How Your Favorite Heavy Metal Filmmakers Brought Head Banging To The Masses

In their quest to share the human tales at the rear of music’s most beloved genres, acclaimed filmmakers Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen have flown close to the world on Iron Maiden’s personalized Boeing 757 tour plane, snagged both of those Grammy and Peabody awards, and even survived being stranded on the Great Wall of China.
But 30 yrs back, they were being just a couple of die-tough headbangers from Ontario. The pair fulfilled when Dunn was enjoying in a metallic band and McFadyen was functioning as a tunes promoter, and they immediately observed a link via their shared adore of shrieking vocals, ability chords, and pyrotechnics.
At the time, significant steel was not specifically hip. The satanic stress, the meteoric increase of grunge, and the polarizing introduction of nu metal made metalheads the butt of late-night time jokes — and even outright hostility. Metallic supporters are famously faithful, nonetheless, and anthropologist Dunn needed the chance to highlight the global metallic community’s camaraderie and inclusive character. “I grew up listening to music, playing songs, it was in my DNA,” he points out. “I became interested in it as a cultural phenomenon.”
So Dunn and McFadyen sent their favourite artists handwritten letters — this was the late ‘90s, bear in mind — inviting them to acquire component in a film that would examine and rejoice metal’s enduring cultural effect. Possibly charmed by the pair’s enthusiasm and the project’s Do-it-yourself ethos, Rob Zombie, Dee Snider, Alice Cooper, and a great number of other rock legends basically agreed. The final result was 2005’s Metallic: A Headbanger’s Journey, a smash strike documentary that introduced steel lifestyle to a international viewers and set Dunn and McFadyen’s newly launched manufacturing enterprise, Banger Movies, on the map.
In the many years considering that, Banger Movies has advanced into a music media empire, venturing into new genres like hip hop and K-pop. Their business now makes its individual Television network together with VR encounters, live live shows, and even kids programming. “Back when we created our 1st movie, it was just about less difficult to explain to individuals what we did not want to do,” suggests Dunn. “Sometimes it is just about recognizing the way factors have been performed prior to, and then obtaining your individual path.”
In this video clip, we partnered with Lexus to swap their tour bus for a high-class SUV. Entirely redesigned from the wheels to the roof rails, the fifth-era Lexus RX embodies the strength of folks like Dunn and McFadyen who blaze their own trail and refuse to settle. Watch the movie previously mentioned to listen to the pair share tales about Banger Films as they head to their generation studio on Toronto’s Sterling Street.