Metal music is no stranger to scares. For many bands that’s the entire point, with perverse lyrics, gory album art, and frightening stage outfits. It’s a constant battle of one-upmanship.
However, as metalheads we can become pretty desensitized to this excessive brutality, so it takes something pretty special to make a legitimately scary metal song: a perfect balance between “shocking” and “haunting.”
Most metal bands that might be considered “scary” (at least by normie standards) fall on the “shocking” side, focusing on violence and gore. The most obvious example would be Cannibal Corpse, who are undoubtedly brutal with sickening lyrics and album art, but aren’t exactly ones for subtlety. Practically all brutal death metal, slam, goregrind, etc would also fall into this category.
On the other extreme, some bands nail the “haunting” side of scariness with slow, lingering riffs and dark, wailing vocals, but never quite pack that punch to make you feel like you are in very real danger. My favorite example of this would be the main tremolo riff from “Sign of an Open Eye” by Gorgoroth, but most funeral doom and atmospheric doom would belong here.
However, the bands below successfully found the balance between these two elements to make some genuinely unnerving material. And before any of you chumps start calling me a pussy and name a bunch of scarier music, stick around for next Halloween when I make my “scariest metal albums” article. Unless I get around to writing the whole thing before Halloween this year. But don’t count on it.
7. Suicide Silence – “…and Then She Bled”
There are a few songs on No Time to Bleed that fit the balance between “shocking” and “haunting,” but none like “…and Then She Bled,” an instrumental with a 911 call from a screaming, terrified woman played over it. The riffs mirror the horror of the events the woman describes as she pleads with the 911 operator to send the police to kill her pet chimpanzee, who is actively mauling her friend.
Although the band clarified in an interview that the voice of the 911 operator you hear on the track is not the real operator from the call (they had Pat Sheridan of Fit for an Autopsy rerecord it to avoid legal issues), they said nothing about the voice of the caller, Sandra Herold, implying they left that part untouched. Or the screams of the chimpanzee you can clearly hear as it bites a woman’s face off.
6. Mudvayne – “Not Falling”
This song just sounds like it belongs in a sci-fi horror movie. It was heavily featured in the movie Ghost Ship, which comes close I guess. But when I hear the intro riff I think of aliens that are about to begin their biopsy of the humans they just abducted. And I’m not just saying that because that’s essentially what happens in the music video, I got that idea long before I saw it.
Ryan Martinie’s bass work on this track (and all of Mudvayne’s material, for that matter) is also ridiculously unique.
5. Mgła – “Age of Excuse III”
Don’t ask me why, but the discordant riff at the 02:11 mark always conjures up the image of me running through a dark forest with ghosts howling after me. But here’s the thing: the ghosts aren’t the scariest part. They’re just trying to warn me of some greater eldritch horror that is about to befall me if I don’t heed their exhortation and turn back. But for some reason I don’t.
4. Katatonia – “Nephilim”
This song begins with the line “Loving mother, he has come to take your son,” followed by one of the heaviest riffs ever written with haunting keyboards in the background. In true Katatonia form, this song alternates from soft and melancholic to crushing and ominous, concluding with an eerie base line.
I just wish they hadn’t recycled the riff they played in both “My Twin” and “In the White” again in the verses of this song.
3. Black Sabbath – “Black Sabbath”
Speaking of the heaviest riffs ever written, how about the heaviest riff ever written?
You can’t beat the original. The first track on the first album from the first metal band is still as heavy, foreboding, and unsettling as it was when it was released in 1970, spawning an entire genre of imitators. Tony Iommi’s use of the tritone interval, known as the “devil’s tritone” for its ability to provoke a sense of dread, pairs perfectly with the lyrics about an encounter with the devil.
The lyrics were allegedly inspired by bassist Geezer Butler’s real-life experience when he was heavily into the occult, only to get more than what he bargained for, waking up one night to see a “large black figure standing at the end of his bed, staring at him.”
But you know what’s scarier than waking up to Satan himself?
2. Metallica – “One”
…Waking up and not being able to see at all. Not being able to tell if this is true or dream.
War itself is terrifying, but Metallica chooses to scare us not by writing about the violence of war firsthand, but instead its aftermath. “One” is about a soldier who loses his arms, legs, and jaw to a landline on the last day of World War I, rendered blind, deaf, and mute, yet fully conscious. With no way of knowing where he is, how long he has been like that, or any way to communicate with the outside world, he begs for death.
I can’t even imagine what that must be like and I don’t want to. So, what could be worse than that, you might ask?
1. Korn – “Daddy”
I don’t even want to talk about this one.