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.
Outhouse murder from Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers
SC: There’s a scene where this girl heard her friend talking behind her back, so she stabs her in the back a whole bunch, then shoves her down an outhouse toilet. She’s like gargling in the shit and talking about leeches and maggots. There’s just all these terrible gargling noises. It’s terrible. It’s probably something you ought to check out.
Shotgun attack from The Strangers
PK: It was pretty good. What I liked was that there was almost no explanation or backstory of the killers. They just show up at the house and meet the people who live there and kill them. It’s not quite bloody enough.
The A.V. Club: Is The Strangers one of those movies that don’t even attempt to put a story behind the violence? Like porn where they go straight into the sex?
PK: It’s exactly the same thing, but with killing. It has some sweet scenes in it. The dentist from It’s Always Sunny [In Philadelphia] gets his head blown off with a shotgun.
Wheelchair guy murder from Friday The 13th Part 2
SC: The camera’s panning slowly behind him, and he’s calling out for Mickey. Then he gets a machete in the face. Then he goes down, the machete in him, in his wheelchair, adding insult to injury, with the machete stuck in his face. That was awesome!