I first heard Night Chill when I saw them perform in between the sets of two of my friends’ bands —The Great Octopus and Thunder Glove — at Seescape a couple months ago. I was very much aware of the presence of these caped people with corpse paint on their faces hanging around the venue, but I wasn’t yet aware of the spell they were about to cast on me. The mood in the room changed frighteningly when Night Chill started their ritual. Soon enough, we, the audience, weren’t in Seescape anymore — we were transported to The Dungeon of Death, where the sounds of tortured rock instruments and a sinister, shrieking theremin were serenading our doomed souls. This terrifying incident was followed by the eerie possession of my body, as I, the serious metalhead who normally crosses his arms and frowns in a corner, fell under the hypnotism of the sinister groove and started dancing. 

It’s hard to confidently claim what kind of music Night Chill makes. Occasionally they’ll hit you with a punk rock charge, a surf rock beat, a mean doom metal riff or a hypnotic theremin melody. Nevertheless, bear with me as I take this risky journey to uncover all the mysteries surrounding these enigmatic ghouls. 

Q: What’s a word you would use to describe Night Chill to someone who has never heard of you before?

Night Chill: Phantasmagoric, ethereal, or otherworldly could all be used!

Q: I want to acknowledge that Night Chill has so many unique soundscapes and it thus evokes a multitude of bodily reactions. This is music you can dance to, headbang to, shiver to… How exactly do you strike a balance between groove and heaviness, all the while maintaining a spooky but playful tone?

NC: We create the themes to horror films, either real or imagined, that we’d love to listen to! The balance is the product of the unique talents and tastes of the individual members of the Night Chill coven, coming together in a unified purpose to create something that draws from the deep well of influences in macabre music and horror films to create a mental musical soundscape that aims to transport the listener into a realm of strange and bizarre places! We are the product of a lifetime of absorbing old horror films, television shows, comic books, magazines, and weird fiction, and try to walk the thinnest line between fear and fun! Part of the horror experience is the rollercoaster of unexpected turns, scares, and drops, but ultimately, the audience should be thrown into this haunted house of harmonic horrors and have a frightfully fun time! Since we are instrumental, it uses the old ethos of theater of the mind, that the vibes of the song can take people to either dark and dreary places or shock their nerves with sounds so spine scintillatingly spry you can’t help but dance to ’em!

Q: I also can’t help but ask how the theremin came into play? There are times when it almost feels like the theremin is the lead vocalist of the band.

NC: That is an astute observation! During any soundcheck before our live performances, we will tell the sound person to position the level of the theremin as if it’s the lead singer; the theremin drives our melodies. We found the theremin incredible at either adding layers of ethereal atmosphere, acting as an operatic voice, or shrieking through the human skull with the howling wails of a thousand ghosts! It continues to enchant or bewilder audiences, and never fails to summon curious audiences close to the stage!

Q: You are instantly recognizable from your appearance as well, shrouded in capes and pale as the moon. How did the horror theme come about, and was there ever an incarnation of the band without the theme?

NC: The heart of darkness and evil has always existed with the band, and we have worn it as a badge of honor, or shall we say horror. We originally began as a mystery-shrouded faceless enigma, originally intending only to use our musical and visual arts prowess to be a studio based horror soundtrack project. Eventually, the incoming interest from mesmerized audiences encouraged us to leave our haunted house by the cemetery and take the sounds to the stage, where we incorporated past experience in visual art and design, costume, and film to create an entirely immersive horror experience! We definitely set intentions on a visually striking appearance culled from classic occult films, sixties cultists, garage punk, and black metal. Having the unified appearance definitely delivers the impression of being a witch cult or coven of occult practitioners, enticing unwitting audiences into participating in our unholy forbidden rites and macabre musical rituals! Our first shows on stage already incorporated the corpse paint, the capes and medallions, the costumes, the stage banners with the unholy symbol of Eibon, the film projections, and candelabras to take audiences to nightmarish otherworldly dreamscapes of horror harmonies! Night Chill continues to explore many macabre personas, and has been no stranger to incorporating themed costumes for specific events like dressing as evil green skinned space Martians, silent mask wearing folk horror cultists, or as music playing gorillas in our not so secret alter ego Night Ape.

Q: Is there any background lore to the personas you put on the stage, and is it ever hard to not break character while performing live?

NC: The personas are an unnatural and distorted version of our already existing personalities, although Thea can only play theremin if she remains in a trance-like state. Our members reflect an essence of vintage TV hosts like Zacherly, the Cryptkeeper, and maybe a little bit of William Castle in between; we are not afraid of gimmicks or creating a spiel on stage to hypnotise lost souls into buying our merch. The background lore beyond these revelations will continue to remain a mystery as like all good magicians, practitioners of the occult arts, or secret architects of evil, we cannot reveal our secrets and always want to leave the audience wanting more!

Q: While quite a bit of your songs are instrumental, they seem to emotionally correspond to the titles you give them. Which makes me wonder – does the music come first or the title?

NC: There are multiple methods to our madness. Some songs have the themes of older horror films or weird fiction, and it might get titled accordingly once the music is worked out. Some songs have been written ahead of time by individual members and brought in fully formed with a title in mind. Many more have been the product of us being tasked to create a song, whether they are for specific themed compilations or to be a soundtrack to another’s’ work…some of our best songs like ‘Night of the Wendigo’, ‘Dungeon of Death’, ‘Oblong Box’, and ‘Return of the Sorcerer’ have been created by request.

Q: To finish off, is there any horror-related piece of media you would recommend to the Innis Herald readers?

NC: There are so many pieces of horror media we could recommend, but to get a good essence of Night Chill, we recommend films like The Devil Rides Out, The Beyond, City of the Living Dead, The Wicker Man, Werewolves on Wheels, Black Sunday, or Suspiria! Also now is the beast time to devour some autumnal, veil-thinning media such as any of the British Library Tales of the Weird book collections, Hellebore zines, Severin’s All Haunts Be Ours blu-ray box sets, any old monster mags you can find in the basements of old vintage or comic shops. The Beguiling basement in Toronto is worth digging through. Music like ‘Samhain’ (Night Chill is named after a Samhain song!), ‘The Damned’, ‘Mercyful Fate’, ‘Devilmaster’, ‘Fields of the Nephilim’, ‘Electric Wizard’, ‘Darkthrone’, ‘Screaming Lord Sutch’, ‘The Gruesomes’, ‘Forbidden Dimension’, or ‘The Ghastly Ones’! Dig through the realms of vintage trashy magazines, dilapidated lurid paperbacks, forgotten creepy video tapes or vinyl record albums with ghastly cover illustrations, you’ll be sure to find Night Chill!

Note from Night Chill:

If you don’t follow Night Chill on Instagram @_nightchill or get all the free music you want via music listening platforms (We give a lot of songs away for free on our Bandcamp) what are you even doing with your life? If Night Chill is playing in your town, we issue this evil edict: YOU MUST GO TO SEE NIGHT CHILL AND YOU MUST LISTEN TO EACH HYPNOTIC HARMONY AND FOLLOW THE COMMANDS ISSUED FROM THE STAGE!! JOIN THE COVEN OF THE LOST AND THE DAMNED IN THEIR CAREER OF DARKNESS AND EVIL!! AND THE ONLY WAY TO AVOID THE CURSE OF NIGHT CHILL IS TO BRAND YOURSELF WITH THE MARK OF NIGHT CHILL!