Monsters really rock in 'Too Much Horror Business'

Rock star money buys stuff. Homes, planes, influence. For Kirk Hammett, the longtime guitarist of Metallica, rock star money also bought the horror-movie childhood he never quite had. Around the mid-1980s, as the band started to make a name for itself, Hammett, who grew up in San Francisco obsessed with monster movies and comic books, began collecting the monster movie paraphernalia that he once pined for but could never afford as a child. Newly flush, he began contacting dealers and developing relationships with collectors around the world. And soon he owned many of the same toys and models and masks that he had once ogled in the back pages of the legendary horror fanzine “Famous Monsters of Filmland.” Then he went further: He bought original movie costumes, props, Halloween masks, ultra-rare posters, even the original art that had graced the covers of “Famous Monsters.”

Christopher Borrelli

December 7, 2012