Last weekend at the Toronto Film Festival, I sat down for a longish interview with Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti, directors of the excellent documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad. We’ll have a lot more from that interview in an upcoming installment of FilmCouch, but below you’ll find a preview. Acrassicauda, the band depicted in the film, are currently living in exile (and in extreme poverty) in Syria, and are in danger of being deported back to Iraq. In this clip, Alvi and Moretti explain what the filmmakers are doing to help Acrassicauda escape their current situation and live out their heavy metal dreams.

I don’t care how tired of Iraq documentaries you think you are–you need to see Heavy Metal in Baghdad. Executive produced by Spike Jonze in conjunction with VBS.tv (the online video venture of VICE Magazine, of which Jonze is creative director), the film tells the story of four years in the life of Acrassicauda, allegedly the first (and probably the only) Iraqi heavy metal band. It’s the first piece of media I’ve seen that potentially has the power to break through “Iraq fatigue” and actually get American kids to care about the decimation of Iraq and the ensuing refugee crisis.

Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti (co-founder of VICE Magazine and head of VICE Films, respectively) had been following the Acrassicauda saga for three years before ever meeting the band members. MTV’s Gideon Yago wrote a story on the band for VICE in 2003, and two years later, the magazine sponsored an Acrassicauda show in war-torn Baghdad. At that point, the situation in Iraq was already so epically bad that between death threats, blackouts and US military red tape, the show almost didn’t happen, and when it did, Alvi and Moretti found themselves locked out in Lebanon. A year later, fully aware that the violence in Baghdad was escalating on a daily basis, the filmmakers embarked on a trip to Iraq, “to see if [the band members] were still alive.” The week they departed, a TIME Magazine cover story on the war ran with the headline, “Life in Hell.”

Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the boys of Acrassicauda were reasonably fun-loving, apolitical kids (in an early scene, the drummer says he changes the channel every time something about the war comes on TV), who were more or less able to eat their metal hearts out–as long as they respected Saddam and steered clear of head-banging, which can be mistaken in the Muslim world for Jewish prayer. But as the war drags on, their real-life circumstances begin to imitate heavy metal mythology: separated from one another by streets full of fire, corpses and (maybe most dangerously) justified paranoia, in five years the band is only able to play six shows. By late 2006, these educated, middle-class twentysomethings are “rock n’ roll refugees,” struggling to hang on to a less-than-zero existence in Syria after literally running for their lives from Baghdad.

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I’ve been following Electroma out of the corner of my eye for awhile. It’s the first feature film written and directed by Guy-Manuel De Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, who are better known as the French techno duo Daft Punk, although there are no Daft Punk compositions on the soundtrack. Bangalter has described Electroma as “experimental and inaccessible; however, it’s a movie that does not require your brain to function.” It screened at Cannes, where it earned possibly the most condescending Variety review I have ever read, wherein Leslie Felperin sniped at the film’s “risible” plot and total lack of dialogue, and lobbed pejorative comparisons to Gus Van Sant’s Gerry and Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny – which are two films that I absolutely adore — although she eventually concedes that one shot of a burning robot (is that a spoiler?) is pretty off the chain.

And as more reviews roll in, the news seems to be getting better and better. This one, from Seattle’s The Stranger (which comes to us via BuzzFeed) says Electroma is “pretty” and “sad” and that, in terms of emotional arc, “is a huge downer, like Brokeback Mountain for robots.” That review is rife with details on the “roughly three things” that form the movie’s plot, so don’t click through if you’re sensitive about that sort of thing.

Unfortunately, it looks like Electroma will be going straight-to-video here in US–right now, it’s scheduled to be released by Vice Records in September. I’m trying to get my hands on a copy, and as soon as I do, you’ll be the first to know.

Ah. Fear.

The sudden sensation of having my gut gripped in a vice and lurched up into my throat as I sit in a dark theater. Slowly unclenching my muscles as the credits roll after spending 90 minutes suppressing the most primal of my instincts: fight or flight. Waiting weeks for the tingly tremors going up my spine every time I go into the basement to subside. Waking up in the middle of the night to two teenagers talking outside on the sidewalk and thinking they’re a duo of escaped convicts in my living room. These are just a few of the side effects I get from watching a 90-minute horror flick.

As a boy, I once overheard some kids at the back of the bus talking about A Nightmare on Elm Street. For months afterward I sang “Jesus Loves Me” every time I made the walk from my bed to the bathroom. Herein lies the real lasting effect of horror. It’s simply not a 90-minute “roller coaster ride,” as so many people might say. Your imagination never conjures up a roller coaster jumping out of the closet with a knife while you’re babysitting. Horror sticks with you like an ice pick in your consciousness. Forever.

Ever notice most horror movies only need 90 minutes to mess you up, while most dramas need over two hours to engage you? There’s something unhealthy about that. To people who say horror fulfills a natural desire to get spooked, I say, “Sure, and Red Bull is a natural source of vitamins.” And how old the movie–or the viewer–is has no bearing on whether or not it’s scary. In The Innocents (1961), when the ghost of the butler suddenly glides into the window behind a little boy standing in a dark greenhouse, I popped. I’m thirty freaking years old and later that night, as I tried to go to sleep, I couldn’t convince my adult brain the butler was not gliding up next to my bed.

For all the squeamish whose horror-loving buddies always talk you into midnight shows, quit cold turkey. It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown is plenty enough for your spook supplement. Want more? Agree to a TBS showing of the original Halloween with all the freaky parts cut out. Dying in a car accident, catching the West Nile virus from a mosquito, finding Mercury behind the furnace, these are all legitimate fears we endure every day without having to lose sleep over whether or not a butler will be floating over me when I open my eyes.

Boycott horror. For the children.