Antti Haase – Monsterman #DOXAfest

Antti Haase – director – Monsterman

FRED’s Matt Micucci interviews director Anti Haase, whose latest feature documentary Monsterman had its world premiere at the 2015 DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver.

The film talks about Lordi, the Finnish heavy metal band that famously won the 2006 edition of the Eurosong contest. However, we meet them years later, as the meadia has started to forget about them.

We particularly follow the band’s leader who, as Antti Haase tells us, was a childhood acquaintance of the director himself. Antti tells us how the project began, what attracted him to making Monsterman in the first place and why he didn’t want to make a fan film but rather focus on the more universal aspects of the story.

MONSTERMAN: Tomi Petteri Putaansuu, also known as Mr. Lordi, is the lead singer of Finland’s most celebrated, and decorated, metal band, Lordi. After being severely bullied in school, Tomi channeled his pain, and his love for KISS, into an elaborate monster fantasy world. From creepy figurines to horror movies, his artistic vision led him to form Lordi in 1992.

Fast forward to 2006, when Lordi was the first hard rock band to win the Eurovision Song Contest. (They remain the only Finnish artists ever to win the award.) A huge welcome home concert in Helsinki took place, and, for a moment, the band members were national heroes. Lordi even landed a movie deal, starring in the horror film Dark Floors.

But a few years later, when the hype had worn thin, and the screaming crowds were long gone, Tomi, on the advice of Sony Music Entertainment executives, decided to participate in a reality television show called Clash of the Choirs. This is when Lordi took the inevitable turn from unfettered artist to corporate entertainer. In the style of a true Shakespearean tragedy,

Monsterman traverses the rise and fall of the band’s popularity. Rarely taken seriously by true metal heads, and now near-abandoned by the mainstream, a rotating cast of band members and a pressure to get out of debt make it difficult for Lordi to write another new album.

Never free of monster frills and makeup, Tomi continues to receive unconditional love and support from his adoring mother, his best friend, and even his pet boa constrictor. But eventually, he must turn his lyrics on himself and ask: “Would You Love a Monsterman?”