Scream Kings: Ice Nine Kills’ Horror Universe
There is a moment in the evolution of ICE NINE KILLS when the distinction between a band and a horror franchise begins to disappear. It is difficult to identify exactly when it happens. Perhaps it begins with a Michael Myers reference hidden inside an early song. Perhaps it is Every Trick in the Book, when the band discovers that entire albums can be constructed around other people's stories. Perhaps it is The Silver Scream, when horror cinema becomes the band's central language. Or perhaps it happens later, when Spencer Charnas stops merely singing about monsters and begins to inhabit a fictional world in which he himself might be one.
ICE NINE KILLS began as a band influenced by the pop-punk and post-hardcore culture of the 2000s and gradually became one of the most elaborate examples of theatrical world-building in contemporary heavy music. Their recent identity is no longer adequately described as simply "a horror-themed metalcore band". The band has created a mythology in which famous horror films provide the source material, fictional versions of the musicians provide the protagonists, and an original lore provides the connective tissue. What makes that evolution particularly interesting is that it was not originally planned as a grand cinematic universe. It emerged organically from the band's increasing interest in adapting stories. Every Trick in the Book established the method; The Silver Scream perfected the formula; Welcome to Horrorwood turned the formula inward. The material that followed increasingly blurred the line between homage and authorship.
The history of ICE NINE KILLS' horror mythology is therefore also a history of the band discovering what it could do with other people's stories and eventually realizing that it could tell its own.
Before Horrorwood: The Genesis
ICE NINE KILLS' early history is important precisely because the band did not emerge fully formed as the theatrical horror act it would later become. Their early sound belonged much more to the pop-punk and post-hardcore world, and Spencer Charnas has spoken about growing up admiring bands such as FINCH, LESS THAN JAKE and FENIX TX.
Yet horror was already occupying a big part of the singer’s imagination. He has described discovering horror films as a child through the VHS section of a video store located inside a supermarket. Films such as Halloween and Friday the 13th captured his attention at an age when most children would probably have been more interested in almost anything else. He eventually began dressing as Michael Myers for Halloween, explaining the appeal through a remarkably revealing piece of childhood logic: if he became the monster, the monster could not hurt him.
Horror, for Charnas, was not merely about fear. It was about inhabiting fear, controlling it and transforming it into entertainment. The band's early work contains traces of this fascination without yet making it the organising principle. Horror references appeared as jokes, imagery and lyrical details. The band's 2006 debut, Last Chance to Make Amends, already contained the sort of dark references that would later become central to their identity, while subsequent material continued to incorporate horror culture. As Charnas later explained, they were "sprinkling things in" long before they went fully into the concept.
ICE NINE KILLS did not invent a horror persona and then retrospectively claim that it had always been there. The horror obsession genuinely predates the modern version of the band. What changed was the realization that it could become a framework for songwriting. That realization arrived with literature.
Every Trick in the Book: Learning to Borrow a Story
Released in 2015, Every Trick in the Book is arguably the most important album in the band’s history precisely because it is not yet The Silver Scream. The opus takes its inspiration from literature, with songs drawing on works including Animal Farm, Carrie, Dracula, The Exorcist and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. At first glance, the concept seems straightforward: take a famous book and write a song about it. But the significance of Every Trick in the Book lies in the creative problem it forced the band to solve. How do you compress a novel into a four minute song without simply turning the lyrics into a plot summary?
The answer was perspective. ICE NINE KILLS began treating literature as raw material rather than scripture. They could isolate a character, a theme, an image or a psychological conflict and reconstruct it through their own musical vocabulary. The band wasn't trying to compete with Orwell or Bram Stoker. Charnas himself acknowledged the absurdity of placing their song-writing alongside literary classics while explaining that the appeal was having "great stories to work off."
That is the album's real breakthrough. The band discovered that existing stories gave them something that personal songwriting could not: an enormous mythology to enter immediately. They did not have to establish the world from scratch. The audience already knew the basic architecture. This also made the songwriting more playful. Charnas has described the thematic records as particularly rewarding because they allowed him to write about material he already loved rather than repeatedly mining personal experiences. The result was not merely a concept album, it was a demonstration of a method. And once the band had proved that the method worked, the next step was almost inevitable. If literature could provide the stories, what could cinema provide?
The Silver Scream: Discovering the Perfect Medium
The answer arrived in 2018 with The Silver Scream. If Every Trick in the Book was a literary anthology translated into metal, The Silver Scream was the cinematic version of the same experiment. Each track drew from a different horror film, spanning slashers, psychological horror, supernatural horror and creature features. While literature requires the listener to imagine the world, cinema has already fleshed it for them. A horror film arrives with costumes, faces, locations, cinematography, sound effects and music. It has an established visual and audio language. ICE NINE KILLS could therefore borrow not only the story but the entire cultural memory, tangible atmosphere surrounding the film.
This is one reason The Silver Scream hit on a much larger scale than Every Trick in the Book. For example, Stabbing in the Dark does not simply tell you that Michael Myers exists, it constructs a musical identity around the atmosphere of Halloween itself, making the track accessible to a much wider audience as well. Enjoy Your Slay brings the psychological deterioration of The Shining into a theatrical language built to translate in metal; Thank God It's Friday transforms Friday the 13th into a campfire where characters ultimately sing of teenage vulnerability and slaughter. The band avoids traps that could have made them fall under soundtrack or goofy territory by putting emotional fidelity before a scholarly one. This also allows people to attach to the song, discover something new in something old. It’s not a repetition but an offering from fans to other fans.
But how do you make something that is by definition theatrical even more so to ensure that it translate into music? You exaggerate the most recognisable elements of the source material. Horror cinema is already heightened, and so is metal. Combining the two becomes an echo chamber. However, there’s an important innovation in The Silver Scream that cannot be overlooked: the films are not the only stories being told.
When the Band Became the Story
The music videos surrounding The Silver Scream began constructing a second narrative underneath the individual movie adaptations. Through them, ICE NINE KILLS turned from narrator to actor. They introduced the fictional persona of Charnas, which would become central to many story arcs. His obsession with horror there turns sinister, playing on the singer’s real identity to make the audience question the line between reality and artistic fantasy.
The introduction of Dr. Ian Black creates a narrative pivot in the band’s lore. Charnas has explained that the therapy setting was partly inspired by The Sopranos, where Tony Soprano's therapy sessions provided an overarching structure through which the audience could enter his internal world. For the band, therapy became a gateway into their horror fantasies. It allows an ambiguity that offers creative freedom for them: Charnas can sit in a session and discuss his thoughts, but being a horror fan it also can have the story descend into recounting a nightmare based on Halloween, Friday the 13th or another film. Then the sequence ends, the audience returns to the therapy room where the clock resets before the next song.
That setting also creative an infinite multitude of universes and interpretations as the fictional persona of Charnas exists inside a horror narrative while simultaneously creating horror. He is both the performer and the potential monster, the victim and perpetrator.
The Fear of Becoming Your Art
Beneath the jokes and references, there is a theme running through this era of ICE NINE KILLS: it is the fear that an artist might eventually become indistinguishable from the art they create. Charnas spends his career singing about murderers, he dresses like killers, he recreates horror films, he builds an entire identity around violence. Then the fictional world begins to ask the obvious question: what if he actually is what he sings about?
That question turns the band's career itself into a narrative line. The more successful they become at depicting horror, the more suspicious their fictional counterparts become. The band's greatest creative strength becomes the evidence used against its protagonist. This is where the Horrorwood concept becomes more than a sequence of references. The horror films are no longer simply inspirations, they are evidence of someone’s psyche.
Welcome to Horrorwood: When the Sequel Turns Inward
Where The Silver Scream established the base of a lore, The Silver Scream 2: Welcome to Horrorwood turns it into a franchise. Released in 2021, the sequel continues the band's horror film adaptation formula while making the original ICE NINE KILLS narrative considerably more prominent. The band took the risky bait of making itself the next horror focus.
Charnas has described Welcome to Horrorwood explicitly as a sequel in the tradition of horror franchises such as Halloween, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. The intention was to go further in building a saga in which the music videos function as parts of a larger cinematic universe. That goal also impacts the way we listen to the album. Assault & Batteries can be enjoyed as an adaptation of Child's Play, The Shower Scene as one of Psycho, Rainy Day as a Resident Evil tribute and more. But together, the songs are also pieces of a much larger narrative. The distinction between the source movie and the ICE NINE KILLS lore becomes increasingly blurred.
Hip to Be Scared and the Art of Self-Awareness
Hip to Be Scared is perhaps the clearest example of how intricate the band's approach to adaptation had become. The song draws from American Psycho, but rather than simply reproducing Patrick Bateman's story of violence, it focuses heavily on the character's obsession with image, status and cultural performance. That is the connection point which ties the story to ICE NINE KILLS. Patrick Bateman is a man performing an identity; Charnas is on video a fictional character performing as a musician who performs as a killer. The layers begin to mirror one another.
Charnas has also described American Psycho as a film that became more interesting to him with repeated viewings because of its layers, particularly its relationship with 1980s culture, fashion and music. The band continues to gravitate towards horror that already has something to say about identity, performance, entertainment or spectatorship. They are not just interested in blood, they are interested in what the blood means.
Horrorwood as a Satire of the Entertainment Industry
Their introduction of Roy Merkin as a character in their own mythology becomes another pivot. Roy functions as a sensationalist media figure. If Charnas represents the artist and the Silence represents the killer, Roy represents the Hollywood machine that turns violence into entertainment. He serves as a direct tangible form of the industry. The murders in Horrorwood are not simply crimes, they are stories that can become videos. These videos can become music and the music becomes entertainment. This entertainment becomes just another product that can be consumed by an audience and capitalized upon. Horrorwood therefore becomes a distorted, blood stained mirror for the real entertainment industry where everything is packaged, dramatised and sold for profit. The band however carries this with self awareness and the irony of doing the same thing themselves. They critique because they are participating in that same system.
The Silence: From Homage to Authorship
The creation of the Silence is arguably the most important development in the entire ICE NINE KILLS lore. Up until this point, the band could always be described as borrowing its monsters except for their singer with an ambivalent status. Creating an original “villain” means that the band now owns a character capable of carrying stories independently of existing horror franchises. The Silence can evolve as the band's own narrative needs it to. In a sense, it represents what they had spent years borrowing. Their own horror icon.
This is also why the mask matters so much. A masked killer is one of the oldest visual archetypes in slasher cinema and bringin their own twist to it allows to continue a legacy rather than starting from scratch. What was previously an homage now becomes authorship.
Beyond Welcome to Horrorwood: ICE NINE KILLS as a Horror Institution
What followed Welcome to Horrorwood is a concept that escaped the boundaries of the studio. ICE NINE KILLS started branching out as a horror institution rather than simply as a band with horror-themed music. The Silver Scream Con is potentially the more telling example: this horror convention initiated by the band places them within the broader horror community alongside actors, filmmakers and genre fans. It’s an open door to the field as a whole and a connection point with the fans, pushing their idea of an experience further. They’ve also discussed their wish to go even further in terms of horror movies, haunted houses, games and other forms of entertainment, always trying to go further into an all-encompassing fan experience.
Coming Full Circle
The ultimate irony of ICE NINE KILLS' evolution is that the band may eventually reach the point where it no longer needs the films that inspired it. The development of the upcoming horror-comedy slasher film The Slashin' of the Christ points toward that possibility. The project represents a milestone for the band as they set to create a movie like the ones they’ve been inspired by.
The band's horror obsession has endured where a simple gimmick might have become exhausting because they are not merely dressing up as horror characters but studying what makes horror recognisable and then feeding those mechanisms back into their own art. Their songs started as a product of passion and nostalgia, but their lore evolved because of growth. Their music videos imitate famous films, but the story connecting those videos belongs to them.
ICE NINE KILLS has spent years exploring the boundary between fiction and identity. That is why the progression of their career and visual identity matters so much. Their records are not simply thematically related albums. Together, they document a band discovering how to construct its own mythology. The first stage was imitation, the second was adaptation and the third was transformation. The band began by asking what their favourite horror films would sound like as metal songs. After nearly two decades of evolution, the more interesting question is the one they now appear to be answering themselves: What does it sound like when a band becomes its own horror movie?
The answer is ICE NINE KILLS. And the story is still being written.
Words: Lysandre Pons
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