Ice Nine Kills don’t make music videos so much as short films—violent, darkly funny, and meticulously staged mini-movies that owe as much to VHS-era horror as they do to modern metal. For frontman Spencer Charnas, the goal has always been immersion: take a song and build a world around it, complete with characters, lore, and practical effects that feel ripped from a midnight screening.
That ambition, however, increasingly runs headlong into the reality of YouTube’s “family-friendly” ecosystem—an algorithmic gatekeeper that can throttle reach, bury search results, or slap age restrictions on anything deemed too graphic. “It’s super annoying, to be honest,” Charnas says plainly. “If you turn in something that is too violent, then they put up all these restrictions.”
For a band whose identity is built on horror cinema, that friction is unavoidable. Case in point: Ice Nine Kills’ collaboration with the Terrifier franchise on the song “Work of Art.” “You can’t do anything related to Terrifier and not make it balls to the wall, insanely gory,” Charnas says. “So we just went all out with that, and thankfully it’s become one of our biggest songs and most popular videos.” The gamble paid off—but not without consequences.
“It’s definitely something we have to think about now,” he adds. “YouTube is kind of like the new MPAA.”
That comparison isn’t accidental. Where the Motion Picture Association once dictated what could pass into theaters, YouTube’s guidelines now shape how artists visualize their work—especially in genres that thrive on shock, blood, and transgression. For Ice Nine Kills, the challenge isn’t just censorship; it’s the quiet erosion of discovery. A video can exist online, but without algorithmic blessing, it might as well be locked in a vault.
Still, Charnas doesn’t see restriction as purely negative. In fact, he argues that limits can sharpen creativity. “When you do have restrictions, sometimes it brings more creativity out of you,” he says. He points to the classics—films that made audiences feel brutality without explicitly showing it. “There’s so many great slasher movies where you would have sworn you saw something really violent, but it was all really just camera tricks and the right sound design.”
He cites The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as a prime example. “If you watch the movie carefully, there’s really not much that you see. You could have sworn you saw Leatherface put that lady on a hook, but you don’t really see the hook go in.”
That philosophy has quietly shaped Ice Nine Kills’ recent output: implication over excess, atmosphere over splatter. It’s a tightrope walk—balancing authenticity to horror culture with the realities of a platform that wants to be everything to everyone.
For Charnas, the mission hasn’t changed. Ice Nine Kills will keep making cinematic videos that feel dangerous, even if the danger has to live between the frames. “We’re having fun here,” he says. And in a landscape where creativity is increasingly filtered through policy and pixels, that defiant sense of play may be the most subversive move of all.
Watch the full interview with Spencer Charnas from Ice Nine Kills below!