Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett and Ghost leader Tobias Forge recently took a part in a Fear Fest Evil interview where the two talked about movies, music, as well as Kirk‘s explanation of why GHOST might be the modern-day equivalent of British heavy metal legends Black Sabbath.
Kirk said:
“Can I just say one thing? What Black Sabbath was to that time era and to movies like ‘Black Sabbath’ and all those crazy Hammer and early ’70s horror films, I think the modern equivalent is Ghost and movies like ‘The Conjuring’ and ‘The Nun’ and ‘Annabelle.’
“I think Ghost is connected to all these great modern horror movies that are coming out. I might be just totally full of it, but that parallel that I’m drawing really is cool because I love this band, I love those movies and it’s a way of, like, bringing ’em all together and celebrating all I love which is, you know, the dark!”
Tobias added:
“I guess that would be very natural, and quite logical to think that. Going further, if we parallel-compare the horror genre with metal, not only are they alike, but they are also alike because you have the creators of what instigated the horror genre that eventually led to a myriad of filmmakers essentially paying tribute to a lot of those older films.
“Same way that metal was created by people originally playing blues and funk music who then stumbled into making metal, and then all the metal bands that came after that are in a way, unfortunately dogmatically, sometimes just paying tribute to other bands.
“I come from a death-metal underground, and it’s basically full of horror name dropping! I know that a lot of classic films made back in the ’60s and ’70s, especially in the ’70s, were inspired by previous horror/thriller makers. Obviously, Hitchcock influenced others, Terrance Fisher…”
Ghost‘s latest album, Prequelle, was released on 1 June 2018. The album marked the band’s strongest selling debut to date, landing at number 3 on the Billboard 200, selling 66,000 copies in its first week, with 61,000 of those being “traditional” album sales.