Something’s wrong with Dave Grohl.

With a bad case of writer’s block, the Foo Fighters’ frontman starts losing his mind as he and the rest of the band — guitarists Pat Smear and Chris Shiflett, bassist Nate Mendel, drummer Taylor Hawkins and keys player Rami Jaffee — settle into an Encino mansion to record their 10th studio album.

At least that’s how the story begins in the new Foo Fighters’ horror-comedy feature film, “Studio 666,” which hits theaters nationwide on Feb. 25. The movie was made in the same Encino mansion where Grohl & Co. hunkered down in late 2019 to write and record the album “Medicine at Midnight.”

It was screenwriters Jeff Buhler and Rebecca Hughes who helped push the band to star in what would ultimately become a “Spinal Tap” meets “Evil Dead”-style film directed by BJ McDonnell, who had previously worked on the TV series “American Horror Story,” the films “Hatchet III,” “Annabelle Comes Home,” “The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It” and music videos for the metal band Slayer.

“We haven’t had to dive into any heavy dramatic roles in Foo Fighters’ music videos,” Grohl said during a recent phone interview. “They’ve been all just slapstick comedy. With this project, we had a script and we had to act. Granted, we had to act like the Foo Fighters, which we’re pretty good at, but still, it was very different.”

Without giving too much away, once the band is inside the home and starting to record, evil takes over. One by one, the band members encounter hilarious and blood-soaked scenarios. These scenes include lots of old-school horror gore courtesy of special effects artist Tony Gardner, who created the prosthetics for Foo Fighters’ “Run” music video.

“I have got to be honest: I never heard anyone say the words, ‘Less blood,’” Grohl said with a laugh. “It was usually, ‘More blood! More blood! Keep it going with the blood!’ It was really funny actually because one night I walked out of the house and went down to the street and there was fake blood running down into the sewer. I’m not kidding. I looked down at the curb and it was just a river of blood. It was awesome.”

McDonnell said they wanted to limit the use of CGI, so gallons of stage blood were readily available. A replica set of one of the bedrooms in the home had to be constructed outside for one particularly over-the-top scene, which was likely the reason the streets of Encino ran with (fake) blood.

“If we would have done that in the house, it would have destroyed the house,” he added during a recent Zoom interview.

For all involved in the project, the goal was to make an actual horror movie that would appeal to both fans of the Foo Fighters and connoisseurs of the horror genre. That’s why, McDonnell said, the film needed to have a shocking opening – and it has one, featuring “Scream” and “Insidious: Chapter 2” actress and Palm Desert native Jenna Ortega.

“We needed a strong lead actress and a strong performer to open this movie up to where people don’t expect the ride they’re about to get on,” McConnell said. “I think a lot of people think they’re jumping into a Foo Fighters funny thing, but we wanted it to be gnarly.”

The movie also stars Whitney Cummings, Leslie Grossman, Will Forte, Jason Trost and Slayer guitarist Kerry King.

Grohl said he was genuinely impressed with the acting chops his bandmates displayed during filming and there might be at least one Foo Fighter who could potentially go on to have a lucrative film career following his performance in “Studio 666.”

Related Articles

“When we sat down at our first table read with the directors, producers and the extras, reading through the script, I started to think Rami Jaffee could probably quit and wind up with a crazy career in a series of hilarious movies,” he said. “Taylor Hawkins didn’t want to read his lines that were written for him in the script. He said, ‘I’m just gonna say what I’m gonna say.’ And he comes off as the most genuine Taylor Hawkins I’ve ever seen in my entire life. He did a great job. Pat Smear, though, it’s hard to take your eyes off Pat. He lights up the screen every time he walks through it.”

Grohl said he is a big horror movie fan. Growing up in Virginia, just outside of Washington D.C., he spent a lot of time hanging out on the famous steps shown in the movie “The Exorcist,” a film that is subtly referenced several times within “Studio 666.”

“That’s where punk rockers would drink on weekends in the ’80s,” he said. “I was obsessed with ‘The Exorcist’ and I can honestly say it’s my favorite movie of all time. I grew up hanging around that house, too. I never went in. I almost bought it one time, but then I thought, ‘Man, that’s weird.’”

Since he’s such an admirer of the genre, Grohl said he took a leap of faith and personally contacted filmmaker and composer John Carpenter, known for classics like “Halloween,” “The Fog” and “The Thing,” to see if he might get involved with the project.

“I said, ‘There’s no way that John Carpenter’s gonna be in our stupid horror film,’” he recalled. But Carpenter did agree to make an appearance in the film and the director, who also composed music for his own films, even offered to write the theme to it.

“I still don’t believe it,” Grohl continued. “When he sent the music over, it’s such a classic John Carpenter composition. People will hear it and think, ‘Oh, that sounds like ‘Halloween’,’ and yeah, it does! It’s John Carpenter! I got chills when he sent it and I almost cried. I can’t believe it. I was like, ‘You know his name has to be the biggest name on the poster right?’”

Though the band’s 25th-anniversary outing was sidelined by the COVID-19 pandemic, Foo Fighters will be out celebrating 27 years on the road this year and will play a pair of hometown gigs at Banc of California Stadium in Los Angeles Aug. 18 and 20. Not only did the band drop an album during the pandemic, but it put out a new documentary, “What Drives Us,” and Grohl released a book, “The Storyteller: Tales of Life and  Music.”

So, while he has a few moments of downtime, he’s not spending it resting up for the tour, he’s in the studio working on something extra special. He’s been recording metal music for a fictional band that appears in “Studio 666,” meeting a tragic fate just before the Foo Fighters move into the house.

“I was like, you know what I should do, I’m gonna make their lost record,” he said. “So I wrote this crazy metal record and I’m sitting around writing lyrics for it. I mean, what else am I gonna do? I’m starting out on another book, I’m writing this heavy metal record. There’s always something going on and I like it that way. I never let grass grow under these two feet.”