Ice Nine Kills do not do things halfway. After contributing "Twisting The Knife" to Scream 7 earlier this year, the Boston metalcore outfit are back in horror movie territory — this time with something considerably more elaborate. For Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come, the band didn't just write a song. They built a mythology.
Enter Grave Diggler
The conceit is this: Grave Diggler is a fictional glam metal band from the '80s — comprised, in the elaborate in-universe backstory, of the fathers of Ice Nine Kills' members. Per a statement from the band, Grave Diggler "once stood shoulder to shoulder with their eyeliner-and-excess peers in Poison, Mötley Crüe, and W.A.S.P., before bad business and even worse drugs dampened the fire in their loins." By the early '90s, like so many glam bands, Grave Diggler faded from the spotlight.
The story doesn't stop there. When the directors behind Scream (2022) and Scream VI began work on Ready Or Not 2, they wanted to feature one of Grave Diggler's forgotten anthems in the film. But securing the rights turned into a legal battle between fathers and sons — resulting in Ice Nine Kills re-recording "Hell Or High Slaughter (Grave Diggler: Pt. 2)" for the movie, and the original 1987 music video finally seeing the light of day.
The teaser, which frames all of this as a mockumentary, is already live. It features commentary from the cast of Ready Or Not 2 alongside what the band describes as "familiar faces from the metal world."
Dropping March 20th
The full track and its music video will debut this Friday, March 20th — the same day Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come opens. The original Ready Or Not was a 2019 slasher horror/dark comedy that developed a cult following, and the sequel brings back the same directing duo (Radio Silence Productions) who've become the go-to for elevated horror that doesn't take itself too seriously.
That tonal match makes Ice Nine Kills the obvious creative partner. The band has built an entire identity around horror movie references — their most recent albums The Silver Scream and Welcome to Horrorwood went deep on horror iconography, and their live shows are spectacles built around cinematic set pieces. Collaborating with actual horror films is the logical next step in that trajectory, and the Grave Diggler concept is the most ambitious version of it yet.
The Bigger Picture
The level of world-building here is worth recognizing. A lesser band drops a song on a soundtrack and calls it a day. Ice Nine Kills built a fake band, wrote a backstory spanning decades, tied it to the mythology of real '80s glam metal, and packaged it as a mockumentary. It's a marketing exercise, sure — but it's also genuinely creative, the kind of thing that gives hardcore fans something to dig into beyond just the music.
Spencer Charnas is name-checked in the Grave Diggler lore as the connection Radio Silence Productions used to track down the rights — which means even within the fiction, Ice Nine Kills exists as a separate entity from Grave Diggler, and Charnas is a character in the story.
It also fits cleanly into how Ice Nine Kills have evolved their identity over the past several years. When the Silver Scream era landed, it felt like a gimmick to some. The band converted those skeptics by making the music undeniably strong and backing it up with production quality that matched the ambition of the concept. Welcome to Horrorwood doubled down and expanded the world. Grave Diggler is the third iteration — moving from concept album to actual film collaboration to full alt-universe mythology. That's genuine artistic growth, not just brand maintenance.
Ice Nine Kills and Horror: A Perfect Marriage
The band's connection to horror isn't decorative. From the cinematic song structures to the theatrical live shows, everything Ice Nine Kills does operates on the logic of a good horror movie: build tension, release it, leave the audience wanting more. Charnas is an engaging frontman with enough stage presence to anchor the spectacle, and the band has been tight enough live to back up the theatrics with actual performance.
The Scream 7 track "Twisting The Knife" showed they could write a song that fits inside an existing franchise without losing their own voice. Grave Diggler takes that further — they're not just contributing to someone else's universe, they're extending their own into someone else's.
This is the kind of thing that only works if the music is actually good. We'll find out Friday.
For more on the horror metal crossover space, check out the Metal Mantra metal news section and our coverage of Ice Nine Kills and the metalcore scene.
Get tickets to Ready Or Not 2 via Ticketmaster.
