Ghost’s Tobias Forge Revives Repugnant for ‘V/H/S/Mixtape’

A Swedish death metal band that broke up in 2004 has a new recording out, and the place to find it is a horror anthology. Repugnant, the group Tobias Forge ran before he built Ghost, re-cut its song “Premature Burial” for V/H/S/Mixtape, now streaming on Shudder.

Forge started Repugnant in 1998 and shut it down in 2004 after a run of singles and EPs. The posthumous Epitome of Darkness arrived in 2006. He reassembled the band briefly in the early 2010s, then set it aside again for Ghost, which is where most of the people now hearing about Repugnant know him from.

Forge sang the 2004 original. He does not sing this one. Erik Danielsson of Watain takes the vocal, backed by Gustaf Lindström on bass, Gottfrid Åhman on guitar and Thomas Daun on drums, all three of them out of earlier Repugnant lineups. Lindström also played in an early version of Ghost. Forge is credited as the video’s director, and it is his first credit behind a camera.

A ‘V/H/S’ Built Around Music

V/H/S/Mixtape premiered at Beyond Fest before reaching Shudder on October 9, and it hangs its found footage on music. Ernest Dickerson directs “The Music of Mr. Sze”, about a student chasing down a teacher, and Flying Lotus takes the other music video interludes. GWAR hosts the wraparound, staged as an MTV-style show broadcast from hell. The finished film runs 98 minutes.

Twenty years after the band’s last release, the new version of “Premature Burial” is playing inside a horror movie on Shudder, which is a stranger route back than most reunions take.