There Go My (Horror) Heroes
Foo Fighters & GENRE
Dave Grohl has always known exactly how to wield a good horror film reference. From the Foo Fighters’ “Everlong” music video (a dreamy, EVIL DEAD-inspired pastiche helmed by Michel Gondry) to Grohl’s recurring role as Satan in the Tenacious D universe, it’s long been a joy to see what he and his crew come up with for our viewing pleasure.
In addition to popular horror touchstones, Foo Fighters videos have lampooned everything from materialism to cheesy TV ads to FALLING DOWN’s corporate everyman rage. Ever topical but never pedantic, they’ve always found the fun in skewering modern life.
With this in mind, are we really surprised that they’ve delivered us the delightfully random gift of a horror film? One which, naturally, stars the band as themselves?
STudio 666: a REVIEW
Go on, name a video couple with more chemistry than Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins; I’ll wait, then tell you you’re wrong.
The Foo Fighters Horror Movie is…exactly what it looks like, to be honest. They’ve decided to put their own spin on the “band movie,” following in the footsteps of many entertainers who know the power of tongue-in-cheek meta humor: KISS! The Ramones! Spice Girls!
And why wouldn’t they? As a group, Foo Fighters have 25+ years of camaraderie and cheekiness under their belt. We know them and their sense of humor by now. STUDIO 666 is chock-full of inside jokes and exaggerated dynamics between the band members; it’s self-indulgent, but as a viewer you never feel left out of the joke.
Truthfully, the film would never stand on its own as a horror movie. It’s never more than the sum of all its references, from the EVIL DEAD Necronomicon backstory to the EXORCIST stairs to the FRIDAY THE 13TH under-the-bed kill. And it doesn’t have to be. We’re watching this precisely because we want to see this beloved rock band blunder through cliché after cliché.
The comedy stems from Foo Fighters’ self-awareness as “established” (read: aging) rock stars. Highlights include a burnt-out roadie, a dig at sound engineers who instantly gauge a room’s acoustics with a single clap, and a recurring joke about fellow 90s alt-rock titans Pearl Jam.
Again, they’re far from the first band to poke fun at a fictionalized version of themselves in a purposefully B-grade movie, but their cleverness, Gen-X cynicism and love for specific pop culture references really does elevate STUDIO 666. And they’re big enough fans of the genre that there are objectively good things about the film (Editing? Tight. Theme song? John Carpenter composed it.)
The movie runs a bit long for me - they ‘LORD OF THE RINGS’ it a bit with multiple fake-outs before actual credits roll. But hey, this is a slasher movie after all. STUDIO 666 all but requires the “one last scare” and the bad guy explaining the reason for his killing spree and the final scene promising that evil will live on. I can hardly begrudge this film for adhering to the genre trappings of its forefathers.
Takeaways
Reminder: Foo Fighters are too awesome to be pedantic, but I never said I was.
By the end of STUDIO 666, I don’t think it’s reading too far outside the lines to say that the plight of saving Dave Grohl “the artist” (and the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll by proxy) is inextricably yoked to the aging white man’s struggle to maintain the huge cultural power he once wielded. Yeah, yeah, that’s quite a sentence, but I think Grohl himself would agree. Consider a recent NY Times interview quote: “I don’t think rock needs more Satan, but I do think it needs another youth-driven revolution. I think that the next…will look nothing like the one that we’ve seen before. And I’m not entirely sure what that is. But it’s coming.”
Quite frankly, there’s something poetic and fittingly “Foo Fighter” about a film like that. Just because you make a lot of dick jokes and cartoonishly gory slasher kills doesn’t mean your movie can’t also ponder existential growing pains and the transition from the old guard to the new. Yet if the end is truly nigh, why not say “fuck it” and go out having a hell of a good time? As their own song goes:
“Don't the best of them bleed it out
While the rest of them peter out?”