Monsters of Rock: 8 Music Films to Watch for Halloween
By Andy Markowitz
Music documentaries are not by their nature very scary, but a handful are wonderfully well-suited to the dress-up, role play, and pagan/supernatural undertones of All Hallows Eve. Even (or maybe especially) this year, Halloween is for fun, indulgence, and Satan; so too, often, is rock ‘n’ roll. And hell, you’ll already be wearing a mask.
These docs, plus a couple of fictional ringers, will make fine complements to your socially distanced demonic rituals and remembrances of the faithful departed (among them some of the subjects noted below — RIP Roky Erickson, Clarence Reid, and Dave “Oderus Urungus” Brockie).
Night of the Vampire (2010)
Directed by Grant James
Featuring Roky Erickson and The Black Angels
Between helping invent ‘60s psychedelia with the 13th Floor Elevators and his later years as a genial indie rock elder, the great Roky Erickson built a catalog of inspired horror/sci-fi rockers (“Night of the Vampire,” “Two Headed Dog,” “Creature with the Atom Brain”) that belong on any Halloween playlist. (Probably not coincidentally, this period followed his terrifying post-Elevators institutionalization in an East Texas psych ward, as documented in the excellent 2005 doc You’re Gonna Miss Me.) This short concert film recorded on Halloween 2008 at L.A.’s El Rey Theater features Roky running through a brace of career-spanning classics with the sympatico backing of Austin sludge rockers The Black Angels, and it makes a fine accoutrement to your demoniac festivities.
Watch: YouTube
Super Duper Alice Cooper (2014)
Directed by Sam Dunn, Scot McFadyen, and Reginald Harkema
Featuring Alice Cooper
The shock rocker who ruled them all narrates the story of his transformation from preacher’s boy Vincent Furnier into black-garbed, blood-soaked Alice Cooper, the ghoulish alter ego that made him one of the world’s biggest stars and nearly killed him. Emphasizing the split-personality angle and upping the Halloween viewing quotient, this entertaining doc from the hard rock hands at Canadian production outfit Banger Films (Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage, Iron Maiden: Flight 666) is generously interspersed with clips from the 1920 silent version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Watch: Amazon Prime | iTunes
KISS Loves You (2004)
Directed by Jim Heneghan
Featuring KISS
KISS costumes were popular Halloween fare back in my trick-or-treating days, and certainly few bands inspired their fans to more extravagant heights of fantasy and dress-up. Jim Heneghan’s pioneering fan doc offers a glimpse of what can happen when the mask slips. Tracking some of the KISS Army’s most devoted foot soldiers, from an Ace Frehley impersonator who ends up pals with his hero to a 4-year-old who virtually lives in Paul Stanley makeup, KISS Loves You evolves from an amusing travelogue among the obsessives into an affectionate and unexpectedly moving portrait of fandom as lifestyle, even as career — and of the not always gratifying consequences when the worshipers and the worshiped cross paths.
Watch: YouTube
Until the Light Takes Us (2008)
Directed by Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell
Featuring Mayhen, Burzum, Darkthrone, and more
No one does macabre dress-up like Norwegian black metal bands, maybe because unlike Alice Cooper and KISS they actually mean it, to the point of corpse photography and church arson. Well, some of them, anyway, as detailed in this anthropological exploration of the scene and the divisions within it, undertaken by two American filmmakers at the height of black metal’s 1990s tabloid infamy and featuring an extensive jailhouse interview with Varg “Count Grishnackh” Vikernes, the genre’s most notorious pagan ideologist and violent thug. Illuminating, if not exactly fun.
Watch: Amazon Prime | Google Play | iTunes | YouTube
The Weird World of Blowfly (2010)
Directed by Jonathan Furmanski
Featuring Clarence Reid a.k.a. Blowfly
Songwriter/producer Clarence Reid was a fixture in the 1960s/’70s Miami soul scene whose credits include co-writing the Betty Wright classic “Clean Up Woman” and the Gwen McRae smash “Rockin’ Chair.” But as a solo artist he tasted his greatest success as Blowfly, a caped sexaholic superhero purveying “party records” full of raunchy hit-song parodies like “Hole Man” and “Shitting on the Dock of the Bay” and even filthier originals, sometimes delivered in a speak-singing style that came to be called rap. Considered a hip hop pioneer by the likes of Chuck D and Ice-T, Blowfly achieved semi-notoriety but ended up broke. Like Super Duper Alice Cooper, Furmanski’s surprisingly tender doc examines the thin line between the complicated man and the cartoonish character, with less polish but more poignancy.
Watch: Amazon Prime
Phallus in Wonderland (1993)
Directed by Distortion Wells and Judas Bullhorn
Featuring Gwar
When it comes to costumed metal mayhem, nobody trumps Gwar, the barbarian collective of interplanetary warriors incarnated on earth as a comically violent thrash band. When not on the road drenching audiences in stage blood, Gwar produced a cycle of nominally narrative long-form videos based on their albums, starting with this (true fact) Grammy-nominated grotesque of sex, drugs, satire and secretions that finds the band battling the godly xenophobes of the Morality Squad to reclaim the stolen “Cuttlefish of Cthulhu” and restore it to its rightful place between frontman Oderus Urungus’s legs. Good clean fun, then, and a showcase for both Gwar’s calculated offense and its deft sense of musical pastiche on tracks like the swing-metal “Have You Seen Me” and power ballad parody “The Road Behind.”
Watch: Amazon Prime | YouTube
Monsterman (2014)
Directed by Antti Haase
Featuring Lordi
Gwar-lite horror-metal band Lordi became national heroes in Finland by winning the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest, the massive European TV spectacle generally dominated by overblown ballads and pop kitsch. By 2011 they were a national joke: broke, largely ignored, about to be dropped by their label. Monsterman picks up the story there, with masked-and-armored frontbeast Mr Lordi, aka Tomi Petteri Putaansuu, trying desperately to keep the band afloat. Haase’s doc dutifully chronicles the comeback attempt, but it truly engages as a gentle, funny, intimate portrait of Putaansuu (well, as intimate as you can get with a subject who won’t show his unmasked face on camera), a horror geek manchild who can’t fathom a life in which he isn’t Mr Lordi. His existential crisis is the scariest thing on this list.
Watch: Amazon Prime | Vimeo on Demand | YouTube
Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
Directed by Brian De Palma
Featuring Paul Williams
The Halloweeniest rock musical this side of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Brian De Palma’s deranged cult curio loosely transposes The Phantom of the Opera to a Fillmore-esque rock palace terrorized by an earnest composer who gets disfigured trying to prevent his magnum opus, a soft-rock cantata inspired by the Faust legend, from being stolen by Mephistophelian music mogul Swan (elfin ‘70s songwriter Paul Williams, wonderfully stunt-cast). It gets convoluted, but just go with it. As with much of De Palma’s early work, Phantom of the Paradise is uneven but audacious, a manic Glam Guignol of campy production numbers, movie in-jokes, and eye-candy design overlaying a gonzo vision of the music industry as a soul-selling pyramid scheme hooking fans on spectacle and death.
Watch: Amazon Prime | Google Play | Vudu | YouTube
trailers/clips
Night of the Vampire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEdNvUpJVT8
Super Duper Alice Cooper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAuyznrcR5U
KISS Loves You: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXHRWVxledo
Until the Light Takes Us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr_RaCM-1ug
Weird World of Blowfly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCOBGotTMmM
Phallus in Wonderland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaxM4RB010Y
Monsterman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpIayzStWnI
Phantom of the Paraside: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9yof8cwli4
Andy Markowitz is the program director for SoundCheck Film Festival. He is a former film programmer at CIMMfest (Chicago International Movies & Music Festival) and the co-founder of MusicFilmWeb.com, an online resource devoted to music documentaries.