When a rock guitarist recites Edgar Allan Poe beside a charred skeleton with ravens drifting across the screen, you could call it a Halloween stunt. With Kirk Hammett, it lands differently. He recently released a video reading the final seven stanzas of “The Raven,” dressed in a raven-themed black jacket bearing a grim-reaper design, seated beside a charred skeleton while ominous uplighting fills the frame. Metallica’s “Inamorata” — the closing track of 2023’s 72 Seasons — scores the entire gothic tableau. The timing connects directly to Metallica’s Life Burns Faster residency at Sphere in Las Vegas, where the band is already staging an electric-chair perspective for “Ride the Lightning” and a Lovecraftian monster during “The Call of Ktulu.” The Poe reading isn’t a detour from that world. It’s the same creative address.
The Horror Life Hammett Built Long Before This Video
His horror credentials run far deeper than any seasonal post could suggest.
Most people know Hammett as Metallica’s lead guitarist. Fewer know he has:
- organized the Fear FestEvil horror convention
- collects rare movie posters with the focused intensity of a serious archivist
- embeds horror-film artwork directly into his guitar designs
The video pulls all of it into a single frame: Hammett reads the stanzas where Poe’s narrator reaches his breaking point, surrounded by raven imagery and ominous uplighting, wearing a jacket that doubles as a grim-reaper motif. “Inamorata” — the closing track of 72 Seasons — plays underneath, its extended runtime giving the clip the unhurried atmosphere of a séance. This is not aesthetic cosplay. It’s a sustained parallel creative life, and the Poe video is its latest dispatch — a moment where rock mythology meets folklore in its most deliberate form.
From Portals to the Sphere Stage
A 2022 instrumental EP and a Las Vegas residency connect the same creative thread.
Hammett’s 2022 instrumental EP Portals — featuring tracks including “Maiden and the Monster,” “The Jinn,” and “The Incantation” — grew from his collaboration with composer and conductor Edwin Outwater. According to Rolling Stone, Hammett described Outwater as a fellow horror fan, and their work together drew directly on that shared enthusiasm. The EP sounds like the score to a film nobody commissioned: cinematic, unhurried, genuinely unsettling.
That atmospheric ambition now runs visibly through Metallica’s Sphere residency, where a Lovecraftian monster looms over the crowd during “The Call of Ktulu” and an electric-chair viewpoint reframes “Ride the Lightning.” Hammett’s Poe reading fits that theatrical vision without any adjustment required.
Horror has always been structural in Hammett’s creative identity — not decoration layered over the guitar work, but part of the same foundation. The ravens in that video weren’t atmosphere. They were the whole argument.
