Loose Canon I: The rise and fall of nu metal cinema

Or, why Fred Durst should have been in The Matrix

Friends – some big news here at The Chimera. We’re going paid (boo!). I’m a freelance journalist and my only guaranteed regular income currently totals around £850 a month¹ (shout out to Rob); everything else is incidental and occasional. As we edge towards 2,000 subscribers, I can add half of that on top again – if a mere five per cent of you decide to pledge £5 a month to this newsletter, then that’s 100 paid subs.

Don’t worry though, if you don’t want to pledge: the vast majority of posts (I’d guess 80+ per cent) are still going to be free. There’s just going to be some extra goodness for paying members added in the mix from the near future onwards. More details on that to come, but for now, if you like what I’m doing here and want to get ahead of the curve, you can pledge below. At the moment, I’m thinking payments will be turned on around Valentine’s Day, so there’s no rush.

And now, on to the main event… today, I want to introduce a new regular series: LOOSE CANON. Everyone’s aware of specific canonical traditions within cinema – of the road movie, of the mafia film, of the historical murder-mystery, and so on. These films have rules and signifiers which, over time, we’ve all learned to read and interpret. But what about all the subgenres that don’t have names yet? Loose Canon will look at film through the warped lens of genres you never knew existed, and try to categorize the undefinable. It’s a place for the abstruse and the byzantine. Hopefully, it will make you think about old movies in a new way. If we’re all lucky, it might even make sense.

First up: nu metal cinema.

They are standing in a cherrywood dojo gently lit by the sun, but it does not exist.

“This is a sparring program,” Morpheus explains, gesturing. “Similar to the programmed reality of the Matrix. It has the same basic rules; rules like gravity. What you must learn is that these rules are no different to those of a computer system. Some of them can be bent. Others can be broken. Understand?”

Neo nods.

“Then hit me.” Morpheus almost smiles. “If you can.”

I love The Matrix. It’s the ur-text of a certain type of film that was produced at a certain point in history, being deeply un-self-conscious, very stylishly violent and dressed to the nines in late-90s/early 2000s aesthetics. I didn’t know that this sort of film had a name until I stumbled across a Letterboxd list by a user named Thiago, who had come up with a brilliant descriptor: Nu Metal Cinema.

The nu metal comparison is perfect. For those who didn’t spend their teenage years in the company of Corey Taylor and Fred Durst, let me explain: nu metal was a subgenre of rock music and a dominant cultural force around the turn of the century. Broadly identifiable by extensive use of breakdowns, rapped lyrics and a style heavily influenced by hip-hop, nu metal was a dick-grabbing, pants-sagging, unashamedly macho, aggressive and crass form of metal which radically abandoned the earlier, more glam fashion hallmarks of the genre. Big hair and guitar solos were out, gold chains, snapbacks and sneakers were in (this was why it was “nu”). Angsty maximalism and soul patches were, for a while, the height of cool. These bands feuded with Eminem and tried, in every single case with significantly less talent, to bite his style and steal his fanbase. Nu metal was the sound of a thousand American brats shouting “Fuck you, mom!” across a suburban parking lot.

If this sounds like I’m doing The Matrix dirty through the comparison, then let me be very clear – the film is a lot smarter than any lyric Limp Bizkit has ever written. It’s neither as crass nor cynically commercial as many of the nu metal acts were. But the cultural moment in which The Matrix was conceived, shot and released was one in which nu metal – and its close cousin mall rock – was at its peak, and the film’s imitators share a lot of the aesthetic hallmarks of the musical genre. So if The Matrix is the figurehead of nu metal cinema, the holy trinity (pun intended) is really completed by Resident Evil and Underworld, both of which were decidedly more B-movie than the Wachowskis’ philosophically inclined picture. Other special mentions go to Blade, Hellboy, Van Helsing, Sucker Punch, Æon Flux, The Crow – all basically camp, roided-up schlock for fun-loving idiots. These films were everywhere from, loosely speaking, about 1995-2005.

To qualify as a nu metal movie, you need to hit a few particular notes. The first is the setting: grimdark. We’re talking post-apocalypse, usually, where some supernatural or scientific threat has spawned to menace humanity. Could be zombies, could be vampires, could be werewolves. Could even be zombified vampiric werewolves, but it’s usually one of the three, or some other mythological nasty with a taste for flesh. These films are part-horror, part-action, all cheese.

To go along with the setting, every character in your nu metal movie has to dress like a school shooter.² They need leather trenchcoats, army boots, and wrap-around shades that make them look like the frontman of Smash Mouth, only they’re absolutely cut because they’ve been trained in tai chi and Krav Maga. At least one white guy needs to have dreads.

Neo really let himself go after Trinity’s death

Shabby of-the-era CGI is also a must (take a look at Blade’s climax for inspiration). The high point of nu metal cinema was around 2005. At the time, many action and adventure films were adapted into atrociously bad video games. More saliently, though, many nu metal films were adaptations of games themselves. Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Uwe Boll’s BloodRayne, Mortal Kombat, the Timothy Olyphant Hitman. Your film doesn’t have to be a literal adaptation of a video game – it can be one spiritually to tick the box. If I told you Underworld: Rise of the Lycans first came out on PS2 in 1999 before being made into a straight-to-TV film, you’d believe me, right? It’s not true, but it could be.

Obviously, a nu metal film also befits a nu metal soundtrack, or anything with rapped vocals or industrial stylings. Bizkit, sure, but also Deftones, Nine Inch Nails, Linkin Park, Evanescence, Korn or Slipknot. The final scene of The Matrix has Neo standing on the pavement within the simulation, totally in command of his reality-bending powers. A trenchcoated god among NPCs, freed from the real. “I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin,” he says in V/O, addressing the machines who have enslaved humanity. “I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.” Then he puts his shades on, looks up, and bursts into flight over the city. Roll credits.

The soundtrack? “Wake Up” by Rage Against the Machine.³

The setting isn’t always contemporary: there’s a sub-sub-genre to the nu metal movie, which relies on a sort of gothic dark fantasy take on the Brothers Grimm, often with steampunk-y elements. Most of these films are shot in Hungary or the Czech Republic. Think dark pine woodlands and lonely mountain ranges, barbarian warlords burning villages and wolfmen rampaging through the night: into this subcategory fall Van Helsing, Snow White and the Huntsman, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters⁴, Season of the Witch and the truly abominable but campy and fun Conan the Barbarian⁵. This form of nu metal filmmaking might even extend to TV. I’ve been watching The Witcher recently on Netflix, and it’s fucking bad. Poorly written and full of cliché. But does it fit the tropes of nu metal cinema? Almost definitely.

These weren’t small movies; although certain actors made their names in them (Milla Jovovich, Kate Beckinsale), they often featured major cameos from acclaimed actors. Michael Sheen and Bill Nighy, of all people, were both in the first Underworld movie. Jeff Bridges Kris Kristofferson played backup to Wesley Snipes in Blade, while Ben Kingsley, astonishingly, was in BloodRayne. Jason Isaacs narrated Resident Evil’s opening scene.

In fact, Resident Evil is a good bellwether for the nu-metal movie genre. Based on a hugely successful Japanese game called Biohazard, renamed Resident Evil for its international release, there had been several attempts to get the film off the ground. First, German production company Constantin Film, which had acquired the film rights to Resident Evil in 1997, had hired screenwriter Alan B. McElroy to write a script. McElroy was also working on a script for an adaptation of the iconic 1993 game Doom at the time, but neither was used – though his Evil script was reported at the time to follow a very similar plot to Biohazard.

Later, George A. Romero, he of Dawn of the Dead, was hired to write a script after making a Japanese TV advert for Biohazard/Resident Evil’s sequel. Romero produced several draft scripts for Constantin, but again, all of these were rejected because they would have earned a less profitable NC-17 rating upon release in the USA, and because, like McElroy’s script, it was too similar to the first game. By the time Romero’s mooted film was released, Resident Evil 2, the game, would be on the market; the logic was that a film based on the first game would look dated.

In the end, it was Paul W.S. Anderson, the film’s eventual director, who wrote the script that would be used. Anderson was wary of video game adaptations that stuck too closely to the game’s storylines, at the expense of good cinematic storytelling, and as a result he changed lots of the details from the original source material, including excising major game characters. He needn’t have bothered; Resident Evil is awful, the worst of the three big nu metal movies by a distance (this hasn’t stopped the film and its sequels earning more than a billion dollars since 2002).

Milla Jovovich in Resident Evil (2002). She and Anderson have been married since 2009

Nevertheless, Anderson’s script still deals with some interesting ideas. There’s the idea of the megacorp-as-villain, for example, in the form of Umbrella Corp, the world’s largest healthcare and drug provider, which in its greed has manufactured an illegal biohazardous virus that turns its employees into zombies. There’s a malicious AI supercomputer that runs Umbrella’s underground research facility called “The Red Queen”, which tries to kill anyone who breaks in. There’s an environmental activist who unwittingly sets off the chain of events that releases the virus after trying to infiltrate the facility. This stuff all feels very Covid, very Rocco’s Basilisk, very Extinction Rebellion – biopunk before biopunk. I can’t find any interview with Anderson to confirm this, but it also feels influenced by the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle.

If Resident Evil feels typical of the genre, that shouldn’t come as a surprise. While the Wachowskis are the best known directors who could claim to have made a nu metal film, Anderson is the king of the subgenre. An unassuming Englishman from Tyneside, he has directed six Resident Evil films as well as nu metal movie staples Mortal Kombat, Alien vs Predator and Death Race. He also happens to be married to the subgenre’s undisputed queen: the beautifully leporine Jovovich.

The nu metal movie was the goth cousin of that other nineties/noughties staple: the romcom. For every How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days at the multiplex there was a Chronicles of Riddick, for every Along Came Polly an Æon Flux. But while the death of the romcom has been mourned extensively on Substack and further afield, the disappearance of the nu metal movie has passed largely uncommented on. Where have these films gone?

Well, my guess is that the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its ilk killed them off. That anyone with an appetite for big franchise movies was hoovered up by the MCU, and that the oxygen gradually ran out for its weirder, more idiosyncratic competitors. Nu metal films played the Neanderthals to the current breed of superhero films’ homo sapiens: they co-existed, but were gradually outcompeted.

Many of the nu metal films were in fact the cultural prototypes for Marvel films, early exercises in adapting comic book IPs like Blade and Hellboy and John Constantine, Hellblazer. Nu metal movies showed that there was a huge appetite for these brainless but entertaining ready-made franchises, but they also demonstrated that such content needed its more subversive corners sanded down. Too much sex or violence, and you’d be slapped with an NC-17 rating that precluded part of your potential audience from seeing the movie in the cinema. I think the likes of Kevin Feige and Avi Arad realised this; I think they surgically removed what made nu metal unique in the first place – its whiny brattiness and its ridiculous bolshiness – and left us with the sexless, anaemic MCU. Jovovich and Beckinsale were relegated to sequels, threequels, and -quels so far down the chain that they haven’t invented punny names for them yet. In their place, true A-listers like Robert Downey Jr and Scarlett Johansson could safely put their names to big-money IPs without having to worry about tricky questions of taste or parental guidance.

And so the nu metal movie suddenly expired, and with it, its trademark blend of horror, thriller and action flick. It doesn’t look like it’s coming back any time soon. But if there’s one thing this pseudo-genre has taught us, it’s this: never turn your back on a corpse, no matter how dead you think it is.

1. About US $1,000.

2. Remember when they blamed Marilyn Manson for Columbine? Incidentally, Manson co-wrote the score for Resident Evil.

3. Note that Resident Evil’s end credits were soundtracked with the oh-so-subtle “My Plague” by Slipknot, too.

4. An absolutely unhinged movie starring Gemma Arterton and Jeremy Renner which supposes that the eponymous twins, after surviving their traditional fairytale abduction by the hag and killing her in the oven, go on to exact revenge against monsters and witches throughout the land. In this film, Hansel has diabetes because of all the gingerbread he was forced to eat as a child, and has to treat it with a sort of Renaissance version of insulin.

5. The 2011 remake that launched Jason Momoa, not the 1980s Schwarzenegger one.