found its audience slowly, and eventually became one of the most influential horror movies of all times.
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There's something very metal about that.
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The connection.
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So, a death metal song from Poland in 2017, and a horror film from Scotland in 1973, where's the line?
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Here's my argument.
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Both Kill the Cult and the Wickerman are about the same terrifying thing.
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They're both about belief systems that have decided that they are beyond question.
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And both ask the same very uncomfortable question.
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Not is this religion evil, but who gets to decide who's the faith and who's the cult?
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In The Wickerman, the villagers are obviously the antagonists.
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They burn a man alive.
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But watch the film again and ask yourself, is Howie innocent?
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He's rigid, judgmental, and contemptuous.
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He looks at these people and sees nothing but degeneracy.
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He never once considers that they might have their own history, their own story, and their own relationship with the land that they've lived on for generations.
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He comes in from the outside, with his law and his God, and he cannot conceive of a world where those things don't apply.
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The film does not let either side off the hook.
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Just like in Rosemary's Baby, this film lies in the era's gnawing question Is God dead?
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Religions curtail social, intellectual, and sexual freedoms, but without God to fill the skies, the universe is a lonely place.
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Hardy's film holds that tension without resolving it.
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That's what makes it great.
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Now, listen to Decapitated's Kill the Cult.
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The song doesn't call out any targets specifically.
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Vogue himself has explained, you can find cults everywhere and in everything we do.
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What kind of world do we live in?
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Who pulls the strings?
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The song is a rage against manipulation wherever it lies.
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Political, religious, cultural, any system that asks you to stop thinking and start following.
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And here's what I find fascinating.
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The song almost sounds like a ritual.
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The continued repetition of Kill This Cult sounds almost liturgical.
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Decapitated, in writing a song against cult thinking sounds like a cult chant.
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I don't think that's accidental.
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They knew exactly what they were doing.
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The Wicker Man does the same thing.
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The islanders' songs are beautiful, the Maypole dancing is joyful.
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The community has warmth and life and a true connection to something ancient.
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The horror isn't that they're monsters, the horror is that they make sense, right up until the moment that they don't.
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That's the thesis.
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Both works understand the most dangerous belief is the one that feels righteous.
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Both refuse to give you a clean villain.
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Both leave you in the fire asking why and who.
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I didn't find an interview where Vogue says, quote, We were watching the Wicker Man and thinking about when we wrote this.
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That claim isn't mine to make.
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What I can tell you is that both of these works are drawing water from the same well.
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The deep, ancient anxiety about what happens when humans organize their fears into systems and point those systems at each other.
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That's folk horror, that's death metal, and as far as I'm concerned, they're having the same conversation.
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The Wicker Man turns 50 this year.
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Kill the Cold is eight years old, and the question that both of them are asking: who holds the power, who decides what's sacred, and who gets thrown into the fire are not getting any less relevant.
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Next episode, we talk to decapitated.
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We talk horror, we talk fun, we talk metal, and we connect back to that other conversation about humor, the smirk, and why it's so important to keep it in the music.
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Until then, stay heavy, stay skeptical, and watch where you're walking on that island.
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Fulci lives.
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That's a wrap on this one.
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Thank you for listening to Screaming Projector.
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New episodes drop regularly.
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You can follow us on Instagram at Screaming Projector, and you can find everything at Screaming Projector.com.
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I'd like to hear what you have to say.
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I want to know what your thoughts are.
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Hit me up at Dave at Screaming Projector.com.
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And if you're watching this on YouTube, please hit like and subscribe.
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It genuinely helps new people find the show.
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If you'd like to help support what we're building here, we're on Patreon.
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Every little bit helps.
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Until the next time, stay heavy.
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Stay scared.
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Fulci Lives.
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Screaming Projector is a production of Screaming Projector Media.
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Music by D218.
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Welcome back to Screaming Projector.
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I'm your host Dave.
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I'm so glad you're back.
00:00:21.120 --> 00:00:26.399
You're here for the deep dives, the interviews, all of it, and I'm so glad you are.
00:00:26.640 --> 00:00:27.519
We love that.
00:00:27.839 --> 00:00:28.480
This is it.
00:00:28.640 --> 00:00:35.359
This is Screaming Projector, the podcast about two art forms that have always understood one another: metal and horror.
00:00:35.600 --> 00:00:39.759
This is for the horror fans, this is for the metal fans, and this is for the newcomers.
00:00:39.920 --> 00:00:41.200
This is for the curious.
00:00:41.359 --> 00:00:43.439
This is here for everybody.
00:00:43.679 --> 00:00:50.159
I'd like to thank Fires in the Distance for taking the time to speak with me last episode.
00:00:50.240 --> 00:00:51.679
It was a fantastic interview.
00:00:51.840 --> 00:00:52.799
You guys are awesome.
00:00:52.960 --> 00:00:54.399
You're welcome back anytime.
00:00:54.479 --> 00:00:55.920
We'd totally love a part two.
00:00:56.560 --> 00:00:58.799
A few quick mentions before we get started.
00:00:59.039 --> 00:01:04.879
I'd like to say hello to Indie Spotlight, keeping the spotlight on an independent podcast like this one.
00:01:05.120 --> 00:01:06.560
And to Death Metal Pug.
00:01:06.719 --> 00:01:07.760
Keep rocking on.
00:01:08.000 --> 00:01:12.640
Spoiler alert, this episode discusses the ending of a 1973 horror film.
00:01:12.879 --> 00:01:15.519
It's been a few years, you've had some fair warning.
00:01:15.599 --> 00:01:19.359
However, if you haven't seen it, go take a look, come on back, we'll be here.
00:01:19.599 --> 00:01:28.480
Last episode we sat with something heavier in the heart than in the riffs, fires in the distance, sacrifice, and what it costs to give up everything for the ones you love.
00:01:28.640 --> 00:01:30.560
If you haven't heard that one, go back.
00:01:30.719 --> 00:01:34.719
It's one of the most personal and emotional episodes that this show has ever done.
00:01:34.959 --> 00:01:37.280
Today we go somewhere different, somewhere heavier.
00:01:37.439 --> 00:01:39.200
Not sacrifice, but belief.
00:01:39.439 --> 00:01:41.760
Unquestioning, murderous belief.
00:01:42.000 --> 00:01:45.840
No humor, just fire, and a question that has an uncomfortable answer.
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I want to be transparent about how this is going to work, because that's the point.
00:01:50.239 --> 00:01:59.920
Screaming Projector is not a list of bands to say, yeah, we were influenced by this or uh we love that movie, although sometimes that may happen, but this is about something else.
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I'm making a case.
00:02:01.359 --> 00:02:04.879
I'm drawing a line between two things and I'm asking you to follow it.
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The connection is my argument.
00:02:07.040 --> 00:02:11.199
You can agree with it, or you can push back, or you can find a new line entirely.
00:02:11.360 --> 00:02:13.919
Whatever happens, it's always interesting.
00:02:14.240 --> 00:02:17.199
Let's talk about today's pairings, without naming names just yet.
00:02:17.360 --> 00:02:24.800
One is a death metal track born from grief, survival, and a lifetime of watching institutions weaponize belief to the people underneath them.
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It comes from a country that knows what happens when authority cloaks itself in the sacred and asks you to stop questioning.
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The other, a folk horror film that nearly ceased to exist.
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Torn apart by a studio, buried as a B movie, and possibly the original negative entombed under a British highway.
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It survived anyway, found its audience slowly, and was eventually called the Citizen Cane of Horror Movies.
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Neither one is about the other, but I think they're saying the same thing.
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And that thing is this the most dangerous belief is the one that thinks it's righteous.
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Decapitated, born pissed off in Krosno.
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To understand Kill the Cult is to understand where Decapitated came from.
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Krosno, Poland, a small industrial town in the southeast, nineteen ninety six.
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Please forgive me for butchering these names.
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Vaclav Vog Kjaltka was fourteen or fifteen.
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His younger brother, Vitold, who everyone called Vitek, was twelve.
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Two brothers starting a death metal band in Poland at the age of twelve and fourteen.
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Let's sit with that for a minute.
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Two teenagers, twelve and fourteen, sorry, preteens, started a death metal band in Poland.
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What were you doing when you were twelve and fourteen?
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When first formed, the age of the band members were between ranging between twelve and sixteen.
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They were kids, but they were kids growing up in a specific atmosphere, and that atmosphere is enormously important to the music and what it became.
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Vog talks about this directly.
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Poland is a deeply Catholic country.
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People go to church every Sunday, you're taught religion in school, there's a church on every corner, and in his words, people are always pissed off.
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That's not a throwaway quote.
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That's the soil that the music grew in.
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Decapitated released their debut album, Winds of Creation, in April 2000.
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They were just barely out of their teens, but the metal world noticed immediately.
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They were technical and precise, almost inhumanly precise.
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Vitec's drumming was something that critics struggled to describe.
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Inhuman is the closest that any of them could come.
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Then came 2007, and everything changed.
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On October 29th, while traveling to a show in Gomel, Bielarus, their tour bus collided with a truck.
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Vitech died three days later, he was twenty-three.
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Their vocalist Kovan suffered massive brain damage and didn't recover for years.
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Most bands don't come back from that.
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Vogue toured and played with other bands continuously to keep his hands busy while he was figuring out what was left of Decapitated.
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In 2011, a new version of Decapitated released Carnival Is Forever.
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The band kept evolving, kept releasing records, kept pushing, but the shadow of 2007 never fully lifted.
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By 2017, when Anticold arrived, Decapitated were a very different band from the teenagers growing up in Krosno.
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They had been through grief, loss, lineup changes, and twenty years of the music industry grinding on them.
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The album deals with the abstract of who and what we are as humans.
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It's existentialism at its finest, raging against the so-called machine, and standing up for yourself, defining your own code.
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And at the center of that album sits Kill the Cult.
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The song explores the themes of disillusionment and rebellion against oppressive ideologies, calling for the destruction of false belief systems and manipulation in society.
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They are aimed at the machinery of belief itself, the way institutions use faith as a leash, the way authority cloaks itself in the divine to avoid accountability.
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Fogg put it plainly in interviews, we've been pissed off with people who use religion, or the way they use people in general for things like war and terrorism.
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They manipulate them.
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There it is.
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The Polish kid who grew up surrounded by churches, and through unquestioning devotion, watching his brother die on a tour bus in the middle of nowhere, and kept making music through all of it.
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And when he finally writes an album about the world and what he thinks of it, it sounds like this relentless, grooved into your skull, a chant that sounds like ritual itself.
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Kill this cult, cult of lies.
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I burn your symbols and spit on your faith.
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Keep that in mind, because we're about to meet someone who understands exactly what he means.
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The Wicker Man, the citizen cane of horror movies.
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The year is nineteen seventy three.
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A Scottish police sergeant named Neil Howie receives an anonymous letter about a girl who's gone missing on a remote Scottish island called Summer Isle.
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He flies out alone to investigate.
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What he finds is a community that has completely, openly, and cheerfully completely abandoned Christianity.
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The inhabitants of the island who have abandoned Christianity now embrace a form of Celtic paganism.
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They dance around Maypoles, they have sex in fields, they sing songs in the pub that are barely disguised fertility hymns.
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They are, on the surface, utterly peaceful.
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Howie is appalled.
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He's a devout Christian, not just personally, but professionally, morally, he's disgusted.
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His entire worldview is built on faith, and everything on this island is designed to make that worldview feel small.
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Essentially it is essentially a battle of belief systems, about rigid moral code versus a society that literally dances to a different drum.
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As the investigation proceeds, something feels wrong.
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The locals are too helpful.
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The stories keep shifting.
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The missing girl, Rowan Morrison, either exists or simultaneously doesn't exist, depending on who how he asks.
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The film builds slowly.
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There's no gore.
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The director, Anthony Schaefer, specifically wanted a film with a minimum of violence and gore, but was still terrifying anyway.
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Sound familiar?
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He was tired of horror films that relied almost exclusively on viscera to be scary.
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The focus crystallized when he, quote, finally hit on the abstract of sacrifice.
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What makes the Wickerman truly terrifying isn't blood.
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It's the smile.
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Everyone's smiling the entire time.
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They'll be helpful, they'll sing you songs, they'll make you food, and the entire time the machinery is running and has already made the appointment.
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In the film's ending, which I'll describe here because it's fifty years old and you should know what you're getting into, Howie meets the criteria for the perfect sacrifice.
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He came of his own free will, he holds authority like a king, and he's a virgin.
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So?
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He's stripped, dressed up in robes, and put inside a giant wicker man cage and set on fire.
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As the Islanders surround its singing, Howie recites Psalm twenty three and prays to God as he burns.
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That ending lands like a door slamming shut, not because it's graphic, it isn't, but because of what it means.
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Howie's faith gave him absolutely nothing.
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The Islanders' faith got everything they wanted.
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Two belief systems clashed, and only one survived.
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The film doesn't tell you which one was right, it only shows you the flames.
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Film magazine Cinefantastique called it the Citizen Cane of Horror Movies.
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Christopher Lee, who played Lord Summer Isle, called it the best movie he ever made.
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This is coming from a guy who has been in over 250 films, including a certain wizard with a long white beard.
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Here's something worth knowing about the Wickerman almost not existing at all.
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It was used as a tool in a power struggle between two studios, was written off as a B movie, and the original film stock may actually be buried beneath the British highway system.
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The studio cut it down, buried it as a crappy B movie, and did everything possible to almost make sure it never existed at all.
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The film survived anyway, found its audience slowly, and eventually became one of the most influential horror movies of all times.
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There's something very metal about that.
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The connection.
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So, a death metal song from Poland in 2017, and a horror film from Scotland in 1973, where's the line?
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Here's my argument.
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Both Kill the Cult and the Wickerman are about the same terrifying thing.
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They're both about belief systems that have decided that they are beyond question.
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And both ask the same very uncomfortable question.
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Not is this religion evil, but who gets to decide who's the faith and who's the cult?
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In The Wickerman, the villagers are obviously the antagonists.
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They burn a man alive.
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But watch the film again and ask yourself, is Howie innocent?
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He's rigid, judgmental, and contemptuous.
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He looks at these people and sees nothing but degeneracy.
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He never once considers that they might have their own history, their own story, and their own relationship with the land that they've lived on for generations.
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He comes in from the outside, with his law and his God, and he cannot conceive of a world where those things don't apply.
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The film does not let either side off the hook.
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Just like in Rosemary's Baby, this film lies in the era's gnawing question Is God dead?
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Religions curtail social, intellectual, and sexual freedoms, but without God to fill the skies, the universe is a lonely place.
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Hardy's film holds that tension without resolving it.
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That's what makes it great.
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Now, listen to Decapitated's Kill the Cult.
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The song doesn't call out any targets specifically.
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Vogue himself has explained, you can find cults everywhere and in everything we do.
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What kind of world do we live in?
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Who pulls the strings?
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The song is a rage against manipulation wherever it lies.
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Political, religious, cultural, any system that asks you to stop thinking and start following.
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And here's what I find fascinating.
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The song almost sounds like a ritual.
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The continued repetition of Kill This Cult sounds almost liturgical.
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Decapitated, in writing a song against cult thinking sounds like a cult chant.
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I don't think that's accidental.
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They knew exactly what they were doing.
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The Wicker Man does the same thing.
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The islanders' songs are beautiful, the Maypole dancing is joyful.
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The community has warmth and life and a true connection to something ancient.
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The horror isn't that they're monsters, the horror is that they make sense, right up until the moment that they don't.
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That's the thesis.
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Both works understand the most dangerous belief is the one that feels righteous.
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Both refuse to give you a clean villain.
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Both leave you in the fire asking why and who.
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I didn't find an interview where Vogue says, quote, We were watching the Wicker Man and thinking about when we wrote this.
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That claim isn't mine to make.
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What I can tell you is that both of these works are drawing water from the same well.
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The deep, ancient anxiety about what happens when humans organize their fears into systems and point those systems at each other.
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That's folk horror, that's death metal, and as far as I'm concerned, they're having the same conversation.
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The Wicker Man turns 50 this year.
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Kill the Cold is eight years old, and the question that both of them are asking: who holds the power, who decides what's sacred, and who gets thrown into the fire are not getting any less relevant.
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Next episode, we talk to decapitated.
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We talk horror, we talk fun, we talk metal, and we connect back to that other conversation about humor, the smirk, and why it's so important to keep it in the music.
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Until then, stay heavy, stay skeptical, and watch where you're walking on that island.
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Fulci lives.
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That's a wrap on this one.
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Thank you for listening to Screaming Projector.
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New episodes drop regularly.
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You can follow us on Instagram at Screaming Projector, and you can find everything at Screaming Projector.com.
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I'd like to hear what you have to say.
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I want to know what your thoughts are.
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Hit me up at Dave at Screaming Projector.com.
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It genuinely helps new people find the show.
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Every little bit helps.
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Until the next time, stay heavy.
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Stay scared.
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Fulci Lives.
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Screaming Projector is a production of Screaming Projector Media.
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Music by D218.
