Ghost’s Tobias Forge selects rock music’s five scariest faces
Like many hard rock and metal bands, Ghost celebrates extreme theatricality expressed through extravagant gothic clothing, accompanied by black metal’s beloved corpse paint. Aside from the frontman himself – Papa Emeritus – played perfectly by the band’s founder, Tobias Forge, Ghost has crafted a culture that emulates the hardcore imagery invented, perfected, and reimagined by metal’s most enduring luminaries.
Growing up, Forge was exposed to all of metal’s various weird and wonderful forms as a result of his brother’s interests. He turned the future star onto some of the biggest names in the genre, including the likes of Metallica, The Rolling Stones, Iron Maiden, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Mötley Crüe, and Faith No More.
As the face of Ghost, Forge performs various iterations of the Papa figure, each with their own unique personality and physical attributes. The current front figure, Papa Emeritus IV, is one of the fan’s most loved, partially due to his more endearing facial features compared to previous singers but also because his personality is, as many would deem, inherently wholesome.
While Forge himself very much continues the typical metal-masked allure under his Papa moniker, he also possesses no delusion when it comes to the menacing aura emitted by masks or theatrical facial paint, citing the many that came before him as some of the scariest faces in music. Alice Cooper, for example, known as the ‘Godfather of Shock Rock’, is someone Forge deems deeply dark on account of his eccentric makeup. He said: “He’s quite a good-looking man, but he had a Hammer Horror face, like Vincent Price or Christopher Lee; a face that could look very, very scary. He effectively uglified his look with that eyeliner; he was punkish, dressed in drag and wasn’t afraid to get dirty and crawl around on the floor”.
Equally, he turns to two of the most iconic faces in rock – the two that most will immediately think of the moment anyone mentions rock face paint – Kiss and Misfits, to demonstrate two massively influential pioneers of facial theatrics. Kiss, in particular, had “a uniformity that was phenomenal,” according to Forge, who continued: “I’ve always been interested in the darker side of life, and I’ve also always been intrigued by androgynous creatures, too, so I found [guitarist] Ace Frehley in his spaceman get-up so cool”.
However, while those three all left a lasting impression on Forge, none of them formed the scariest of rock’s faces in his eyes. In fact, there are two in particular that he says took the whole idea to a new level: Attila and Mayhem. “I remember seeing a black-and-white Xerox photo of Attila in a fanzine,” Forge said, “he’s wearing what I know now to be a wig. It’s absolutely horrendous and sticks out so he looks like a swamp monster. There’s another picture where he’s wearing a crab claw, too. He was intimidating and scary and cool”.
Arguably, black metal’s most notorious band ever, Mayhem, makes his list for obvious reasons – aside from the well-known horror stories, the band took on a physical appearance that reflected everything they were as people. “They just looked like thrashing, mad kids,” Forge muses. “When I discovered black metal as a kid, the proximity both geographically and age-wise to bands like Mayhem made them even more intimidating. You knew that this was the real deal. It felt and looked like dangerous shit.”
Tobias Forge’s five scariest rock faces:
- Alice Cooper
- Misfits
- KISS
- Attila
- Mayhem
