Hardrock, Heavy Metal und der Splatterfilm: Affekte und Symbole in den Filmen der Rocksploitation

Abstract

Since the 1980's a number of exploitation movies from the horror and splatter genres used rock musicians as protagonist figures. Rock music (especially hard and heavy rock, death metal, dark metal, etc.) was the mostly used film-musical style of these movies. The article discusses the role of horror scenarios and symbols in the public communication of metal music, based on an affinity of emotional and atmospheric characteristics of musical and narrative styles in the films of the corpus. Violence, Satanism, and other themes of the movies are discussed as strategic devices in intergenerational diversification of audiences. At last the question is raised whether the symbol worlds of horror and terror are losing their traditional cultural meanings and being transformed to indirectly used codes leading to affective themes of juvenile orientation.