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What metalheads and academics can bond over

In preparation for Halloween, the AV Club spoke to their favorite pop-cultural critic, Chuck Klosterman about his greatest fears. Klosterman is known first and foremost as a music critic who writes clever, insightful essays about music and nerdy trivia. No conversation with him ever manages to completely avoid these things, and neither did this one. When asked about scary movies, Klosterman talks about one of the granddaddies of slasher flicks, Halloween, and how much it scared him as a kid. But more importantly, he points out that even though he was really into metal, he never had an abiding love for scary movies. Usually, these two things go together.

“When you’re young, the kind of person who’s into slasher films are like metalhead kids and kids who are into Dungeons & Dragons and stuff,” Klosterman says. “But as an adult, the only people who care about horror movies are academics. No one loves to talk about horror films more than somebody with a Ph.D. in cultural studies at a university. Every horror movie seems to be about penalizing people for values. There’s a certain iconography of the vampire, a certain iconography of the werewolf, the zombie. That seems to be the core audience for slasher films—metalheads and collegiate professors.”

That’s actually—and weirdly—accurate. Maybe more professors should spend time at GWAR shows, and more GWAR fans should take film studies classes. Well, in any case, you can count on both buying concert tickets to see the band live.