Serial thrillers! How Ice Nine Kills slayed Welcome To Rockville

At five o’clock in the afternoon, Alice Cooper, reliable as ever, gives Welcome To Rockville a stadium-sized circus of horrors. With the temperature creeping toward 100 degrees, the Master Of Shock remains ice cool as he doles out decapitations, executions and fights against a massive Frankenstein’s monster at Daytona International Speedway.

He should check over his shoulder, though. Because Spencer Charnas is looking to usurp his cartoonishly carrion-stained throne. While headliners Guns N’ Roses close out the first day of this year’s bash, over the other side of this gargantuan site, he and Ice Nine Kills are giving Daytona a gory but charming lesson in camp, wonderful, ’80s B-movie violence.

There’s stabbings with big knives. At one point he shoots Agent Smith from The Matrix in the head. At another, he emerges as Freddy Krueger with a big, fearsome glove. He duets with viral sensation MAPHRA for her first-ever live performance. And as is now tradition, during the banging Hip To Be Scared Spencer, dressed in a pristine white shirt, braces and mack, does the bit from American Psycho where Patrick Bateman kills Paul Allen with an axe in the face, to – naturally – enormous cheers.

Spencer himself is a ringmaster to rival Coop. And, like his much older counterpart, he has the perfect grasp on why the grotesque and the horrible can be really, really funny. A flaming foetus swung around by its umbilical cord by Art The Clown from Terrifier is perhaps not something for polite conversation, but here, to the biggest crowd on this stage all day by some distance, it’s an absolute scream. And talking of Scream, Ghostface comes out to direct a string quartet. Marvellous.

What’s striking is how natural it all is. The production values are through the roof, but they actually know what to do with it all as well. Mostly, what INK want to do is have you baying for blood and cheering for violence, like when they off radio DJ Jose ‘Metal Ambassador' Mangin. Like the perfect murder, everything is just so.

It helps, of course, that Spencer is a born leading man, as eyebrow-wagglingly handsome and charismatic as Patrick Bateman wants to be, with a better sense of sick humour. He's like a gameshow host where the prize is always being relieved of your blood. And while every big sing-along sounds like Fall Out Boy with beefy metal riffs (they do, alright?), Meat & Greet, Welcome To Horrorwood and the live debut of Twisting The Knife are all imperious as the band hack their way through them.

But what makes INK so good is just knowing how to do a good scare, or a good laugh. In the case of Art The Clown arriving in racing fatigues, driving around in a mini car and calling for a wall of death, it’s both.

Nobody does shock these days quite like INK. As a good fright out, even Alice Cooper would worry how to deliver so many treats. Killer, whichever way you slice it.

Read this next:

• From Kurt Cobain to Wes Craven: The icons who inspired Ice Nine Kills’ Spencer Charnas
  
• Ice Nine Kills: “Horror has always been in my blood and it always will be”
• “Horror allows me to never grow up”: Ice Nine Kills’ Spencer Charnas on the spookiness and subtleties of The Silver Scream 2