CRADLE OF FILTH // In the Dark Black Death Forest of Doom with Dani Filth

Dani Filth dishes on how he got into horror and how he actually made Tony ‘The Candyman’ Todd (and Kurn of the House of Mogh, don’t forget that – ed.) so disgusted during a recording he left the studio!

John Landis and Thriller got me into horror properly. Before that, I would get my Dad to tape the Hammer House of Horror in the evenings on BBC 2. There were a lot of horror and black and white films on the Friday evenings at that time.

Then as a kid I saw An American Werewolf in London, which I thought was just another monster movie at the time. It terrified me absolutely. I got the bug. It had monsters, it was frightening and it was scary. I didn’t see the irony or dark humour in it the first time, I was just like ‘Fuck. That’s really scary.’

I think horror came into its own in the 80s. It wasn’t plagued by CGI or anything like that. Gothic horror came into its own in the 90s because you had all those big blockbusters; Interview with a Vampire, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Stoker’s Dracula. You got some of the more thought provoking ones then. But the 80s was much more visceral. You had the back end of the 70s occult films and the Italian gore stuff. The 80s brought [David] Cronenberg to the fore, [Clive] Barker was doing a lot of writing, and his books were being translated. You had the Chainsaw Massacre films too. I think things started moving a lot more in the 80s. Films like Robocop and Scanners took the genre to a different kind of scope. The 90s would take it for me personally because of the gothic horror. A lot of the stuff was getting very modern and sophisticated.

Talking about Hammer Horror, we approached Christopher Lee to narrate on Dusk and Her Embrace or Midian: one of the two. He wasn’t able, but got the guy who played the Candyman, Tony Todd, to do narrative on Godspeed on the Devil’s Thunder. He did the voice of Gilles de Rais. He’s a notoriously overly complicated person, quite tetchy. His manager hadn’t actually given him the gist he was playing a historical character and he was reading from trial transcripts that actually had occurred. He didn’t know it wasn’t the product of a jaded, warped mind. Which obviously he thought it was because it was about despoiling young children and stuff. I was expecting the Candyman voice like he did in the film before the effects are put on it, but he delivered it in this very quiet, creepy sort of way. It was very odd. During one take you can actually physically hear him going ‘No no, I can’t do this anymore,’ at which point he gets up, leaves the studio and we never hear from him again!

As told to Tom Valcanis for the May 2013 edition of Hysteria Magazine

CRADLE OF FILTH and INFECTED RAIN – Australian Invasion Tour

September 2024

Tuesday 24th – PERTH, Metropolis Fremantle
Wednesday 25th – ADELAIDE, The Gov
Friday 27th – MELBOURNE, Northcote Theatre
Saturday 28th – SYDNEY, The Metro
Sunday 29th – BRISBANE, The Triffid

Tickets available from Metropolis Touring