Metallica’s Kirk Hammett has helped usher in Halloween by reading The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe.
On Tuesday (October 27), San Francisco’s thrash metal giants got their lead guitarist and resident horror hound to chill fans with the 1845 poem, long a staple of Gothic literature, soundtracked by the song Inamorata from their 2023 album 72 Seasons. Watch below.
Hammett has made no secret of his lifelong love for horror. He has an array of ESP KH-2 guitars decorated to feature iconic scary film figures, with respective models depicting Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster, Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula and Elsa Lanchester as The Bride in Bride Of Frankenstein.
Another model is designed to resemble a Ouija board: a fixture of horror films since one was used to inadvertently summon the demon Pazuzu in the 1973 classic The Exorcist.
In addition, Hammett, 63, hosted the horror convention Kirk Von Hammett’s Fear FestEvil from 2014 to 2015. The events featured live performances, signings and panels all rooted in the guitarist’s passion for the spooky.
During a 2022 interview with Gibson Guitars, Hammett spoke about how 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre “truly” frightened him growing up.
“There was a buzz on the street and everyone was talking about it,” he said. “I remember going to see it and truly being frightened because there hadn’t been a film like that up to that point that was so graphic and violent in its brutality. There wasn’t anything like that. I remember me and my friends leaving the theatre shaking our heads going, ‘Wow’, and looking at each other wondering, ‘Did we just see that?!’ It was a real experience.”
He also spoke about The Exorcist, explaining how it affected him as a Catholic kid: “I thought the perpetrators of that film were coming after me next,” he said. “It was an honest fear when we were kids. For the next four months I slept with the lights on every single night.”
Hammett joined Metallica in 1983, shortly before the recording of their 1983 debut album Kill ’Em All, and has been with the band ever since. One of the biggest acts in heavy metal, they’ve sold more than 150 million albums worldwide and won 10 Grammy Awards.
The four-piece are currently putting on a residency at Las Vegas multimedia venue the Sphere, scheduled to continue on Thursday (October 29), then on Halloween night itself on Saturday. Whether Hammett will dress up to mark the occasion remains to be seen.