Hot-on-the-heels of 2012 festival favourite Hellion, Kat Candler’s 2013 follow-up short Black Metal tells the story of how a lead singer struggles to process the guilt he feels after a fan commits a gruesome murder in the name of his band. A haunting film that shuns shock and gore in favour of a more relatable character-driven approach, Black Metal echoes real-life events and although it feels like you spend such a short time in Candler’s universe, this story will resonate long after watching.

It’s an ambitious narrative to attempt to tell in such a short run-time, but Candler tackles her subject with real sensitivity, eliciting restrained performances from her talented cast and delving into a subject that rarely seems to be covered in the short format. Speaking to Revolver Magazine, the writer/director revealed the inspiration behind her distinct short film:

“I became pretty fascinated with this idea of “artist’s guilt” a few years ago: How an audience reacts to something an artist puts out into the world and how that reaction can come back to haunt them. I looked at A Clockwork Orange a lot and how it was pulled from theaters in England after a series of copy cats. The whole Judas Priest case. I did a bunch of research into bands, movies… My stance is that responsibility lies with whoever holds the gun or the knife, but inevitably as a human being it’s hard to shake a feeling of guilt”.

Revealing in an interview with Filmmaker magazine that Black Metal was originally envisioned as a feature-length film, before turning it into a short, Candler had at the time of the article (Jan 2014) gone back to work on the longer script. Although we can find no further updates on how the project is developing, since making this short Candler released a feature-length version of her earlier short Hellion (starring Aaron Paul and Juliette Lewis) and also created psychological thriller short The Rusted (starring The Hunger Games’ Josh Hutcherson and Jena Malone) as part of Canon and Ron Howard’s Project Imagination.