This last year or so, creatively, has been largely about getting back to my roots.
I started out as a wannabe horror novelist, but somewhere along the way that dream got subsumed by my aspirations as a filmmaker (one thing I learned in my mid 20s was that you get more interest from girls if you call yourself a "director" instead of a "writer." I'd be lying if I said this wasn't at least partly a motivating factor). And, as torture porn and zombie movies rose up to basically push everything else out of the genre, I gradually began to lose interest in horror. I found myself writing TV pilots, action movies, dark dramas, sci-fi, gangster films, Westerns, etc. ... pretty much everything but horror.
There were exceptions, of course — most notably my short film "Vanya," which I co-developed with my cinematographer/BFF Corey Weintraub. Deeply inspired by John Carpenter and "The Twilight Zone" (me) and classic war films (Corey), it was not only our most perfectly balanced collaboration, but it also came as close to representing (almost by accident) my "old" sensibility as anything that I'd done in years.
The first event that began to shift things came late last year when I attended the "H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival & CthulhuCon" in San Pedro, CA. "Vanya" was an official selection, and I was stunned by the movie's reception. I was quite literally treated like a celebrity, and I even signed my first autographs. This festival was unlike any other horror festival I'd attended. It reminded me more than anything of the time I attended the World Horror Convention in Denver almost 15 years ago. These weren't necessarily typical horror movie fans. They were book readers, for one thing. It was more about the Lovecraft than it was about the films. The audience was very specific, and they got "Vanya" in a way I couldn't have imagined. The whole thing was a surreal experience, and somewhat disconcerting because that was the moment where I realized how far from my roots I had strayed. As I mingled with the other festival goers, went through the merch tables, and watched the other films I had a very distinct feeling of coming home. These were my people.
Since then I've been studiously and steadfastly reintroducing myself to the genre I had once loved, and as I rediscovered the spark it became quite clear to me that my most seminal influences are fundamentally not cinematic, but literary (I use the term loosely. We're talking about pulp horror fiction, after all). There was Stephen King (of course)... but also Lovecraft, Barker, Ketchum, Rickman, Newman, Matheson, Beaumont, Brennan, Campbell, Du Maurier, etc. So I began reading and rereading many of the old books and short stories that had first set me on my path back around 1991, as well as digging into a few new ones.
I know I said I was gonna talk about Korn and nü metal. I'm getting there. I promise.
The second event came very soon after the Lovecraft festival, and was in many ways a direct result of it. Just a few weeks later I made "Halfway House" for the 48 Hour Film Project Horror Competition. The film won, which was gratifying, and people seemed to mostly like it (even if a lot of them told me afterwards that they didn't really get it), which made me happy. But the most satisfying thing about it was that it was my first conscious attempt to transpose the sort of 1950s-style horror fiction I'd been writing back in high school and college into a film format. I'd done it already with "Vanya" and probably with "Sweetie," but those had not been planned. This was. And I felt like I pulled it off.
The third — and last — event came this past July. As I was driving between Los Angeles and Albuquerque, I listened to the audiobook of Nick Cutter's recent horror novel "The Troop." It got things firing in my soul in a way no movie had in years. The excitement I felt as Cutter's muscular prose propelled me headlong through his singularly fucked-up narrative was palpable, so thick that I could actually taste it. This was what I should be doing, I realized. Somehow I'd let myself forget it.
(Not that I'm going to quit making movies, BTW. I'm just going to do this, too.)
So my mind turned to a half-abandoned horror novel I'd started years before called "The Darks," and in that weird alchemical way that no writer really understands, it suddenly combined with another concept I'd been sort of noodling with but couldn't quite figure out. Now I could see it.
I was going to write this novel, damnit. And that's exactly what I'm doing.
Nostalgia is a dangerous thing, and when it starts it tends to spiral out in all sorts of uncontrollable directions. In this case, it was invigorating, but as I dove into it my mind naturally turned to all those other things that had defined my youth and shaped the way I think and feel. Particularly music.
One of the main characters in "The Darks" is an aging 90s rock star in the Marilyn Manson vein, and through developing his back story I found myself tumbling through my own musical past.
If horror fiction was the foundation of the house I had been building for myself as a teenager, then heavy metal was surely the frame. But I'm a child of the 90s, which was a really weird time for metal. 80s cock rock was swept aside in favor of grunge right around the time I was entering middle school. That held sway for a few years, but it wasn't too long before we were all looking for the Next Big Thing.
In retrospect, it's a little weird how dark shit got, pop culturally, in the mid 90s. We were out of the Cold War, after all. The economy was booming. We were at peace. And yet, pretty much the biggest rock album of 1994 was Nine Inch Nails' "The Downward Spiral" and the most important movie was "Pulp Fiction." Huh?
Metal was still around, of course, but it had warped into something very different from its 80s incarnation. The overt theatricality — the costumes, the makeup, the fantasy-based lyrics, etc. — had mostly been shunted aside. A lot of the dumb fun had leached out of it, and the newer bands were deadly serious. For one thing, if you were a metal dude it wasn't cool to look like a girl anymore... even if you were a girl. These new bands were all fronted by scary, tough-looking guys who looked like they'd break a beer bottle across your face and then rip your heart out and eat it in front of you. Pantera and Sepultura ruled them all, but death metal was on the rise (as well as black metal in Europe, although I didn't really find out about it until I got to college). Iron Maiden was what qualified as scary in the 80s. Now it was Cannibal Corpse doing "Meathook Sodomy."
In the years preceeding 1994 I was aware of grunge, but I had spent most of middle and early high school ignoring what everyone else was into and listening almost exclusively to Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and The Beatles. That all changed when my parents finally got cable and I was able to watch MTV regularly for the first time.
This was the "Headbangers Ball/120 Minutes" era. Flannel was on its way out, but no one quite knew what came next. Pop punk was starting to hit with Green Day and The Offspring, and industrial was getting some notice by way of NIN and Ministry. But nothing quite felt like a movement yet.
I bit into metal hard around that time, but right away I felt out of place within it. I wasn't some scary, tattooed bruiser. I was a geeky, sullen, bullied loner, and all the alpha-male chest beating from the Phil Anselmos and Max Cavaleras of the world was as off-putting as it was enticing. Rob Zombie made a little more sense to me (he was a horror movie geek, after all), but he seemed kind of silly. I liked NIN, Manson, Tool, etc., but I felt like they were the cool kids. All of it was keeping me at arms length.
And then I found Korn's first album.
Now, keep in mind, nobody knew who the fuck Korn was at this point. I don't even think they'd aired a video yet. They sure as shit were not on the radio.
I don't remember how, exactly, I found it, but I remember holding the CD in my hand and looking at this picture and thinking "what the fuck?":
I found that image deeply disturbing... which, of course, meant I had to buy it. It wasn't until I got home that I looked at the song titles and saw that the sixth track was called "Faget." My heart sank. Because I was a faggot. Not literally, but it was a word that had been thrown at me many, many times, and to this day it churns my guts more than almost any other. Immediately I felt a hostile relationship with this band that I knew nothing about.
I opened the jewel case, expecting to see a band photo. There was one, but you couldn't really make out what anyone looked like. Jonathan Davis's face was obscured by a black hoodie. You caught a hint of a scowl, but that was it. I hadn't even put the CD into my player yet, and I already felt a sense of real menace. For a horror fan like me, menace is good. I was intrigued.
So I put the CD into my boombox (yeah, we still had those), braced myself and went immediately to track six.
This is what I heard:
It's hard to hear it now with the same ears I had in 1994... but I do remember that literally nothing sounded like it at the time. Technically, of course, that's not true. Coal Chamber – maybe the first band to be widely accused of ripping off Korn's sound — actually predated Korn by a few months, but they didn't manage to put out an album until three years later. And, of course, Deftones were doing their thing. But I wouldn't really become aware of them for another year or two.
Korn was something utterly new to me.
The first time I had a song or an album crack my brain open and pour something new into it was when I heard Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Sinister Purpose" when I was seven and on a cross-country road trip with my parents. Even way back then I was kind of a dark kid with a weird imagination, and "Sinister Purpose" hit a sweet spot I didn't even know was there.
The second time was when my brother gave me a cassette tape of Pink Floyd's "The Wall" when I was maybe eleven or twelve and I heard "One of My Turns," followed immediately by "Don't Leave Me Now." Whatever inner blackness John Fogerty had hinted at with "Sinister Purpose" was just right there in its full, lunatic glory in Roger Waters's demented magnum opus. Even now when people refer to Floyd as "space rock" I can't help but snicker. Unless you're talking about the space between existential dread and a full-on psychotic break, the term just doesn't apply.
The third time was when I heard "Faget."
Make no mistake about it, I was an angry kid. I had a few legitimate reasons to be angry, and a lot of bullshit teenage ones too. But I was also a shy kid, so I rarely if ever expressed that anger in any outward way. I'd occasionally melt down (usually in front of my parents), but more often I would just turn it inward and pick at it and pick at it until it felt raw and bloody. I was angry at myself, angry at the world, and didn't know who to lash out at. I've never related to the Columbine shooters, but I'm self aware enough to know I at least had a seed of that in me at that time. I don't know what it would have taken to push me there, but I suspect it would have been less than I would now like to believe.
Frankly, it was discovering writing and horror — and realizing that I had talent — that got me through it.
Korn expressed that particular sense of rage in a way that was ugly, painful and very specific. As soon as I realized Davis was calling himself a faggot, I locked in. This was me. In simplistic terms, you could call the song an anti-bullying anthem, but that reduces it to its most basic elements. It was a scream from the reptile brain, and one I deeply recognized. At the time, I felt like Davis wasn't so much singing as he was channeling the black stew of my own emotions into audio form and then throwing them back at me.
So that's what Korn meant to 16-year-old Scotty. They mean something very different to me now. They hit big a couple years later with "Life Is Peachy" and then went into the stratosphere with "Follow the Leader." Good for them. I'm not one of those guys to immediately abandon a favorite band as soon as they get popular.
But it took almost no time for them to turn into a parody of the very thing they had seemed to be railing against.
I mean, how do go from that to this?
I'm sure they justify the use of the word "faggot" in this song by saying that it's meant to be ironic and that they're subverting the overt machismo or whatever (and, to be fair, the final refrain gives that idea at least a little bit of weight). But that's a cop-out. Fundamentally, this song is an excuse for dumb guys to say "faggot" to each other. It's not even the use of the word that offends me, but the posturing. And the simple fact that Davis is revealing his true pathetic self here: after all his outsider raging, it turns out he really did just want to be one of the cool kids after all.
Korn simply cannot be forgiven for introducing the world to Fred Durst and Limp Bizkit. Their legacy, such as it is, will be forever tainted. This is true even if they hadn't started making absolute shit music in the late 90s and the aughts.
I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a minute there where I liked Limp Bizkit. That first album felt sort of fresh, I guess, for about six months. And, for the record, I also liked Sugar Ray for awhile. "Streaker" is still one of my favorite songs. I was already pretty open to the whole rap-metal thing because of Rage Against the Machine, Downset, Stuck Mojo, and Anthrax's much earlier collaboration with Public Enemy.
But from almost the very second I heard "Nookie," I was done. Durst represented everything to me that Korn (and Marilyn Manson and NIN) had been an escape from. And he brought garbage like Crazy Town and Staind and (gag) Papa Roach along in his wake.
Korn, frankly, must be held accountable for this. They had helped create something that I still believe could have been uniquely raw and vital for an entire generation of misfit kids, and then they turned their backs and kicked the door open and let all the dudebros in after them. It was a musical and cultural betrayal of epic proportions.
As part of writing "The Darks," I created a "Devin Fucking Mackie's Badass 90s Playlist" on Spotify, and — for fun — I culled through a bunch of that late 90s post-Korn nü metal that I listened to for awhile. And I was surprised to find that, for all the trash, there's still plenty there I like. Disturbed's "Stupify," for instance. Or Chevelle's "Point #1." Is this great music? Not really. Is it dated? For sure. But it meant something to me at the time, and I'm not ashamed to say it still does, at least a little bit.
And I will always contend that that first Korn album truly was something special. But I guess you kind of had to be there. Their later sins in regards to the douche-ification of the late 90s are singular and specific, but for better or worse they are probably the most influential rock band that came in the immediate aftermath of Nirvana. Like all influential bands, they spawned a ton of really terrible imitators. But they opened the door for a few good ones, too. And their influence extended way beyond what we traditionally think of as "nü metal." You can hear it in the guitar and base sound on Sepultura's "Roots," which I think may be the single best metal album of that entire decade. You also hear it on Fear Factory's "Obsolete.". And then Slipknot came along, took what they were doing and cranked it all full of meth in the most beautiful way.
Let's not even talk about Emo.
As I said, nostalgia can be dangerous. I'm glad that, in the end, this is a phase I mostly grew out of. The years after college would bring me into contact with music much more emotionally sophisticated and (indeed) more frightening than anything these guys could conceive of. Nick Cave and the Bad seeds ended up being the fourth (and so far last) time I had my skull cracked open by a band. They were a game changer for me. I don't care how raw you scream, how loud and downtuned your guitars are or what fucked-up costumes you wear on stage, you'll never be able to craft anything as sublimely disturbing as this:
Or this:
Or, frankly, this:
I'll never really be able to call myself a Korn fan again. But, as I take it upon myself to reconnect to my past, it's sort of nice to discover that I can still find something of value there.
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