Toronto’s The Holy Gasp return with the video for “Out of the Hands of the Wicked,” an award-winning live action puppet musical drawn from their critically acclaimed 2003 orchestral album …And the Lord Hath Taken Away. Rooted in good ol’ fashioned southern gothic, porch-stompin’ devil music, the track blends old time-y folk Americana, gospel fervor, and theatrical storytelling into something at once darkly comic and deeply human.

The cinematic counterpart for “Out of the Hands of the Wicked” has already racked up an impressive string of accolades on the festival circuit, including Best Music Video at the Regina International, Best Film Music at the Paris Film Art Festival, Audience Choice Award at Tiny Mountains Film Festival (Australia), and a Best Film Score nomination at Blood in the Snow. As Grimoire of Horror predicted, “it is the creativity and the memorability of [Benjamin] Hackman‘s performance as Pa that are going to win this short some awards” – and they were right!

1. Tell us the story of this song, why did you choose to visualize this song specifically? The video itself tells the story of a family of southern dustbowl puppets. After a harrowing journey home from hell, their patriarch, Pa, boasts of his triumph over evil and how he came to lock the devil in his heart. Against the protests of his family, Pa then must return from whence he came to save the ones he loves from the hands of the wicked. But though his family may be safe from evil, how far does any one man get with the devil locked inside his heart? 

Me and the folks in The Holy Gasp had been having a gay ol’ time making videos for other tracks off our album, …And the Lord Hath Taken Away, and had already made two live action videos (In Amsterdam and Havel Havalim) and two animated videos (The Algonquin Bridge and Devil Oh Devil), and just really wanted to work in a medium we hadn’t worked in before and answer the call of that very basic artist desire: to try something new and to be playful and creative. The call-and-response vocals in “Out of the Hands of the Wicked” were already musical theatre-esque and we just thought it’d be fun to work with singing puppets. What more can I say? It all looked fun.

2.What was the inspiration behind this video (visuals, storyline, etc.)? 
Storywise, the script was inspired by southern gothic literature – in particular the works of Flannery O’Connor and Tennessee Williams. Visually, we mainly drew from the Kansas scenes from The Wizard of Oz, John Ford’s film adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, and Roy Stryker’s “Killed Negatives,” which I hope readers will spend some time with if they haven’t already, as they offer a remarkably intimate insight into the hardships of American life in the 1930s, and are some of the most gorgeous documentary portraits I’m aware of in existence. 
As for the design of the puppets themselves… character design is always, in a sense, the invention of a new species. Kristi Ann Holt was given quite a bit of freedom to concoct a new species as she saw fit, within the broad strokes of the visual references she was provided. We knew we wanted to stay away from cuddly fun fur muppets – both because material costs were still, during pre-production, affected by COVID and therefore prohibitively expensive, and because we wanted to explore the full scope of puppetry as a theatre form and medium, and not feel relegated to what-we-think-of-when-we-think-of-puppets. I confess I can’t remember Kristi and I discussing what the puppets would actually look like, only their mechanism. I think it was a process-oriented journey for Kristi in which she discovered the genetic makeup of each puppet as they revealed themselves to her through the process of making. I wish I could remember this part of the process better. I’m gonna call Kristi later and ask her. In the meantime, readers should reach out to her directly and ask her more about it:  https://www.anarkiti.ca/

3.What was the process of making this video?Quite difficult, I should say. Puppets can be vulnerable artifacts with delicate mechanical structures, and compelling puppet performances often require exuberant gestures, highly expressive movements, and a bit of overemphasis in lieu of moving eyebrows, lips and cheeks – all those things that physical actors have at their disposal but which many puppets do not. The consequence of this is a lot of broken puppets, which, in my experience of our one-day shoot, frustratingly caused so many delays in production that it was hard for me to feel like I was able to maintain a flow of creativity, and many scripted and storyboarded moments had to be cut for time and budget. That’s indie filmmaking, though, and in the end, extraordinarily talented puppeteers and editors made a piece of art I’m unquestionably proud of. Contrary to what I said in an interview in Blood in the Snow, I would work with puppets again, but perhaps less of them. I encourage readers to explore what can be accomplished with low budget puppet productions, so that we can all learn more about what is possible for the independent artist working and creating in this beautiful artform.