What is heavy metal music? For most, its excessive and gaudy qualities
befit the parodying received in Spinal Tap. But for serious fans of
metal – many isolated in their outer-suburban wastelands –
metal is their sonic escape hatch to another dimension. Lyrically, metal
speaks volumes to its audience. Identity and selflessness, desperation
and aspiration, loneliness and empowerment are thematically woven through
the crassest metal in ways felt deeply by fans of the music. And there
are many metal fans.
Few films speak to this large and sprawling audience. Most teen movies
celebrate harmless enough thrills and surging pubescent love. Within
such a world, the metal kid is usually the outsider, the loner, the
freak. Horror movies synch better to the metal psyche. Their theatrical
violence holds direct appeal to kids fuelled by the apocalyptic scenarios
of metal music.
Grey Metal is a horror movie for metal kids predisposed
to the supernatural and its links to dark mystical forces. The drama
focuses on how a metal kid grapples with this eruption of otherworldly
forces into his everyday life, and how he mentally adjusts to the traumatising
yet seductive nature of becoming possessed. In depicting, extending
and resolving these tensions, Grey Metal l presents
the family as monstrous and the demonic as comforting – just as
it is in heavy metal music.
Grey Metal is a meld of naturalistic teen drama with paranormal
overlays. As the psychic dimension is opened wider, the film transforms
into heightened psychological horror. Like the best of metal, the emotional
build-up is purposely hysterical and overblown. Think Lost Highway
meets Carrie scored by Metallica. Grey Metal
is aimed at creating relevant escapism for one of cinema’s most
underexploited audiences.
