• Combined book format includes film, photographs, and essays that offer unprecedented insight into the secretive fringe society of serpent handlers in modern America
• Sundance Channel-produced documentary film about Appalachian snake-handlers offers first candid look at religious practices by trusted filmmakers Michael Mees and Gabriel Wrye
• Includes the spellbinding essay “Streets of Gold: Travels Among the Appalachian Snake-Handlers” by T. R. Johnson
• Photography by Jeffrey Schifman
• Included full-length DVD features original music by Joey Santiago of the Pixies

Heaven Come Down is a many-faceted document of ordinary people who go to work, raise families, and every week walk into a church with a box of poisonous snakes under one arm, a jar of strychnine on the altar, and an electric guitar on the dais. They testify and pray and sing and dance and speak in tongues. They light up a glass bottle filled with kerosene, stick their face in the fire, take the snakes out of the boxes, drink the strychnine, and dance and sing and pray some more. Filmmakers Gabriel Wrye and Michael Mees present portraits of four contemporary Appalachian worshipers who find nothing unusual in these practices, including a brother and sister whose father, a preacher, was fatally bitten during Sunday service. Another heart-rending series of events finds two best friends caught between the law and a breed of religion that is nothing if not uniquely American.

“Gabriel Wrye and I are not religious people, but after 18 months we left knowing these Pentacostal snake handlers are true believers, and we definitely respected them,” says director Michael Mees. “When you’re in the room, when the spirit is moving, and that rock and roll church music is pumping and they’re throwing serpents around the room—that’s just electric. That’s almost Appalachian punk rock—it’s the wildest thing you can imagine.”

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Wherever heavy metal has gone, the movies have followed—and blazed ferocious new celluloid trails, from concert movies and trippy midnight flicks at the dawn of heaviosity, through inspirational depictions of ancient times and future armageddons, right up to the raw hand-held video productions of today.

Heavy Metal Movies rounds up, reviews, and canonizes all known incidents of the heavy metal in the motion pictures:

• Performance films
• Feature documentaries
• Occult rock-n-roll horror
• Headbanger characters
• Soundtrack standouts
• Namesake inspirations
• Lyrical references
• Aesthetic archetypes and more

As brash, irreverent and visceral as both the music and the movies themselves, Heavy Metal Movies is the ultimate guidebook to the complete molten musical cinema experience.

Mike McPadden is the head writer at MrSkin.com. In the 1990s, he published the glandmark sleaze-zine Happyland under the pen(is) name Selwyn Harris. Other gigs include Hustler, Celebrity Skin, and writing screenplays (both hard and softcore) for director Gregory Dark. Metal cred comes from manning rhythm guitar and mounting live nude sodomy circuses for Chicago psych-noise miscreants Gays in the Military throughout the 2000s.