Existing comment:
What Is Heavy Metal Parking Lot?
"This unforgettable documentary is a true cult film."
-- Boston Herald, 10-18-00
When aspiring filmmakers Jeff Krulik (UMD '83) and John Heyn descended upon the Capital Centre parking lot on May 31, 1986, they had little more in mind than to document a fan scene at full peak. The result was Heavy Metal Parking Lot, a 16-minute film featuring local heavy metal fans expressing their enthusiasm for Judas Priest before the band performed in concert that night. Yet the film, which lacks a narrative, also seems to capture something at once obvious and elusive, a collective portrait clear in its depiction but somehow impossible to define. The film's subsequent 30-year journey into popular culture -- which started from bootleg copies passed among fans and video collectors, and grew into multi-generation dubs on an underground tape-trading network -- had earned it an international fan base all its own. Filmmakers, musicians, actors, artists, music fans and scholars have embraced it as both an iconic representation of a unique subculture and a valuable primary source worthy of anthropological study. Meanwhile, the question, "What is Heavy Metal Parking Lot?" remains unanswerable, and that may be precisely why its legacy endures. |