Hindershot’s an indie-rock band, but it just might be a death metal act at heart. With the title of its debut EP, It’s Only Blood, the Denver six-piece makes the claim that it isn’t squeamish when the red stuff starts to flow. Enjoy an exclusive spin of the EP’s title track, and then settle in as The A.V. Club puts the blood-tolerance claim to the test with singer-guitarist Stuart Confer and guitarist Patrick Kelly, challenging them to catalog their favorite slasher-flick massacre moments. The verdict? These dudes really aren’t sissies when it comes to enjoying a little big-screen bloodshed.
Hedge-clipper massacre from The Burning
Stuart Confer: There’s this sweet scene in The Burning where these kids go down the river and they get picked off one by one. Then there’s this raft with six kids, and they see this canoe that one of the other kids went down. They pull up to the canoe and the music starts. There’s this candid, kind of voyeuristic camera shot on the canoe, kind of coming out of the canoe watching the kids paddle towards it. Then they get close to the canoe, and the groundskeeper jumps out with these garden shears and just starts cutting off fingers and slicing people’s foreheads. Then he cuts off this one guy’s fingers and you get a close-up of it. He basically kills six kids in a matter of a minute. It’s pretty sweet. It’s a really good scene, but the movie overall isn’t the greatest slasher film.
The special effects are better than some of the special effects in Friday The 13th, the original, because they actually go into some detail of the fingers getting cut off. I hate it when they come up with a knife and then slash at them and blood starts coming up, but you don’t get to see the knife going in. So when he takes a garden shear and shoves it in this guy’s throat, you can actually see it go in. It’s impressive.
Boyfriend torture from The Audition
Patrick Kelly: It’s basically about a psycho girl. I don’t want to say too much about it, because it’s really a good movie. She slashes this dude’s ankles with razor wire and all this crazy shit. She’s torturing him, and it’s pretty fucked up. It’s the kind of movie that if you watch it, and you’re a male and have had a crazy ex-girlfriend, you can empathize with it. I thought it was a good take on a slasher film, because it’s very slow but it builds up to something that’s really gruesome. It’s measured.
SC: This is one of the only scenes—besides the movie Cabin Fever, which is also in that same genre—that almost made me pass out when I watched it. [When watching Cabin Fever] I had to go down in the middle of the movie and splash my face with water. Then I went back up, and I felt like I was going to pass out again, so I walked out and literally grabbed onto the hood of a car in the parking lot of the movie theater and got in my car and drove home.