Finding The Fear Factor: Demdike Stare

A few years ago, I read a music review on Pitchfork (I know, but hear me out) that included the following description: “I tried playing it while I slept a few times, and woke up in the middle of the night with a real oh god, what's going on and how can I make it stop feeling, which in this context is an absolute plus.” I was immediately interested. 

Here’s why. Years ago, I’d had an unsettling nightmare centered on the Love And Rockets song“The Game," after falling asleep to Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven. In the dream, I found an unlabeled cassette tape in a shoebox and played it on a boombox. When the sounds came out of the speakers I screamed so loud that my face distorted. It was sort of like The Ring only about 12 years earlier. The idea of music being that disturbing never quite left my subconscious.

As it turned out, the album that Pitchfork had described so intriguingly was Tryptych by Demdike Stare, a duo from Manchester. When asked about their striking and unusual name, the band offered the following explanation: 

“Well, it’s inspired from a very famous part of England for witches. There were a lot of witch trials, and they were burned. The most famous one was called Elisabeth Demdike. . . so we thought about a witch’s stare and it sets the kind of mood and ambience of the record. The original idea was to make a horror soundtrack.”

Now I was even more interested. Searching for Demdike Stare on YouTube yielded some fantastic results. Not only was the band’s music incredibly unnerving, they had videos to accompany the music that were comprised of clips from various cult and horror films. These provide a perfect complement to the music, a series of dark, ambient soundscapes that use original instrumentation along with somewhat obscure sonic samples.

In the video for “Forest of Evil (Dawn),” there are clips from Hallucination Strip, a 1975 Italian film with Bud Cort and the eerily handsome Settimio Signatelli. The clips are edited, repeated, and often tweaked to match the tempo of the music. Not having seen the movie I can't speak to how drastically the clips have been edited, but the effect is haunting and hypnotic, akin to a Ken Russell film.

Another video, for “Hashshashin Chant,” repurposes footage from the films Tower of Evil, Mystics In Bali, and more, is even creepier. The repeated droning sound in the track, which is reminiscent of the one in the Iggy Pop song “Mass Production,” accompanies a repeated image of a dragon from what looks like a Chinese New Year celebration. It’s an image that doesn’t seem too scary until it’s repeated so much that it almost becomes nauseating.

There are those who might kvetch that the music of Demdike Stare, as well as the band’s videos, are not much of an accomplishment since they rely so heavily on “found” footage and samples. Yet, one would have to have an intimate understanding of the rhythms of both the source music and films in order to know exactly how to layer them for maximum effect. The band and their videographer Jonny Redman (who manages the Euro cult video site lovelockandload), are doing something completely new with the tools they’ve chosen to use, something that was never intended or even foreseen by the original creators.  

With the obvious caveat to copyright law, it seems that this kind of “found footage,” where the footage is literally found and then re-edited together, would lend itself well to an entire subgenre of horror. Of course, this isn’t without precedent. 1992’s Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America uses found footage to craft a pseudo documentary about alien invasions and the more recent political satire President Wolfman. Why this method hasn’t caught on with the current wave of found footage horror filmmakers is a frustrating mystery, especially since Demdike Stare’s videos –despite being a few years old – can easily hold their own against recent indie horror films.

Not knowing anything about the plot of the films in these videos makes such juxtapositions of sound and music even more arresting. The mind scrambles to make sense of the visuals – some which are cut together in an almost Eisenstein-like montage – while ingesting the disturbing sounds at the same time. It’s almost as if the images come directly from the subconscious, conjured by the music itself.