To celebrate spooky season in style, throughout October my posts here will focus on close readings of the metalcore band Ice Nine Kills’ songs inspired by Stephen King, including “Hell in the Hallways” (based on Carrie), “Enjoy Your Slay” (The Shining), “IT Is the End” (IT), and “Funeral Derangements” (Pet Sematary).  

Much of Ice Nine Kills’ music is inspired by horror literature and films, from classic novels like R.L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) (“Me, Myself, and Hyde”) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) (“Bloodbath and Beyond”) to contemporary slasher film franchises like Nightmare on Elm Street (“The American Nightmare”), Friday the 13th (“Thank God It’s Friday” and “Jason’s Mom”), Halloween (“Stabbing in the Dark”), and Scream (“Your Number’s Up”). Their music and the cinematic inspiration for their videos draw from an even wider range of influences, both within and beyond the horror genre, a practice of dynamic engagement through which they adapt previous works while simultaneously creating new narratives of their own, like in The Silver Scream and Welcome to Horrorwood films that frame and feature those respective albums’ music videos, and the Roy Merkin true crime-style books that parallel each (The Silver Scream, 2023; Welcome to Horrorwood, forthcoming in 2025), which develop these narratives and the process of intertextual engagement even further. 

Adaptation is a fundamentally Gothic process, with its focus on repetition, return, doubling, and what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick terms the “slippage between surface and depth,” and the King-inspired music of Ice Nine Kills provides a unique perspective on King’s fiction, adaptation, and the author’s transmedia legacy in the horror genre.

Each Tuesday in October, I’ll do a close reading of one of these King-inspired songs, along with accompanying music videos, different versions (like the live acoustic version of “Enjoy Your Slay” that the band recorded at the Stanley Hotel, which inspired King’s Overlook), and intersections with Merkin’s The Silver Scream (for “Enjoy Your Slay” and “IT Is the End”). In taking this deep dive into the intersections of my favorite author and my favorite band, I’m excited to explore this complex process of intertextual engagement and—even more importantly—have a whole lot of fun as we rock our way toward Halloween. 

(Note: Rather than proceeding chronologically, I am going to be saving “Hell in the Hallways” for last. The Theatre Department at Culver-Stockton College—where I teach—is doing Carrie: The Musical, opening the first weekend of November, so I’m going to keep those Carrie adventures together in late October and early November).