Last year, in case you didn’t notice, those “hands that threaten doom”, which Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson once sang about, inched 10 seconds closer to midnight. The Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the people who created the Doomsday Clock back in 1947 to gauge how close humanity is to destroying the world, reset the minute hand for the 25th time since its creation, moving it closer to the hour than it has ever been.
So the prospect of imminent global catastrophe is now ever more pronounced, which, to be honest, is something of a bummer. “We are approaching the end of an era. So let’s have a good time.”
It was with these equally doom-laden words that Papa Emeritus IV, Ghost’s puckish frontman, welcomed the faithful to the Kia Forum in Los Angeles on September 11 last year, for the first of two ‘rituals’ bringing the Re-Imperatour U.S.A. 2023 tour to a close.
For those in attendance, the weight of those words hung heavily in the air. In February last year, news that a second night at the 17,500-capacity venue had been added to the end of the Swedish band’s tour schedule, after the first show sold out, was delivered in Chapter 16 of the occult rock collective’s web series. The episode, titled Tax Season, was accompanied by a message from ‘The Clergy’ stating, “We wish to inform you that in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.”
The clip itself featured none-too-subtle hints that Papa Emeritus IV may not be long for this world; at one point, while he’s playing a retro racing video game, he’s distracted by the sight of a glass coffin being wheeled past his door, and when his attention returns to his TV screen, the words ‘Game Over!!!!!!’ appear.
In Ghost world, where every symbol is scrutinised to the nth degree by the faithful, this was interpreted as a warning that the writing was on the wall for this Papa in the City of Angels. And when it was revealed that the group’s two night-stand at the Forum was to be filmed for a future film release, with all phones to be confiscated from patrons upon entry, we feared the worst.
Hammer duly dispatched Associate Editor Dave Everley to Los Angeles to bear witness to what promised to be the gravest chapter yet in Ghost’s evolution. At the conclusion of the second night at the Forum, however, Papa IV – “channelling the ghosts of Freddie Mercury and vintage Willy Wonka”, Dave noted – was still standing, indeed dancing… but there was a lingering suspicion that there was more to be revealed.
Then, on May 1 this year, came a new message: the announcement that Rite Here Rite Now, Ghost’s debut feature film, chronicling the events in Los Angeles, would be screened in cinemas worldwide on June 20 and 22. And those studying the minutiae of the film poster observed that the letter ‘o’ in the final word of the title had been substituted for an analogue clock, its hands positioned at – and you might be ahead of us here – two minutes to midnight. Well, well, well…
"The Doomsday Clock is not an actual clock – it’s more of a measuring tool for us to understand how near we are to fucking things up. But it’s not like a timer on a bomb, and that means that we can still change things around. And this film is a little bit about that, about turning around and changing your ways, even if it’s just your attitude towards things.”
The real world time is 6:30pm (BST) on May 9, and an email has just informed us that ‘Mary Goore’ has joined our Zoom call from Stockholm. Those familiar with Ghost’s pre-history will be aware that this was Tobias Forge’s stage name in both his death metal band Repugnant and his glam metal outfit Crashdïet, and though he chooses today to keep his camera off, the voice on the call is unmistakably that of Ghost’s 43-year-old leader.
The trailer for Rite Here Rite Now premiered exactly four and a half hours ago, and as far as Tobias can ascertain, it’s been “well met” so far, the only “concerns” he has noticed to date being raised by fans worried that the film has not yet been booked into picture houses in their homelands.
“The film is being distributed in many countries, but not all,” he explains, “so I understand that there were some voices that felt like we’d overlooked this or that country. It’s like when you announce a tour, and immediately get, ‘Why aren’t you coming to… [insert country name]?’ That wasn’t our decision, I can’t tell you why, it’s just that some countries didn’t want the film, or whatever.”
Officially, the first seeds for Rite Here Right Now were planted in Tobias’s mind “over a decade” ago. “When Ghost got signed to Loma Vista, Tom Whalley [owner and CEO] asked what the story of the band was,” he explained in the press release announcing the film.
“He felt telling a story was vital in order to get new fans engaged. I said that because we were a new ‘baby’ band and, more importantly, we were an anonymous baby band, there wasn’t really a compelling story to tell. Not yet anyway. But I told him that if he wanted a story, I could come up with one. This film is the fruit of that conversation.”
Those who’ve followed the band from their earliest days, however, will know that, from the outset, Ghost emerged accompanied by a sense of theatre. Back in 2012, when I spoke to Swedish journalist Richard Lagergren, formerly the guitarist in the band Portrait, and the first ‘outsider’ to be informed of the existence of Ghost, he used the words “very cinematic, very surreal and very intense” to describe his first encounter with the group.
He revealed that he was at home one Sunday afternoon in October 2010, when he received a phone call telling him that a local band wished to see him. Within an hour, a car pulled up outside his home, and he was blindfolded, driven into the countryside and led into a disused warehouse, where, once his blindfold was removed, he found himself face-to-face with Papa Emeritus and five Nameless Ghouls, and was informed that he had been selected to begin disseminating word of Ghost’s Satanic ministry to the world.
This was very much not how bands were expected to conduct their business in 2010, and it telegraphed, from day one, Tobias’s (still present) desire to keep Ghost out of step with standard, traditional music industry conventions. “From the start, we were cutting against the grain,” he reflects.
“If you think back to that time, it was the beginning of when the music industry demanded a sort of hyper-frantic online presence from bands, and every band was updating Facebook as soon as they did anything, sending out private messages, like, ‘Hey, everyone, don’t forget to buy tickets!’ I said immediately to my label, ‘I don’t wanna do that, I fucking hate that shit, and I don’t wanna be part of that… and we’re a fucking anonymous band.’
“So it was an issue, and we had to steer around a lot of those things, while figuring out, ‘How do we communicate with the world what we want to communicate?’ We had to figure out ways to sort of cable out a story to the world, a story that we didn’t really have at that time, or a story that I didn’t want to tell. Because what was the story going to be? My story? No, fuck that. So I said, ‘I’m gonna come up with a story, and it might unfold in the form of short little online episodes.’ And Tom Whalley was like, ‘OK, I’m intrigued. What do you want to do?’
“So we started doing these episodes about The Ministry, with our little commercial messages attached, and it turned out fun. But obviously it became very complicated: there’s a reason why bands just turn their phones on and are like, ‘We’re coming to Brazil!’ It’s so much easier. Whereas everything that we’ve ever done has always been way more complicated. But lots of fun, too. And so, via those web episodes, the story has really taken shape.
The idea of making a film has been in my head for years, and I’ve always been adamant about the web episodes not being too detailed, because you don’t want to paint yourself into a corner, so there’s been a lot of loose threads. But I figured that I could take these loose threads, tie them together in some sort of comprehensible form, and that could be the film. And that’s why we’re talking today, finally!”
If you think that today Tobias Forge is going to outline exactly what happens onscreen in Rite Here Rite Now, you really haven’t been paying attention to how Ghost operate. For as much as Tobias loves theatre and showmanship, he also treasures and truly values the mystique around his band. And that has its roots in the way he himself discovered his favourite bands as a teenager.
For as much as he loved Kiss, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, the Sex Pistols and Venom, the young Tobias Forge was equally immersed in an underground extreme metal community where anonymity was prized above adulation.
“A lot of the bands that I grew up listening to weren’t very famous at all,” he recalls. “Some of them didn’t ever play live, some ‘bands’ were actually one guy in his bedroom, and you knew very little about anyone. And when these bands did communicate with the world, it was through fanzines, and very adolescent interviews where they gave outrageous, very provocative answers.
That helped cement my magnetism towards maintaining mystique, and back in 2010, I definitely thought that there was a way where Ghost could achieve some sort of success whilst 100% maintaining a mystique. And over the years, I’ve learned that was hard… but then I never thought we’d be as successful as we are.
“The best way to be anonymous in a band is by not forming a band. Don’t do it! It’s counterintuitive to remain anonymous if you want to be in a big professional band, and it’s counterintuitive to sign with a major label who want to break your band. I’ve always been under the impression that in order to become a representative of the night, you have to be supernatural, but now it’s time to let the world in on the story so far, to some extent.”
With Rite Here Rite Now, Tobias admits that he’s in “virgin territory”. But here’s what we’re allowed to know. The film takes place over the course of one evening, with a narrative centred around a gig in Los Angeles, but with flashbacks referencing storylines in the Ghost ‘webisodes’, which began on YouTube in March 2018.
For metal fans, the concept of a feature film blending a live show with a dramatic narrative will likely call to mind Metallica’s bold and largely incomprehensible 2013 film Through The Never, a commercial disaster for the band, with James Hetfield subsequently admitting that it “disappeared” and describing the entire experience as “bittersweet”.
Tobias insists that, actually, there are no overlaps in what he set out to do with Ghost’s film – “that film was never a guiding light” are his exact words – and he cites two alternate films as much more instructive in terms of his ambitions.
“As we were pitching this film, the two films that I mentioned a lot in order for people try to comprehend artistically what I’m trying to do were [The Rolling Stones’ 1983 concert film] Let’s Spend The Night Together mixed with [The Sex Pistols’ 1980 ‘mockumentary’] The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle. There is a sense of an origin story, but it’s very much a story that takes place during an evening. So you sort of step right into what is happening right there and right then, and maybe the main character’s inability, or unwillingness, to be there.”
“One issue, or one challenge, that we faced was making a film that was comprehensible to anyone who had no clue about what Ghost is,” he continues. “We have a very, very passionate fanbase, who, to a large degree at least, are very aware of everything that goes on with Ghost. The easy part, conceptually, was to make a film that would please them, because they know the story already, they know the context that we are now extending with this film, because it’s basically picking up where the last episodes ended.
"But we wanted it to be that someone who doesn’t know shit about the story gets brought up to speed pretty quickly. But this is where my ability to be objective ends, because I’m wondering, ‘Do people understand what I’m saying here? Do people get that?’
“Obviously, as with everyone else, I’m a Star Wars fan, and that worked pretty well in the sense where you just crash land right into the story. That works where the message of the film is quite simple, and I think that the message that we’re trying to convey with this film is to be right here right now, and not anywhere else. That’s what I’m hoping everyone will understand.”
This sounds quite straightforward on paper. But, as Tobias was to quickly learn, the film business is not straightforward, not when films cost ‘x million’ dollars to make, and someone has to stump up those ‘x million’ dollars to get it from scripts and storyboards to the screen. Making a film, Tobias says with a very audible sigh, is so much more complicated than making a record, not least because the trust that an artist accumulates working in the music business doesn’t necessarily translate to being trusted with a multi-million dollar film budget.
“The film had to go through discussions with finance people who were as curious about the content as you are,” he says, diplomatically. “And let’s just say that I sometimes struggled to convey what we were just talking about, and not everyone understood it. I’d be saying, ‘Look, this is not really, you know, just us live from the Forum.’ And they were like, ‘Well, could you scrap the live show and just do a film about something else?’ And I’d say, ‘Well, that kinda defeats the purpose of what I’m trying to sell to you.’ So that was a little bit weird.”
The end result of such conversations was that no financial backer came onboard for the film, and Ghost and their management ended up funding the whole process – which, he says, ultimately simplified things.
But the uncertainty meant that acclaimed Swedish filmmaker Jonas Åkerlund – famously once a member of Bathory, and a creative visionary who’s made music videos for the likes of Madonna, The Prodigy, U2 and more, as well as directing films such as Lords Of Chaos and Spun – decided to step away from potentially directing the film to instead take on a co-producer role, and to advise Tobias as a friend.
In his place, as director, came American filmmaker Alex Ross Perry. He first saw Ghost opening up for Iron Maiden in New York in July 2017, at the conclusion of Maiden’s North American tour for The Book Of Souls, and subsequently directed the band’s own ‘mockumentary’ Metal Myths, as well as the fabulously provocative promo video for the band’s cover of Genesis’s 1992 single, Jesus He Knows Me.
“He was obviously the right choice,” says Tobias, “and a no-brainer to come onboard, because not only is he a very, very nice guy, but he also totally understands the band.”
“Jonas was very involved with all the legwork beforehand, but when he stepped down as the director, and became a producer, it actually made things a little bit easier, because he became less stressed about it; all of a sudden he became calm, and just became my friend instead, pushing everything along. At no point did I feel like I’d bitten off more than I could chew, but the whole thing was definitely a huge learning experience.”
“A lot of film studios sometimes struggle to comprehend something that isn’t mainstream,” he adds. “Like, it’s not uncommon that you might want to make a film about, say, a historical event, and they would be, like, ‘Hmmm, it’s really depressing that the boat sinks in the end. Can it not do that?’ And you’re like, ‘Well, no, the story is about these two lovers that meet on the sinking boat, and yeah, he dies in the end.’ ‘But that’s so depressing! Can we make a different ending?’ ‘Er, No.’ ‘Well, we don’t want to pay for that.’ That’s the sort of shit you’re up against."
For Tobias, Rite Here Rite Now is clearly the biggest project he’s ever taken on, but Ghost fans shouldn’t worry that they’re about to lose their hero to Hollywood. At one point today, he mentions his work on the next Ghost album, specifically saying that he’s “synchronising” his work on the film with the new record, so we may get an announcement on that sooner rather than later.
There remains one last matter to discuss. In each chapter of Ghost’s journey to date, there has been death and renewal, with a new Papa coming along at the end of each cycle to replace the outgoing bandleader. And yet Papa IV was not killed off in Los Angeles. So, Tobias, is he going to transition into the next cycle? A drawn out “Errrrrrrrr…” comes through the speakers before an answer arrives. “He will be with us, yeah. For a lifetime, if you will. As everyone is.”
Okaaaaaay. But will Papa V also be appearing soon? “I hope so.”
At this point, the band’s PR steps in to advise that we have one last question. So we ask if Rite Here Rite Now is close to the vision Tobias had in his head when he first embarked upon this ambitious undertaking.
“It’s never, you know, 100%,” he answers, “but pretty damn close. A lot of things that I think scared people in meetings a year ago, are things that I know that we pulled off. As an artist, people want you to dream big, but I always try to come up with things that are actually doable.
“Everything with Ghost is difficult and expensive, but the records are getting closer to what I imagine, and this film turned out pretty close to what I envisioned. And when I see the film, even I look at the show and go, ‘That’s pretty entertaining, that’s pretty cool.’ This is a film that you have not seen before. And you can all tell me what you thought when you see me next, OK?”
Rite Here Rite Now: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack is out July 26.
