Portrait Daniel Hofmann

Yes, otherwise I would hardly make such a film 🙂 It’s always difficult to talk about favorite bands. I always prefered the German sound like Sodom, Kreator, Deathrow and Violent Force. From America, I particularly like Nuclear Assault, Toxic Holocaust, Slayer and Megadeth. But there are also great things among the new young and wild bands, like Traitor, Pripjat, Ravager or Antipeewee. There is a lot of potential here and somehow that changes over and over again.

“For me, thrash metal means being able to escape from everyday life and simply forgetting everything in front of the stage and letting the hell out with the best people in the world” It just bangs, has crunchy riffs, heavy drums and that unmistakable aggression Maybe that was exactly what fascinated me so much at the age of 10. When I had my first contact with this kind of music, it was already the mid-nineties. At that time I was not aware that the genre was in a deep crisis and so I, like many others at that time, followed the songs of the bands on TV and radio. I found it totally boring at first and oriented myself more towards the up-and-coming Black Metal. After that I discovered the albums of the 80s more and more retrospectively and got a different perspective on the genre. The record covers with the many colorful social themes in combination with the heaviness and speed of the music made me want more. So I gradually got more albums and discovered the new works by Sodom, Kreator and Destruction at the turn of the millennium. From that moment on, thrash metal played a central role in my life.

Over the years I attended numerous concerts and festivals, created new structures through my own metal festival in Sauerland, my own metal club and my own metal magazine. That in turn smoothed my way into the scene. During this time, thrash metal also played an accompanying role for me and at some point I asked myself why, after 35 years of music history, there is still no documentation about this extraordinary music genre. So I started researching and quickly noticed that there were various documentaries on the international scene, but mostly based on specific bands and in which the influence of the German thrash metal scene was only mentioned in passing.
At some point the idea came up to make a short film about it, initially it should deal with Tankard, Destruction, Sodom and Kreator and have a length of 20-30 minutes. The conditions were good: I’ve been behind the camera since I was a child, if it was my birthday back then I was shooting, at that time it was image and short films for companies. But I wanted to do something different – away from 0815 thinking – develop a story that the world might have been waiting for. So in early 2019 I started collecting ideas for a potential documentary about thrash metal in Germany. At the beginning of June, during a private trip, I stopped at a holiday apartment by the sea in Cuxhaven. I actually only wanted to stay here for one night, which turned out to be three whole nights and a creative trip to Heligoland. I then went back to the Sauerland with a first rough script, which I developed further over the coming months.

It’s like a big family and it’s great fun to get to know the people around you. Through the movie I got to know so many incredibly nice people and I notice everywhere that they all stayed down to earth. That is a speciality of LIVE concerts in the scene, on the one hand there are the most intense concerts of people flying around and fat circle and mosh pits that you only have in Thrash Metal and on the other hand you have this unbelievably familiar character. Everyone helps each other, the next generation is supported and there is a sense of cohesion that is hardly anywhere else in the world. That is something very special and clearly pointed out in the movie.

The film is intended to take the audience on a journey through time of the German Thrash Metal, in 3 chapters. In the last few years I had alook at a lot of documentaries and always asked myself why they only shed light on a certain time period and never show the entire development. Most times these documentaries have a focus on 2 or 3 bands. There are so many more aspects to find inside the scene and, from my point of view, it doesn’t make sense to focus only on the “big ones” in a movie. Total Thrash does not only focus on bands. The movie also shows the fan scene and the culture behind it, goes into important places of worship and gives an outlook on the international scene. The film should inspire a non-Thrash Metal fan too and pave the first steps into this world. It’s going to be a project of mine as a fan for all the fans out there.