Screaming Projector Episode 3: Something is Moving Under the Surface

Welcome back to Screaming Projector. In this episode we welcome our first special guest -- Ben, guitarist from the German death metal band Endseeker. We discus the band, the upcoming final album, and the horror and humor lurking beneath the surface of metal. Their final album, Coffin Born, drops June 19th.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

You're right. You're here. You made it. So now we've laid the groundwork for what content. In episode one, we saw the birth of metal music from 1914 London to 1970s Birmingham. Episode 2, we charted the rise of horror. From 30s Germany to 1980s California. Now that we've explored the origin stories, we can get into the flow of the series. The pairings, the arguments. All of it. Welcome back to the Screaming Projector, the podcast that discusses two art forms that have always understood one another. Horror and metal. Spoiler alert! This episode discusses plot details from a 1968 film and a 1990s film. Hopefully you've had a chance to see them in the last 40 years. Today's pairing, without naming names, is a Hamburg death metal band wrapping up a decade of records with a farewell album that drops June 19th. Before they close the book, I got to sit down with guitarist Ben. And what came out of the conversation is exactly what this show is built for. I have the distinct honor of speaking today with Ben Liepelt, guitarist for the German death metal band Endseeker. Ben, welcome to the podcast, man. Hey, thanks for having me. Thank you for being here. This is this is really pretty cool. So after decades, you guys are you're retiring, ending the project on a high note. The new and final album, Coffinborn, drops June 19th. Coffinborn as a title says a lot. Does this reflect a path? I mean, the band itself is called Endseeker. How does Coffinborn resonate as a farewell album?

SPEAKER_01 1:42

Yeah, it works. I mean, it it's it's an it's an EP, not an album actually, to be precise, but um and that's that's on purpose because we wanted to end this like we started. You know, we started off with an EP back in the days, and sure. Uh we thought like an end then EP to end all of this uh is quite nice.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

Two films today. A 1990 creature feature set in the Nevada Desert in a town called Perfection, a film that was supposed to fail, almost did, but became a cult classic. The second, a 1968 psychological horror thriller set in a Manhattan apartment where the most terrifying thing on the screen isn't a monster, it's the people smiling at you. Neither film is about the other. Neither song was written with these films in mind. But I think they're all asking the same question. What's lurking under your feet, and how long have you been standing there? Today's pairing. The band Endseeker, the song Global Warming, the movie Tremors, the second song Unholy Rights, the movie Rosemary's Baby. Let's go. Their 2023 record Global Warming was the one that broke them to a wider audience. Their farewell EP, Coffinborn, drops June 19th. It's named after an actual 18th century burial phenomenon. I could explain the title, but I think Ben does it better.

SPEAKER_01 3:01

Yeah, the title, um I mean, like all death metal albums are uh have creepy titles, don't they? I mean that's that's that's part of the game. And I while I was writing lyrics um for the songs I was reading about this phenomenon, like back from the I don't know, 18th century or whatever, way before they did like autopsies and dissections and stuff on people. And so when pregnant pregnant women died and they got buried, sometimes their bodies got bloated in the coffin and they pushed the baby out the kennel, and uh that was called a coffin birth. And I thought that's gnarly.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

And um, yeah, so we of course in the song, you know, we take it a a step further, and the baby is undead and feasting on its own mother, you know, before it digs its way up to the surface. Of course. There you go.

SPEAKER_00 4:00

That is the kind of detail Endseeker finds and runs with. Historically accurate, deeply grim, but somehow in their hands, almost funny. I had an amazing conversation with Ben. We talked about the record, the band ending, and the relationship between horror and metal. And before we could even get into the first pairing, he said something that stopped me in my tracks. We were talking about Sabbath, about the show's first episode, the origins of everything, the tritone, all of that. And Ben said this. Whatever primitive technology they had when they were making movies in the 20s and 30s sounds extra spooky when you listen to it now.

SPEAKER_01 4:34

Um, like when we were talking about Black Sabbath, for instance, you know, first album, first song, it's start it it is the horror movie that you're listening to, and and Aussie's vocals on that, dude, gives me chills every time. It's super spooky, super creepy. And yeah, just three notes. Boom, boom, boom.

SPEAKER_00 5:02

That's amazing. It's a masterpiece. A working metal guitarist talking about his own farewell record, independently arriving at the thesis of the entire podcast. Metal and horror have always understood one another. Sometimes it takes two episodes to talk about why, or sometimes a guitar player from Hamburg uh gets it in thirty seconds. He answered the biggest question of the series, and he got us a little further down that road to finding out if we're correct. Humor as a delivery mechanism. Global Warming arrived with a music video that stopped people mid-scroll. The band, dressed as a happy suburban picnicking family, complete with women, children, and a dog, invaded by giant worms built out of sleeping bags and scaled up in post? It's genuinely funny, and it's genuinely unsettling. And according to Ben, this was completely intentional. So I asked him about the tradition of humor in metal, DRI, anthrax, faith no more. I asked him about the smirk behind the darkness. Was this a philosophy or just a fun day of filming? I agree. Let's go with that for a minute. In uh in an interview with Antichrist magazine, you had said um that uh zombie worms are just an entertaining placeholder for any global threat that eventually leads to the death of us all. Uh, it's basically could be anything, but we really like to fool around with wordplay. So that quote, entertaining placeholder for any global threat, is such a really sophisticated artistic statement. Is that how you think about humor in your music, or did the framing come after the fact? Was it did you approach it that way, or is that but is that or is that your vernacular? Everything, you know, it comes through in everything you guys do.

SPEAKER_01 6:35

Uh we we actually approach it that way. Like, especially when you're talking about this song. Yeah, I knew I I came up with a title first before I had the song. Um because like you know the the the player words, you know, global warming, global warming, whatever, you know, and um yeah, and I thought it was hilarious, and I uh and I asked the boys, you know, what do you think about this as an album title? And everybody was like, dude, that's the let's go for it. And um, yeah, I mean, like we have it in all uh societies, you know, there are like people that don't believe in science, or that you know, say all the experts are whatever, you know, there's a lot of conspiracy going on, you know, global warming is not a real thing, and and all of this, you know, you know what I'm talking about. 100%, yeah. But there are like global threats like war, climate change, I don't know, whatever, you know, the next disease that's already brewing up somewhere, uh, we don't know about yet. And this shit is real to a certain degree. And um maybe at some point it will lead to the death of us all, like it did for so many other species before, you know. Who knows? And um Yeah. Uh so the worms are just like maybe cute little placeholders for for possible uh real existing threat.

SPEAKER_00 8:11

Entertaining placeholder for any global threat. That phrase is doing a lot of work. It's also a sophisticated artistic statement about what horror does at its best. The monster is never really the monster. It's always a placeholder for something we can never look at. For climate collapse, pandemic, war, for the slow rot underneath the surface of ordinary life. Tremors understood this thirty-five years ago, and Global Warming understands it now. Tremors, Perfection Nevada. Tremors is a 1990 creature feature directed by Ron Underwood, starring Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, and Reba McIntyre. It's set in a town called Perfection Nevada, a name the film earns ironically. The concept originated when the writer S.S. Wilson imagined what it would be like to be trapped on a boulder, unable to touch the ground, because of something moving underneath. That image, the ground itself becoming the threat, is the film's central terror. Not a monster from outside, a monster from below, from the thing that you've been walking on your entire life, not knowing that anything was lurking underneath. The creatures, called graboids, can't see. They hunt by vibration, every footstep a dinner bell. And the characters don't respond with paralysis, instead they just respond with ingenuity and dark humor, making light of the circumstances around them, even as people die. So that's the move. Humor doesn't undercut dread, it delivers it. You laugh, your guard drops, and then something grabs you from underneath. Tremors is a masterclass in what Ben described. The absurd surface concealing something genuine. The Graboids are cute little placeholders for the ground giving way under everything you thought was solid. I put this connection to Ben directly. Let's go back to global warming for a minute. Um when I when I watched the video, when I heard the song, I keep thinking about that movie Tremors uh with Kevin Bacon, Giant Worms, Small Community, Dark Comedy, and Genuine Dread coexisting. Is that is that a fair connection?

SPEAKER_01 10:06

Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean uh the video concept was not made by us, uh, it was made by Ali, our friend. He's the guitarist of Heaven Shall Burn, and uh he also has a video production company, and um we have a long friendship with him, and we asked him if he could do music videos for us for that album, and he shot two videos Hello's Here and uh Global Warming. And it was his idea to make it like as B-movy and hilarious as possible, and he came up with all the costumes and all this and all the crappy special effects, and it was that was so much fun. I mean, shooting that video was so much fun, it was probably the funniest video shoot that we we ever had, and um yeah, and and we really loved the outcome when he was sending over the first rough cut. We think, dude, this is unbelievably funny, this is really cool, and um, you know, but within the the metal scene, you can never be too sure how people will take it, you know. They there are a lot of purists or whatever, people who take this shit way too seriously. That's not a proper death metal video, you know. Stop goofing around. Dude, we're just having fun, you know. This is our hobby. We just try to have a good time, so we do whatever the f we want, and uh we're not following your genre rules, you know, we don't care.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

Unholy Rights, a different register. Now the temperature drops. Unholy Rights is a different song from Global Warming, where the title track has swagger and groove and sleeping bag worm video. Unholy rights has weight, deliberateness, something older in it. The smirk is gone, something else replaces it. So I asked Ben about the shift, whether there was a specific horror tradition that he was drawing from with Unholy Rights. I mentioned to him that the song for me evokes films like The Ninth Gate, Rosemary's Baby, and The Blood on Satan's Claw. To me, Ancient Evil operating quietly. His answer was not what I expected, and it was better for it. When I was listening to Unholy Rights, um, compared to the rest of the album, it seemed like there was something older that came from a specific place. To me, it evokes films like The Ninth Gate or Rosemary's Baby or even Blood on Satan's Claw, Ancient Evil operating quietly. Is there a specific horror tradition you were drawing from there? Compared to maybe anything else on the album?

SPEAKER_01 12:40

You mean like like video-wise or lyrically? I mean we when when I wrote the lyrics for Unholy Rights, I had like like I don't know, Knight of the Living Dead or whatever, you know, stuff like that in mind. Like the the classic zombie chase thing, you know, lurking in the dark and whatever, feeding of living people. That's that's super cliche. I though I when I was writing that was just like 100% cliche and just fun.

SPEAKER_00 13:17

Knight of the Living Dead, classic zombie horror. 100% cliche and just fun. Not the occult conspiracy that I heard in it, something more raw and straightforward. That's the show's method working exactly as it should. I brought a frame, Ben gave me something different. And now the question becomes, how does a song written about lurking zombies end up sounding to my ears like ancient ritual? What is it about the register of dread that bleeds across horror? That bleeds across traditions. That's not a problem, that's the conversation. Rosemary's Baby The Conspiracy You Live Inside. Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby puts Satanism on the American screen in a way that nobody had dared before. Not by sensationalizing it, but by domesticating it. He put it in a well-decorated Manhattan apartment where your neighbors bring you casseroles. Rosemary is pregnant. Her pregnancy is going wrong in ways she can feel but cannot name. Her husband dismisses her. Her doctors dismiss her. Every person she trusts is part of a deeper conspiracy. It's a conspiracy she can't prove because it's hidden inside the most normal-looking life imaginable. The horror isn't loud, it's patient. It's been there longer than she has. The connection to unholy rights isn't about Satanism specifically, it's about the texture. The ritual operating just below normal life. The ancient and patient thing that's wearing a friendly face. You don't see it coming because it doesn't look like what you think horror should look like. The connection. Two songs, two films, four different ways of saying the same thing. Global Warming and Tremors use humor as a delivery mechanism. The absurd surface concealing genuine dread underneath. The worm you laugh at is a placeholder for what actually scares you. The joke and fear are the same thing. Rosemary's Baby and Unholy Rights use the opposite approach. No humor, no absurdism, just a slow accumulation of wrongness hiding in plain sight. The horror isn't loud, it's patient. It's been there longer than you have. What connects all four is the thing underneath. In Tremors, it's literal, the ground moves, and Rosemary's Baby, it's the social fabric. Every relationship, every casserole. In global warming, it's civilizational rot dressed up as a suburban ideal. In Unholy Rights, it's ancient operating inside the texture of daily life. That's the show. That's why we're here. Coffinborn drops June 19th. Go have a listen. You can find the full interview with Ben on a Patreon. And watch Tremors and Rosemary's Baby back to back. One makes you laugh, the other one makes you trust no one. Together, they cover the whole field. I'd love to hear what you think. Drop a comment here, email me, Dave at screamingprojector.com. Next episode. A song built from music written in 1914, a riff that took 18 months to finish, and a witch's curse that waited 300 years to collect what it was owed. Until then, stay heavy, stay scared, stay skeptical, and watch where you step. Fulci Lives. That's a wrap on this one. Thank you for listening to Screaming Projector. New episodes drop regularly. You can follow us on Instagram at Screaming Projector, and you can find everything at Screaming Projector.com. I'd like to hear what you have to say. I want to know what your thoughts are. Hit me up at Dave at Screaming Projector.com. And if you're watching this on YouTube, please hit like and subscribe. It genuinely helps new people find the show. If you'd like to help support what we're building here, we're on Patreon. Every little bit helps. Until the next time, stay heavy, stay scared. Culture Lives. Screaming Projector is a production of Screaming Projector Media. Teen and Dave.