Big (bad) Me: Why Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl butchered the band
Dave Grohl may have killed off a few superband friendships, along with his fellow Foo Fighters, in a new horror comedy film.
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Dave Grohl not only gruesomely kills off his bandmates in the Foo Fighters horror comedy Studio 666, he may have stretched his friendships with Pearl Jam and Coldplay.
“I think neither will ever talk to us ever again,” Grohl jokes. “That’s my guess. So we just lost a bunch of really good friends, which is such a f--king drag.”
He can always blame the scriptwriters.
The Chris Martin-led rockers will most likely welcome their namecheck in the film, when a delivery guy declares his Foo Fighters fandom with, “You’re my second favourite band after Coldplay”.
Another nod to rock in-jokes comes when the Foos call for a “Pearl Jam high-five”, mimicking the cover shot on the Seattle band’s debut record, Ten.
“I think we’re immortalising it,” argues drummer Taylor Hawkins.
“Everyone remembers that album cover, they’re all high-fiving.
“That scene literally came from Dave right off the top of his head, right there, and we all did it. A couple of times. Awww, we love those guys.”
There goes the scriptwriter defence on that one.
Studio 666 was inspired by Grohl’s sense of supernatural unease while making the band’s 10th record, Medicine At Midnight, in a 1940s mansion in Encino, California two years ago.
A homage to the 1970s classic slasher films – it even features a cameo from Halloween director John Carpenter, who also co-wrote the movie theme – the project was an idea in the back of Grohl’s mind until he got an out-of-the-blue call from a former landlord.
Grohl had actually lived in the mansion a decade before when he was renovating his home nearby and the owner gave him the heads-up it was about to be listed for sale.
Instead of buying it, the rocker hired it to demo new songs – its spacious living room was blessed with excellent acoustics, along with its weird, ghostly vibes, which are also parodied in the film.
A few weeks after finishing the sessions for Medicine At Midnight in early 2020, it became the set and location for Studio 666.
The plot is classic rock-schlock-horror.
Foo Fighters go to record in spooky mansion and discover it was where the frontman of the mythical heavy rockers in Dream Widow murdered all his bandmates.
Grohl becomes possessed by the resident demon, who compels him to complete an epic thrash metal song with the power to unlock the gates of hell.
The gruesome murders of Hawkins and the rest of the Foos – Chris Shiflett, Pat Smear, Nate Mendel and Rami Jaffee – are gory and hilarious.
A barbecue grilling, a flying cymbal of doom, a chainsaw massacre, each provokes a mash-up of guffaws and grimaces.
“When you’re on set and you hear the director screaming ‘more blood, more blood!’ and you see the guy in the corner pumping the f--king blood machine as fast as you can, then you know you’re making a horror film,” Grohl says.
“There was one night we’d finished filming and I’m coming down the driveway to my car and I look in the gutters and it’s f--king river of fake blood going into the sewer.
“And I’m like, ‘Oh my God, the neighbours are going to poop’, there’s blood pouring out from all over the house. It was awesome.”
There was a script written, there were table reads and there were lines to learn. The Foo
Fighters aren’t complete novices to filmmaking, having created hilarious mini-movies for singles such as Everlong, Big Me and Learn To Fly, as well as Grohl’s documentary films Sound City and Sonic Highways.
But some of musicians were more dedicated to the “craft” than others.
Grohl reveals one of Hawkins’ over-the-top analogies relating to his frontman’s “musical constipation” – aka writer’s block – was another moment of inspired improv.
“Taylor refused to learn any of his lines in the script,” Grohl says, matter-of-factly with a raised eyebrow as if to suggest “you know, drummers”.
“Everybody else was kind of working closely within the parameters of the script and what we’re supposed to say.
“Taylor basically said, ‘F--k that, I’m just going to say whatever I want’.
“And to be honest, it worked because in the movie, that’s a 100 per cent Taylor Hawkins right there.”
Hawkins even begged for his grisly end to be rewritten.
“Mine was going to be a lot more elaborate and take a long, long time to film and have prosthetics and be crawling with stumps and I was like, ‘Nah, I don’t want to do all that.’
“It was going to take five days to film and I was just ‘no’,” Hawkins says.
“I just pointed to the drum set and the cymbals and suggested we go for a Friday The 13th.”
The screenwriters Jeff Bulher and Rebecca Hughes, who were already acquaintances of the band before being brought in to flesh out Grohl’s concept, spent a couple of days observing the Foos to get the band “dynamics” right.
So, alongside the ‘70s horror movie references, there are a plethora of Spinal Tap moments from frontman control freakdom to that one band member who always gets the girl.
What the writers didn’t know when they randomly inserted Lionel Richie into the script for a cameo was that Grohl had the Hello legend on speed dial.
“I read that part of the script and so I just texted him and was like, ‘Hey man, you want to make a horror movie with us?’ He was like, ‘Absolutely, my brother’. That was it.”
Grohl’s maniacal portrayal of a rock god possessed is also his send-up of his reputation as The Nicest Man In Rock.
“I finally had good reason to let the demon out, kill my whole f--king band and go solo. God, it took 26 years!”
Studio 666 is in cinemas from February 24 for one week only.
ROCK ‘N’ SCHLOCK HORROR – ROCKERS WHO SLASH ONSCREEN
Rob Zombie
The shock rocker has been making horror films for the past two decades, kicking of with the cult classic House of 1000 Corpses. He directed the 2007 Halloween remake and its 2009 sequel Halloween II, which weren’t given a glowing reception from critics. He confirmed last year he’s working on a film adaptation of ‘60s TV series The Munsters.
Alice Cooper
From his cameo in John Carpenter’s 1987 film Prince Of Darkness to his role as Freddy Kruger’s dad, Vincent Furnier steals any scene he graces with his Alice Cooper persona. He reportedly agreed to do 1991 slasher flick Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare if he could do it looking like Alice.
David Bowie
The Thin White Duke’s lead role as a cellist in a love triangle with a vampire (Catherine Deneuve) and a doctor (Susan Sarandon) in erotic horror The Hunger is a goth art classic. And there’s his star turn as the creepy goblin king in Labyrinth.
Sting
The Police frontman played Baron Charles Frankenstein in The Bride, the 1985 remake of one of the horror genre’s most popular, and cinematically reinvented, stories. It was declared a “monstrous failure” on release but deserves “It’s so bad, it’s good” status.
Debbie Harry
David Cronenberg’s 1983 horror sci-fi flick Videodrome seems scarily prescient in the reality TV era. Blondie superstar Debbie Harry stars alongside James Woods in the film about a TV executive desperate to program edgy content who finds a channel broadcasting realistic torture and violence.
Originally published as Big (bad) Me: Why Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl butchered the band
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