Exclusive: Zev Deans and Christopher Raymond Dish on the Latest Cannibal Corpse Music Video
Jonathan Barkan
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Attention metalheads! Cannibal Corpse, arguably one of the most evil and horror-centric metal bands to ever grace the metal scene, have released a new music video for their track “Code to the Slashers”! The video, which was directed by Zev Deans, who directed videos for Behemoth, Chelsea Wolfe, Ghost, and more, and shot by Christopher Raymond (Logan, Deliver Us From Evil), is right up the alley of any horror fan, especially those who want a lot of bloodshed!
Not only are we here to show you their latest video but we also got exclusive quotes from Deans and Raymond about the project!
Deans tells Dread Central, “As a director who never shot action or gore scenes before, I was excited to attack this project. I spent a lot of time watching both classic slasher and gore films, as well as a few key giallos (which I prefer stylistically). Giallo speaks to my taste for atmosphere and pure cinema, and I love the attention to fetishistic detail. My take away from absorbing slashers and giallo in a marathon was that almost all of them were extreme metaphors for sexual conquest and frustration. There will almost always be a chase scene where a hunter, usually male, chases a victim, usually female, and the murders themselves are basically horrific sex scenes. I think that spoke to me a lot, when it came to the way we approached the murder scenes in this video.
“Having Christopher Raymond along for the ride was such a treat, because I knew he had a hold on how to shoot action. I made some rough storyboards to illustrate the basic beats, but he really came through and knew how to best frame the chase scenes and murder scenes in a way that really pushed it to a level of realism and heightened excitement.
“Working with a police body camera for the night vision elements was a blast too, and we would have the actors go through their action first with regular cameras, and then again with the actors wearing the police body cameras. The result is intense.”
“Intense” is certainly appropriate, as Deans and Raymond marry Cannibal Corpse’s blisteringly vicious brand of metal with intense, mesmerizing, and unsettling violence. For being Deans’ first foray into action or gore, he’s certainly shown a knack at capturing it with sickening – in a good way, I promise – results!
Raymond adds, “As far as an approach for camera regarding our shoot, my main objective was to keep things flexible. We were figuring out locations on the fly, moving a lot and shooting at night in dark locations with a one man lighting team and just myself doing camera. I kept one camera dedicated to live on the Movi and had one camera dedicated for everything else. That way I would be able to juggle whatever type shots we were doing without wasting too much precious time flipping these cameras back and forth. We also had a night vision camera Zev got to add to the visual mix, which worked when it wanted to but we were able to get enough footage out of it.
“For the red freakout sequence during the guitar solo stuff with the blood queen, I wanted to use the visuals to reflect the dark and twisted origins of the cannibal behavior, so we used some in-camera effects and heavy dramatic lighting with a lot of smoke!”
You can pre-order Cannibal Corpse’s upcoming album Red Before Black, which comes out November 3rd, via Metal Blade Records.
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