ANTHRAX Drummer Talks Horror Movies

IconsOfFright.com recently talked horror movies with ANTHRAX drummer Charlie Benante. An excerpt from the chat follows:

IconsOfFright.com: When we're young, we're very impressionable and everyone kind of has their earliest recollections of the horror genre. What was that for you? Do you remember the first movie that really scared or had an impact on you?

Benante: Um, I remember this movie that my sister would watch and I was really young at the time, but it was "Children Of The Damned". It's an old black and white movie, and certain kids had this ability where if their eyes started to light up, they could look at you and paralyze or kill you. That was one of the first ones. "The Blob" was another one. But I wouldn't necessarily say they scared me though.

IconsOfFright.com: They just opened up your fascination into that world?

Benante: Yeah, because I was always into the Universal monsters. When I consider horror movies, I don't know if I consider them to be horror movies in the sense that… well, they are in the horror genre, of course. "Frankenstein", "Wolfman", "Dracula". I'd seen those when I was little and just automatically took a liking to them. I thought they looked cool.  

IconsOfFright.com: That's the interesting thing. All those creative outlets, they all lead into each other. I loved movies, and music and artwork, but I always found them kind of relative. The thing that drew me to a lot of metal records growing up were the front covers of the albums!

Benante: The imagery of it all.

IconsOfFright.com: Yeah! Same thing for me, the Universal monster movies are what I remember as a kid because they were just always on TV and I loved them. They looked cool!

Benante: As a matter a fact, I still have them. I have a lot of the regular 8 and super 8 reels of some of those horror movies. My mom would order for me from the back of the Famous Monsters magazine. And I still have a lot of those. Like "Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein".

IconsOfFright.com: Wow!

Benante: I remember, my mother and my sister would set up the projector for me and I would sit there and just watch these movies.

IconsOfFright.com: Obviously, when you got a bit older, one of the most pivotal and influential movies for you was "Jaws", because you talk about it in the documentary "The Shark Is Still Swimming". Can you talk a little bit about first discovering "Jaws" and what it meant to you?

Benante: Actually, before "Jaws", the two movies that did something to me, that had an effect on me in a mental type of way was "The Birds" — which I still have a thing about that movie! I've said it to those guys for "The Shark Is Still Working" that there's a tie-in between "The Birds" and "Jaws". Just the way Hitchcock shot it and the way Spielberg shot that movie, they're similar! There's certain things about those movies. And then the other movie in between those two movies was "The Exorcist". That was one of the movies that really did a fucking number on me.

Read the entire interview at IconsOfFright.com.