Film-Thrash-Metal band Kreator: Satan did not come

We have to imagine life as a member of a traditional German Thrash Metal band as a fulfilling life: You have been or have been sitting for 40 years-since you were a cheerful youth with leopard-spandex pants, leather jacket and long hair-on the concert stages of the world and plays the variety of parent-terrible riot music, where you have already eaten a fool as a teenage.

You can realize yourself artistically and you can always wear your black favorite band t-shirts. You tour Europe and distant countries (USA, Japan, India) every year, where you meet an enthusiastic international fan base that traces you behind and that with tears of happiness in your eyes that the music that has been making for over 40 years has turned their life better. You give friendly smiling and humble autographs. On work -free afternoons you look at all kinds of sights in the exotic countries in which you can perform your appearances. Occasionally you also meet younger and well-known music colleagues who express themselves with respect and gratitude, because they say if the small traditional German thrash metal band did not exist, then they would never have founded their own band themselves.

In one scene, the camera watches the bass players how he brushes his teeth before the concert: “I think I owe it to people in the front row.”

The band Kreator, which is known in the scene today, which is talking about here, has therefore played a long way since she gave concerts in 1986, together with the bands Tankard, Sodom and Destruction. But everything could have ended differently: how many young men could have started to work in coal mining underground in the 1980s in the Ruhrpott. Then – after a life with hard physical work – you might have arthritis or a dust blame or both. Or would have been demolished by lung cancer. Miland »Mille« Petrozza and Jürgen »Ventor« have a Reil from the dreary city when they were 15 or 16, decided that they do not dismantle hard coal for the time being, but rather want to be like the rock band Kiss. That seemed to them the better way at the time. “Kiss was my first big love,” says Mille Petrozza.

Therefore, they founded the band Tyrant, which they renamed creator some time later. They opted for the aggressively giving and raging heavy metal variant Thrash Metal, which cannot deny a certain formal and content-related affinity for the hardcore punk, and in the second half of the 1980s played themselves into the hearts of the fans, as they say.

The aesthetics chosen by the band has not been touched in its core since then: the scene-customary horror-burner (inflatable demons and plastic corpse dolls on the stage) is supplemented by the wood-cutting social and social criticism of the song texts written by singer and guitarist Mille Petrozza Pathos -prone verses repeats the low costumes of the governing, the excess and stupid of the masses in capitalism (“The Coma is Endless an Deep”) and the bluntness and barbarism of the war (“Children are pawns / for generals to play with and kill”) denounce. In the mid -1980s, this musical subculture, which mostly met the public with ignorance and lack of understanding, was classified as a youth -spoiling trash. Today the Kreator group is probably considered what the media generally call an “institution”.

Now comes a solid documentary that accompanies the band on tour and in the recording studio in selected cinemas. The rituals are known: arrival at the airport, drive in the tour bus, autograph session, dressing room, backstage, rehearsals, concert. In one scene, the camera observes the bass players who have only joined the group a few years ago, how he brushes his teeth before the concert: »I think I owe this to people in the front row. It’s a bit like you would go to a date. “

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Here and there are also used, sparingly and in irritatingly brief flashbacks, also old photos and coarse-grained video and archive material, which shows Reil and Petrozza at a young age. Occasionally, former colleagues, fans and colleagues (Bela B. from the doctors, Scott Ian von Anthrax) have their say. The guitarist Scott Ian, for example, remembers what he felt when he heard the music of creator for the first time: »It sounded as if a drums falled down the stairs. But I mean that in a positive sense. “

Petrozza, the likeable, says: “Already in childhood I got a feeling that music is something important.” His parents have always heard Adriano Celentano and other pop of the 1970s. In his youth he was a valet in his youth. A satanic ritual was also tried out because it was so common among young people at the time. But that didn’t work: “Satan didn’t come.”

Finally, a band from which the creator was to become creator was “out of boredom”. Which is probably not the worst reason to found a band. Back then, Reil and Petrozza were young people. In one scene, Jürgen Reil shows the school’s classroom, in which her first concert took place in 1983. In 1986, when the first two albums were presented, creator was invited by the Canadian metal band Voivod to take a club tour through the USA with her. Petrozza and Reil were just 19 years old and still lived at home with their parents. They had no car, no phone, have never been on a plane. “Like a mother who sends her children to school,” and she warns not to forget her break bread, he has happened, the manager at the time said.

Initially, her music was misunderstood as a kind of cultural music, says Petrozza. The “metal culture” is actually an “examination of the complexity of human existence”. And his constant is death. The singer and guitarist-once we see him in the film on the site of the Nazi memorial Buchenwald-also emphasizes that he has understood himself as an anti-fascist for everyday life. “I understand the frustration in the country, but I don’t understand why you have to choose inhumane right -wing parties. They are getting more and more shameless, and you have to oppose that, ”warns Petrozza. Already in the early 1990s, in the so-called baseball batons, when a right-wing extremist youth culture was formed in the eastern federal states, the band members, if they gave concerts there, wore anti-nazi shirts on stage. A fan explains how important it was at the time: “That was a signal: that as an anti-fascist you are also part of the metal scene.”

Petrozza seems to put emphasis on a healthy lifestyle. He has been eating vegan for 17 years. And he does strength training and yoga, as he tells a colleague. At the beginning of the film you can see it in a kind of vegetarian noble restaurant sitting and ordering a glass of non -alcoholic rosé. Demonic is nothing about it. The only horrible in the scene is the inevitable Lars Eidinger. It sits at the table, right next to Petrozza. But don’t worry: the scene is very short.

“Kreator-Hope & Hate”: Germany 2025, directed by Cordula Kablitz-Post. 114 minutes, start: September 4th