Screaming Projector Episode 5: Am I Evil?

In this episode, a line is drawn between a classic thrash progenitor and a 300 year old curse. From West Midlands of England to Texas. From Holst to Diamondhead. This s a deep dive as we return to our format.

Transcript

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Welcome back to Screen Reproductor, the podcast about two art forms that have always understood one another. Horror and metal. I'm David, and we're here to discuss the collision of these two genres. The deep dives, the conversations, the backstories, all of it. You're here, you're back. This is the podcast for everything horror and everything metal and everything in between. Last time on the show we took a quick holiday detour. Uncle Sam and SOD. An undead flag, a murderous soldier, both asking the same question about jingoism, taking to a cartoonish extreme. A fun one, a palette cleanser. Today we're going back to the main format, and we're going somewhere heavier. Inheritance, curses, and a question of whether you can really escape what came before you. Spoiler alert. This episode discusses a 1973 film. It's been fifty-five years, so if you haven't seen it, go back and watch it. Come back, we'll still be here. Okay, let's get into today's pairing, without naming any names. It opens with a passage inspired by Gustav Holst, an orchestral suite about the planets, specifically Mars, the Bringer of War. Now if this sounds familiar, we talked about Holst and the Bringer of War, Mars and the Planets, 1970s in the Midlands in England, but that was the origin stories discussing Black Sabbath. This is different. This one tells the story of a man who watches his mother burn and then kills every single person responsible for her death. The singer's own mother was offended by the opening lyric. The song went on to inspire a generation of metal bands, including the biggest metal band in the world. When they heard it, they immediately knew that this is what heavy music was supposed to be. The other is a low budget horror film shot in the 70s in Dallas, Texas, by two women who realized that nobody was making horror for women. It almost disappeared entirely. Its score was made on the Mogue Synthesizer, one of the earliest films to use the instrument. It opens at a gallows, with a witch who doesn't beg, doesn't cry, and doesn't waste her last breath on anything except a curse that will reach 300 years into the future to destroy the bloodline of the man who condemned her. Neither one references the other, but I believe they're asking the same question. What does it mean to inherit someone else's darkness? What happens when the sins of the past come back looking for you? Not because of what you did, but because of who you came from. Here's today's pairing. Diamond Head, Am I Evil, 1980. The Mark of the Witch, 1970. Let's find out if I'm right. Diamondhead, the song that built Thrash Metal. Strubridge, West Midlands, 1976. Two school friends, Brian Tatler on guitar, Duncan Scott on drums, decide to form a band. They pick up a singer named Sean Harris, and eventually a bass player named Colin Kimberly, and call themselves Diamondhead, after a Phil Manzanera solo album. They're teenagers, they're from an unremarkable town in the West Midlands, England, and they're about to write one of the most important albums in metal history. It didn't happen overnight. Tatler has described wanting to write something heavier than Black Sabbath's Symptom of the Universe, which, if you know the song, tells you exactly what kind of ambition we're dealing with here. He came up with the central riff, then the band spent the next 18 months writing a song around it, adding sections, taking them away, recording on a cassette player, in a room, listening back, and adding more. An intro inspired by Holst, a fast section, a slow section, a guitar solo, and an ending. Organic, intuitive, completely unaware of what it was becoming. The opening of MI Evil is unlike anything else in Metal. The intro lifted directly from Mars from Holst's Suite of the Planets, it writhes like a funeral, slow, heavy, ancient. If you listen to episode one, you know exactly where this piece has been before. If you haven't, please go back and listen to it. Geezer Butler has said he was playing the tritone from Mars on his bass before Black Sabbath even wrote anything, and that listening to that tritone may have found its way into his fingers and recorded the first metal song ever. Holst to Sabbath, Sabbath to Diamond Head, Tatler had reached back into the same well that Ayomi had drawn from, possibly without even knowing it. Three generations of music. One piece of music written in 1914, a chain of inheritance that runs through the entire line of metal. Harris's voice comes in over it in one of the most arresting lines in heavy metal history. The song tells a story of a man who witnessed his mother being burned alive for being a witch, and then seeks revenge for all twenty seven people responsible for her death. Standing over their frozen bodies, he asks the question, Am I evil? The answer yes. Tather has admitted he still doesn't fully understand what the song about. Sean Harris has said live that it may be about the music industry draining the life from bands. But the literal narrative is right there in the lyrics, and it's primal. A son, a mother murdered, vengeance, and reckoning. Not evil as a pose or as an aesthetic, but evil is a question that the narrator has to ask once the bloodletting is done. The song was released on Diamond Head's 1980 debut album Lightning to the Nations. Recorded in a week, self-released on a tiny label, packaged in a plain white sleeve. No marketing, no major label, no distribution beyond what the band could manage by themselves. By any commercial measure, the album didn't even exist. Then, in 1981, a young Danish kid living in America traveled to England to see the band live. His name was Lars Ulrich. He ended up living with the band for over a month, writing songs with them. Then he decided to start his own band. He went back to America, and you know what happens next. Metallica covered Ammi Evil as a B-side in 1984. Since then, they have played it over 750 times live. At one point, every one of the big four thrash metal bands, Metallica, Anthrax, Megadeth, and Slayer, have played it together on stage. Diamondhead have said that the Metallica royalties are a big reason the band has been able to keep going. Here's the thing about Ammi Evil for the episode. The song is not about evil as an outside force. The song is about evil as an inheritance. He didn't choose his mother, she didn't choose her death, he didn't choose the rage that followed. Question of the center of the song Am I Evil is really asking, Am I what was done to me? Am I the sum of the things that happened before before I was even old enough to understand them? Hold that question, because there's a film from ten years earlier that has been sitting on it for over three hundred years. Mark of the Witch, The Curse The Waited. Dallas, Texas, 1970. Two women named Mary Davis and Martha Peters decided to make a horror film. Their observation was that the horror industry was booming, and not a single horror movie has been made about or by women. So, they wrote the screenplay, produced it themselves, and hired a director. The budget was tiny, most of the cast never even appeared in another movie. The score was composed on a Moog synthesizer, one of the earliest horror film scores of its kind. The film they made opens with a hanging. A witch named Marjorie is brought to the gallows by a man named McIntyre Stuart, along with two other members of her own coven who turned on her and together caused the death of ten other witches. With her final words, Marjorie curses Stuart. He and all of his descendants will bear the mark of the witch until she returns to exact her vengeance. That opening is remarkable. Marjorie doesn't weep, she doesn't plead, she stands at the gallows with total composure and uses her last breath to set a timer, three hundred years in the future, to a bloodline that has no idea what's coming. Cut to the present day, a college campus. A professor named Max Stewart, a direct descendant of McIntyre Stewart who condemned Marjorie, is teaching a course on superstition. One of his students, Jill, discovers a real book of spells at a charity book drive, performs a ritual without knowing what she's doing, and is immediately possessed by Marjorie's ghost. The witch reveals herself to Jill's professor and boyfriend, bearing a mark on her wrist identical to a mark on Mac's wrist, which marks him as a descendant she's been waiting for. Max Stewart didn't burn any witches, he wasn't even alive in 1648. He's a mild managed college professor teaching classes about superstition, the very kind that destroyed Marjorie's life. And none of that matters. The curse doesn't care what he did, it only cares about the blood in his veins. The film moves through its low budget paces possession, seduction, ritual murder, and ends where it has to end. Max Stewart cannot resist Marjorie's kiss, and is transported back to 17th century England exactly for the moment of his own execution. The innocent descendant pays the price for his ancestor's crime. The curse resolves exactly what it was designed to do. Now, Mark of the Witch is not a perfect film. It's cheap, it's slow in places, and the tonal shift between Marjorie's terrifying opening and the somewhat wobbly on-campus middle section is drawing. Critics have noted this, and I'm noting it too. Because the show is not in the business of overselling things. But here's what the film gets exactly right. The curse, the mechanism, that guilt isn't personal, that it's genealogical. That what your ancestors did can reach across centuries to someone in a classroom in a world that has completely forgotten the original rewound. That past doesn't care whether you're personally responsible. It just follows the blood home. And there's one more detail I want you to hold on to. That Moog synthesizer score. Eerie, electronic, ahead of its time. A horror film from 1970, shot on a shoestring budget in Texas, scored on one of the earliest synthesizers in cinema. You can draw a line from that score to Carpenter's Halloween theme eight years later. And from Carpenter, as we discussed last episode, to the entire atmospheric metal tradition that followed. The synthesizer is the sound of dread that starts earlier than you think. Speaking of Carpenter, stay tuned. We've got a special episode coming up about a man who just closed the loop on fifty years of exactly this. More than that when it drops. The connection. The blood remembers. A metal song from the West Midlands in 1980, and a horror film from Dallas in the 1970s. Here's the line that I'm drawing. Both Am I Evil and Mark of the Witch are about inherited consequence. About darkness that arrives not because of who you are, but because of who came before you. And both ask the same question after all the blood and the burning. Is it fair? In the Mark of the Witch, the answer that the film gives is brutal and clear. Fairness is irrelevant. The curse doesn't negotiate. Max Stewart is a decent man by every indication. He's thoughtful, he tries to help, he attempts to save Jill from the spirit inside her. And at the end, he's pulled back through time anyway. The debt is structural, not personal. It doesn't matter who he is, it matters who his blood was. In Am I Evil, the narrator chooses to inherit the consequences. Nobody told him to go murder all 27 people who were responsible for his mother's death. He made that choice himself. But the question that the song leaves you with, Am I Evil, suggests that he's not entirely sure whether the choice was his to make. Whether that rage that drove him to it was his own, or whether it was something that was always going to happen to him anyway once his mother was burned. Something passed down, something waiting. So here's where the connection between the two films gets really interesting for me. The witch is the origin of the story, not the monster in it. Marjorie of Durdemau was murdered. The narrator's mother in Amma Evil was murdered. The women who burned are the wound that everything else grows from. The horror in both cases is the consequence of the original violence reverberating throughout time. I'll be fully transparent. I have no evidence whether Sean or Brian ever saw the movie The Mark of the Witch. The song came from a riff that Tatler wanted to make heavier than Sabbath, and Harris wrote the lyrics and he's not even sure what it's about. But I would argue that that's exactly the point. Both works arrived independently at the same idea that dead have claims on the living, that blood is a form of memory, that somewhere in the past a woman burned and the fire isn't finished yet. Metal has always understood this. The genre is built on the idea that the darkness we carry isn't accidental. It comes from somewhere. It has a shape. And ignoring it doesn't make it go away. Diamond Head, at 18 years old, wrote a song on a cassette player in a room, and the song proved it. Next episode we go somewhere completely different into it. A Connecticut Melodeath band, an 11-minute song about sacrifice, and a question about what we're willing to give up for the ones we love. It's heavier in a different sense. It's heavier in heart, not just the rips. It's esoteric, it's kind of hard to get your hands around, but it is much more profound. Until then, stay heavy, stay haunted, and be careful about what you inherit. Full G los. 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. Music by D218 and Dave.