Going to an Ice Nine Kills set is like unwrapping Halloween candy pocketed by trick or treating in a dodgy neighbourhood. There could be all kinds of horrors hidden inside the sweetness, your would parents warn, but the temptation and morbid curiosity is far too strong. High on the sugar rush and risk of what you might be getting yourself into, you eat it up anyways, much like how Download gobbles down the gory goodness today. The Apex is dripping with early evening sunshine, and a lot of faux blood. It feels like Summerwe'en already.

As theatricore trailblazer Spencer Charnas rocks up in his finest funeral attire, Hanibal Lecter is wheeled out and let loose for Meat And Greet. It's just one violent reenactment of many to follow. There’s non-stop gags, non-stop prop action, and all of it is totally unhinged. Spencer even claps for himself using severed limbs, and a beach ball that looks like a bloody eyeball bobs around the field. The band and their gear are similarly dressed to kill, including a drumkit that, fittingly, looks like popcorn buckets. Every little detail has been meticulously thought out, and all of it plays a part in bringing together the spectacle.

All kinds of queasy gore are acted out, every sort of slashing, slicing, axing and dicing you can possibly imagine. Spencer dances with a creepy kind of jazz, transformed into the Joker for Laugh Track, and puts on his best Patrick Bateman by dressing in one sight that truly is horrifying to any veteran Download goer: a rain mac. For The Shower Scene, he enters the universe of Psycho. Two silhouettes appear behind a screen, with Spencer slashing into his victim behind it.

While many of the theatrics are pretty slapstick, some could make the uninitiated to Ice Nine Kills fetch up their festival scran. The crowning, gruesome moment unfolds as their time starts to near its end. Terrifier’s Art The Clown emerges, and torches a charred plastic foetus, then swings it around his head like a lasso by its coiled umbilical cord. And of course the Download dog can’t get away with it too, and meets his fate with a twist of the neck. It’s quick, but definitely not painless.

As Art plays us out on drums, a clown of many talents it seems, it’s clear that Ice Nine Kills have mastered a set that puts the fun in funeral. Like Spencer taking a big lick of his bloodied knife, it’s a tasty, sickening time in the best possible way.