Tobias Forge, the singer behind Swedish rock band Ghost, has made his debut as a director with a horror short built around a song by Repugnant, the death metal group he fronted in the late 1990s. The film is part of V/H/S/Mixtapes, this year’s music-themed instalment of the American horror anthology series, and it premiered over the weekend.
Ghost is currently on hiatus, and the move behind the camera was widely seen as a logical next step for Forge, who is a known horror enthusiast and had been looking for a new creative outlet. The short works as a music video for a fresh recording of Repugnant’s song Premature Burial. Forge does not sing on the new version. The vocals come instead from Erik Danielsson, singer with the black metal band Watain.
The story follows a rape-revenge structure and includes a scene in which someone is buried alive. Swedish actors Nour El Refai and Gustaf Hammarsten play the lead roles, giving the short a recognisable home-grown cast. SVT’s culture desk asked Ghost’s management about the video, but they declined to comment, and no explanation has been given for why the song was re-recorded or why Danielsson took over the vocals. The choice of a singer from another well-known Swedish extreme metal band does, however, keep the project firmly within the national scene that Repugnant came from.
Repugnant formed in the late 1990s and is credited with helping to revive a Swedish death metal scene that had gone quiet at the time. In those years Forge sang and played guitar under the stage name Mary Goore. The band had already split up by the time its album Epitome of Darkness came out in 2006, but the record has since come to be regarded as a modern classic of the genre.
The project brings together two sides of Forge’s career: the underground metal of his early years and the theatrical horror imagery that later made Ghost an international act. It also places a Swedish production inside an established American horror franchise. With Ghost taking time off, the short gives fans something new from Forge, although there has been no word on whether Repugnant plans further recordings or whether he intends to keep directing. For now, the short stands as his first credit behind the camera.
