When filmmaker, University of Victoria anthropology grad, and lifelong heavy metal fan Sam Dunn sat down with executives from VH1 to pitch his Metal Evolution television show idea, he must have done a good job. They bought it. (Considering Dunn had the strength of popular documentaries Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey and Global Metal behind him, it’s really no surprise.) The show was a hit, but there was one thing missing, one thing the suits didn’t want to touch: an episode on extreme metal.
Death metal (bands like Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel, and Death), grindcore (Brutal Truth, Nasum, Napalm Death), black metal (Dimmu Borgir, Mayhem, Emperor): these genres make up extreme metal, and the powers that be figured it was just too niche and too underground to have much of an audience on their networks, so they let Dunn make the series, with his Banger Films crew, but said no to an extreme metal episode.
Now that the series is done, Dunn (currently working on a feature-length documentary on shock rock icon Alice Cooper and a separate doc on the history of the devil in pop culture) has turned to metalheads to make the “lost episode” of Metal Evolution happen.
“It’s the subgenre of metal that’s pushing metal to the edge, and I think that that in and of itself encapsulates the spirit of all metal,” says Dunn about extreme metal. “And then maybe more from a sociological perspective, it’s also important because it ensures that the foundation of the metal underground never collapses in the sense that metal came out of the undergroundŃtape trading, factory towns, suburban basements, the places that people didn’t want to go to.”
Dunn and his team launched one round of fundraising through IndieGoGo and raised almost $40,000, which paid for the first round of expenses (travelling around the world to interview main players in the extreme metal scene, as well as equipment and filming costs). Now he’s hoping to raise another $35,000 to cover costs associated with putting the episode together and releasing it independently.
“We learned a lot on the first campaign,” says Dunn. “We’ve never done something like that before. This time we’re going to be much more active. We’re going to be leaking brief excerpts from the interviews that we film as the campaign unfolds, to give people a taste of what we actually did.”
Those who knew Dunn while he was at UVic say it makes sense that his movies have done as well as they have. Margo Matwychuk, assistant professor in UVic’s department of anthropology, says she’s not surprised that Dunn has achieved the considerable amount of success that he has.
“As an undergraduate student in anthropology at UVic many years ago, Sam stood out as an extraordinary student among a cohort of excellent students,” says Matwychuk. “Unusual for undergrad students at the time, Sam looked for and found opportunities to get involved in research projects being carried out by various profs and offered his insightful comments on a paper I was working on for publication. He was an exceptional student and person.”
Matwychuk goes on to say that Dunn’s movies have an academic element to them that isn’t promoted but gives them a deeper element than a standard music documentary.
“While not marketed as such, his films are outstanding anthropological documentaries, or ethnographies, that record both a musical genre and a way of life for thousands of musicians and aficionados around the world,” she says.
For Dunn, it’s all in a day’s work, which is exactly what he’s made his passion for metal: work. He’s settled into a busy career making movies about metal, which is what he wants to be doing, whether the end result is crowdsourced or bankrolled by major networks.
“We try to create good quality work, because the music is important to us and these stories are important to us, and because this is what we want to do. This is our livelihood and also our creative pursuit.”