INVOKING YELL is black metal horror bliss

Patricio Valladares’ Invoking Yell is a movie about the importance of nuance, of specificity. Consider the setup. The film, set in 1997, follows a female Black Metal band from Chile, three women strong, called Invoking Yell as they travel to a forest area to shoot a demo tape to go with their 4-song cassette release. In classic found-footage fashion, they document everything they do in the process from the moment they arrive, going over the many things they both like and utterly dislike about metal. In one scene early in the story, the girl that records most of the experience, Ruth (Andrea Ozuljevich), asks the lead singer, Andrea (María Jesús Marcone), why they went with Black metal for their sound. Andrea resents the question. Annoyed, she corrects the new girl. Invoking Yell is not Black metal, she says. It’s Depressive Suicidal Black Metal (which, by the way, actually exists). There’s a difference, and it’s important.

This exchange colors the rest of the movie, and it makes the horror that slowly unfolds soon after become much darker. That Ruth got the band’s brand of metal wrong points to an underlying animosity that’s just looking for an excuse to become violence. It’s this dynamic that makes Invoking Yell such a smart and terrifying found-footage horror movie.

Invoking Yell is a metal horror movie through and through, though it sticks closer to the culture rather than the music. Don’t expect a robust soundtrack here, despite there being a few instances in which songs play out in the background. Instead, the focus falls on how these three women live and breath metal and how invested they are in indulging every single aspect of it. The girls throw up horn signs every chance they get and they even pull out the corpse paint before it’s all said and done. Also, Andrea carries a recording device to capture psychophony, ghost voices rumored to be heard in places where people have died.

This all feeds their chosen form of metal. For instance, they believe that being a Depressive Suicidal Black Metal band requires being surrounded by the dark ideas and emotions its songs are about. The story explores how far that can be taken and what things get conjured in the process by letting the band act out the specifics of their chosen lifestyle.

The concept comes through exceptionally well thanks to the three performances driving the story. Riding along with Andrea and Ruth is Tania, played by Macarena Carrere, the more energetic one of the trio. She brings a bit of levity to the trip, but she seems to also notice Andrea’s bullish behavior towards Ruth whenever she asks a question or acts like she’s an important part of the band. They project a sense of dysfunction that frames their shared interest as a kind of connective tissue that’s badly infected in parts.

In this regard, the movie borrows a lot from The Blair Witch Project. The three film students at the center of that story also come off as people who try hard to keep their anger in check in order to play nice with each other. When that fails, when cordiality becomes obsolete, their situation turns considerably worse. As a result, the horror elements ramp up in intensity and threat. The witch’s influence gathers strength and hovers closer to the group. The same happens in Invoking Yell, though confirmation of whether supernatural forces are operating here or not are kept under wraps for longer. The movie’s last act benefits greatly from this as certain reveals shift the movie’s many meanings as the spotlight lands on each one, allowing for a layered read of the terrible things that happen along the way.

There’s a lot to pour over in Invoking Yell. Its narrative details reward those who latch on to every word and camera shot to decipher its mysteries. It respects metal and the subgenre it explores specifically, giving metalheads who come into the movie expecting a caricature of their clan something infinitely more inviting. It would’ve been easy to go for Satanist clichés and copious amounts of gore to give everything a cheap metal music video look. But the movie is smarter than that. It wants a more serious conversation to come out of it. And if there’s something about metal, it’s that you really have to know what you’re talking about to get the most out of the darkness it entertains.