Just in time for Halloween, Metallica guitarist and horror aficionado Kirk Hammett has made a video showing him reading the final seven stanzas of Edgar Allen Poe’s classic poem, “The Raven.” In the video, the guitarist reads the excerpt dressed in a raven-black jacket with both the titular corvid and a grim reaper on it, sitting on a couch with a charred-black skeleton looking over his shoulder. Uplighting makes the scene all the more menacing, as he reads the pages and images of ravens flit by.
The background music for the clip is “Inamorata,” the final song off Metallica’s latest album, 72 Seasons. It’s pretty clear from the video, though, which season is Hammett’s favorite.
Outside of Metallica, Hammett has made a name for himself in the horror world, collecting rare movie posters and having once produced his own convention, the Fear FestEvil. He also plays guitars that sport classic horror movie posters.
In 2022, Hammett released an instrumental solo album, Portals, that drew inspiration from horror movies. He told Rolling Stone that year that the idea stemmed from working with composer and conductor Edwin Outwater, who’d conducted the symphony at Metallica’s S&M2 concerts a few years earlier. “When I met him, we hit it off right off the bat because he’s a horror fan,” Hammett said. “I just said to him, ‘Man, you got to check out these two pieces of music that I wrote that are kind of horror themed. You and I should do something together.’ And he said, ‘I’d love to do it.’” The album had song titles like “Maiden and the Monster,” “The Jinn,” and “The Incantation.”
Hammett and the rest of Metallica are currently in the middle of a residency called Life Burns Faster at the Sphere in Las Vegas. The globular venue has shown imagery that could have come from horror movies during some of the songs, including placing headbangers in the seat of an electric chair for “Ride the Lightning” and taking on a giant, Lovecraftian monster for “The Call of Ktulu.” They have two gigs scheduled there this week, including one on Halloween.
