SLAYER unleashed its new album, “Repentless”, on September 11 via Nuclear Blast. To celebrate its release, the band created a gore-soaked music video for the CD’s title track — and RED Digital Cinema was there to capture the entire shooting experience.
Watch RED’s behind-the-scenes clip of “Repentless” below.
RED commented on the music video: “Featuring a star-studded cast of classic and contemporary horror icons, the music video was designed with cinema-quality production value and special effects in mind. The video’s director, BJ McDonnell, used Scarlet Dragons to help capture his vision of a visually stunning music video with a story to tell.”
The “Repentless” video was filmed on August 26 at the Sybil Brand Institute, the women’s prison in East Los Angeles. While SLAYER performed the track under that punishing sun over an eight-hour period, the “prisoners” had to stage a riot for somewhere north of twelve takes before BJ McDonnell finally called it a wrap. But that was all pretty much in keeping with McDonnell’s brutal vision for the clip, a vision that many in the veteran cast and crew referred to as “more like something for a feature film than a rock band’s music video.”
This is McDonnell’s first stint directing a music video. He directed the 2013 horror film “Hatchet III”, and his rich resume as a motion picture cameraman includes “Avengers: Age Of Ultron”, “Ant-Man” and “The Interview”. For SLAYER’s “Repentless”, he and the video’s producer Felissa Rose pulled together a gang of actors and crew who have been part of some of the most iconic horror films ever made: Derek Mears (“Predators”, “Friday The 13th”), Tyler Mane (“Halloween”), Jason Trost (“Hatchet III”), Danny Trejo (“Machete”, “From Dusk Till Dawn”), Tony Moran (“Halloween”’s Michael Myers, “American Poltergeist”), Sean Whalen (“Men In Black”, “Halloween II”), and Vernon Wells (“Mad Max 2”, “Commando”, “Weird Science”) all are featured inmates in the video. And if that wasn’t enough, McDonnell and Rose brought in stunt coordinator Nils Allen Stewart who is known for his work on films like “Planet of The Apes”, “Anger Management” and “Daredevil”.
The “Repentless” title track is an ode to SLAYER’s late guitarist, Jeff Hanneman, who passed away in 2013. “I call it the Hannemanthem!” SLAYER guitarist Kerry King said of the song. “I wrote that for Jeff. Oh, dude, it’s fast as fuck. You don’t know what the fuck’s coming!”
He added: “It’s my perspective of Jeff’s perspective. It’s what I think… If Jeff wrote a song for himself, ‘Repentless’ would be it.”
Source: Blabbermouth
