Slayer will Release Mini-Horror Movie DVD With Deluxe Edition of ‘World Painted Blood’

The song 'Playing with Dolls,' from Slayer's new album 'World Painted Blood,' was cinematic from the start. Guitarist and lyricist Jeff Hanneman wrote the track about a serial killer who -- like the protagonist in the Brett Easton Ellis novel 'American Psycho' -- isn't sure if the atrocities he's committing are real or imaginary. And Hanneman plans to eventually turn the story into a full-length motion picture.

"All along, this guy keeps going, 'Is this me? Am I really doing this?' He's so screwed up in the head, and when he comes to terms with what he did, he's going, 'Why did I do that?'" Hanneman tells Noisecreep. "He keeps trying to figure it out, and he's just caught up in this crazy circle. I'm gonna write a synopsis pretty soon, because I've got the whole thing pretty much done in my head. I just have to put it down on paper."

In the meantime, Slayer have hired 'Metalocalypse' animator Mark Brooks to create an animated mini-movie called 'Playing With Dolls,' that will be included in the deluxe edition of 'World Painted Blood,' which comes out November 3 alongside the standard version of the album.

In Brooks' 'Playing With Dolls,' a boy stands by as his mother is murdered, and years later, the trauma of the experience turns him into a methodical killer who tracks down women and dismembers them. Brooks came up with the idea for the story while the band was in the initial stages of recording 'World Painted Blood.'

"I went into the studio with them to see if there was anything thematically that might glue all the songs together," Brooks tells Noisecreep. "One of the songs, they were working with at the time was 'Playing with Dolls,' and that inspired me to come up with this storyline, and the band approved it."

Brooks storyboarded the grisly movie as a fully-animated project, but the more he worked on it, the more he realized that the subject matter would be better served with a more realistic presentation. "I decided it would be scarier and weirder to actually shoot it with people and then animate the footage, so it's kind of like a graphic novel with stills and moving stills," he says.

All of the actors in 'Playing With Dolls' were shot against white backgrounds, then Brooks used After Effects software to create the stylized, nightmarish animation. "I composited all of these images into environments I created from different sources and, then just started moving the stills," he says. "It looks like animation, but it's just stills, basically. It's almost like the old school kind of animation they used to use with still photography in the '20s."

Brooks didn't edit tracks from 'World Painted Blood' into his footage until months after he began the movie. Still, when he started mixing the songs into the chapters they were named after, they fit together as well as the monster the slayer in the film so painstakingly assembles. "In a weird way, all the songs kind of fit thematically what was going on in the piece," he says. "I was able to find things lyrically in the songs that I didn't even know were there, but which basically matched the storyline."

At first, Slayer planned to use Brooks' footage online as part of a marketing campaign to promote a song from 'World Painted Blood' each week leading up to the album's release. However, when they saw the finished film, they agreed that Brooks' creation worked far more effectively as a mini-movie, and decided to release it as a bonus DVD on the deluxe edition of the album.

For some, Brooks' and Slayer's gore-drenched mini-movie is almost too effective. A real-life boyfriend of one of the victims in the film almost threw up while watching a private screening of "Playing With Dolls," and Sony Japan found the movie so disturbing that they've refused to release the deluxe edition of 'World Painted Blood' and will only put out the regular version sans DVD. "It's supposed to be gross and disturbing, so I guess we succeeded," Brooks says.