#001
Unexpected Rock Soundtrack Moments
When Slayer Crashed a Kids’ Movie
Angel of Death — Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)
It’s a hot summer in 1990. Parents across America have taken their kids to see the sequel to one of the most beloved creature-feature comedies of the decade. Popcorn. Fizzy drinks. Cute little Gizmo on the big screen. And then, without warning, a guitar solo from Slayer’s most ferocious track tears through the cinema speakers like a chainsaw through silk. Nobody saw it coming — especially not the parents.
Gremlins 2: The New Batch was director Joe Dante’s gloriously unhinged follow-up to the 1984 original. Given significant creative freedom by Warner Bros., Dante packed the film with surreal comedy, sharp satire and musical curveballs that ranged from Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue to a gremlin chorus line performing New York, New York. But none of those choices was quite as audacious as what he did when it came time to score the film’s most genuinely disturbing sequence.
THE
FILM
THE
TRACK
‘Angel of Death’ opens Slayer’s 1986 album Reign in Blood — one of the most uncompromising ways any band has ever begun any record in the history of heavy music. Written by guitarist Jeff Hanneman, the song details the atrocities committed by Nazi physician Josef Mengele at Auschwitz, and was so controversial that it caused Columbia Records to drop the album before release. Rick Rubin produced it with a precision that made every riff feel like a weapon. It is, by any measure, not a song you would expect to hear in a Warner Bros. summer blockbuster aimed at families.
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THE MOMENT
When the gremlin known as Mohawk drinks a potion and transforms into a spider-creature hybrid, a portion of ‘Angel of Death’, specifically one of the song’s most savage guitar solos, erupts on the soundtrack. The layers of darkness here are extraordinary when you stop to think about them. A song chronicling the most notorious war criminal in history, played over a scene of grotesque mutation, in a PG-13 (USA), 12 (UK) sequel to a beloved Christmas movie. Joe Dante, always the subversive, slipped the most extreme music imaginable right under the noses of an audience that mostly had no idea what they were hearing.
WHY IT MATTERS!
Slayer weren’t chosen by accident. The track’s ferocity matched the horror of what was on screen in a way no conventional score could. It also gave a whole generation of unsuspecting kids their first, completely unannounced introduction to thrash metal. Many of them went looking for it afterwards and never came back.
Slayer weren’t chosen by accident. The track’s ferocity matched the horror of what was on screen in a way no conventional score could. It also gave a whole generation of unsuspecting kids their first, completely unannounced introduction to thrash metal. Many of them went looking for it afterwards and never came back.