Billy Eye Harper: The Rock ’n’ Roll Frankenstein of Nigel Benjamin and Tracy Sebastian
The story behind the metalsploitation classic ‘Rocktober Blood’ and the career of Mott and London’s late singer, Nigel Benjamin
Playlists featuring the music of Nigel Benjamin appear at the end of this essay.
A Brief History on Italian Giallo Films
Once upon a time there was a film genre out of Italy in the 1970s, one that was quickly knocked off by Spanish cinema: a cycle of horror film known as “Giallo.” Those films were born out the 1940s black and white film noir-inspired, yellow-cover bound paperback pulp novels proliferating Italy’s bookstores in the 1950s and 1960s; pages rife with sex, deception, and mayhem: If the put-upon protagonist didn’t die in the end: they were gaslighted into the nuthouse by a black-gloved supernatural or sexually-confused antagonist.
It was those was those yellow-bound books that inspired the spaghetti-horror, aka pasta-horror, cycle spearheaded by Mario Bava with 1971’s Twitch of the Death Nerve, aka Bay of Blood, and Dario Argento, who became the maestro of Italian Gialli with 1970’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.
Then, jump to the 1980s and watch John Carpenter’s Halloween, Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th, and Brian DePalma’s Dressed to Kill — and compare to Bava’s and Argento’s work: The similarities of Bava’s Twitch of the Death Nerve vs. Friday the 13th, are striking.
The Rise of the ‘New Wave of British Heavy Metal’
As those direct-to-video “boobs and blades” knock offs started flying off the video store shelves, a new form of heavy metal birthed in Britain in the late 1970s — dubbed by Sounds magazine as “The New Wave of British Heavy Metal” (NWoBHM). Featuring the violent, religious mania and bloody lyrics composed by the likes of Venom and Iron Maiden, complete with the requisite Satanic imagery on the album covers, slasher films and heavy metal music were a match made in hell. That unholy union birthed the “Metalsploitation” genre: blood soaked tales rife with metal music showcasing the exploitive titles of Black Roses, Shock ’em Dead, Terror on Tour, Rock ’n’ Roll Nightmare, and Rock ’n’ Roll Zombies.
Metallica’s Lars Ulrich and Geoff Barton of ‘Sounds Magazine’ compiled this NWOBHM 1990 retrospective issued on Caroline and Metal Blade Records.
The Birth of the Faux Metal God Billy Eye Harper
That leads us to the subject of this article: the “career” of an emotionally damaged faux heavy-metal rock god known to the metal-loving world as Billy Eye Harper. The Michael Myers-inspired rocker was the brainchild of screenwriter Beverly Sebastian for what was to become a direct-to-home video Metalsploitation classic: Rocktober Blood — directed by her husband, Ferd Sebastian, and starring their son, Trey Loren, aka Tracy Loren Sebastian.
As with the more renowned John Carpenter and George Romero (Night of the Living Dead, The Crazies, Martin), the Sebastians knew how to squeeze a film’s budget to get the most bang for their bucks. Their earliest films, such as Flash and the Firecat (a Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry-inspired car chase adventure) and Gator Bait (a swampy revenge movie inspired by the Burt Reynolds’ classic Gator), like Carpenter’s and Romero’s, were each produced for less than Carpenter’s Halloween-budget and would consistently earn double-digit millions in drive-in box office returns — profits later compounded by their film’s rebirths on the home video market. As result of Sebastian International Films’ financially successful reputation in producing cost-effective films that garnered substantial returns, Paramount Studios, a major Hollywood studio that wanted to get into the financially-beneficial home-video market, contracted Ferd and Beverly to produce a series of action films in the late eighties featuring lots of bar fights, well-endowed babes, and the requisite motorcycle gangs.
Early promotional trade publication advertisement for ‘Rocktober Blood’ with its in-development title as ‘Trick or Treat.’
The influence of ‘Rocktober Blood’ on ‘Walls of Jericho,’ the debut album released by the German speed metal band Helloween, in November 1985 — a year after the October 12, 1984, theatrical release of the film.
While the glut of video-direct heavy-metal horror films varied in script, acting, and production-value quality, some with greater financial resources than the Sebastians, there is a unique quality to the couple’s vision of Rocktober Blood that the others don’t possess: unlike their celluloid brethren, which grafted the preexisting song catalogs of King Kobra, Lizzy Borden, Michael Angelo Batio, the Names, Thor, Paul Sabu, and Fastway to double for their film’s faux-rock stars, the soundtrack for Rocktober Blood featured all-original tunes that reflected and drove the film’s plot.
Those fan-worshiped original tunes of “Killer on the Loose,” “Rainbow Eyes,” and “I’m Back” were penned by Sorcery (who also starred in the film as Billy’s band “Headmistress”), a metal band that cut their teeth on L.A’s Sunset Strip alongside Mammoth/Wolfgang — the nascent version of Van Halen that opened Sorcery’s earliest shows. Sorcery, with then frontman David Glen Eisley, received their first taste of national recognition with their dual appearances on a pair of Dick Clark-produced Halloween television specials, and honed their acting and soundtrack chops in 1978’s Stunt Rock. (Another notable, unsung L.A band sharing stages with Van Halen and Sorcery, as well as Quiet Riot and Legs Diamond, was Rockicks, signed to R.S.O Records.)
David Glen Eisley, lead vocalist of Sorcery from 1980 to 1983.
Nigel Benjamin of Mott from 1975 to 1976.
By 1979, Benjamin relocated to Los Angeles, joining the already active London as its new lead singer.
Nigel Benjamin Becomes the ‘Voice’ of Billy Eye Harper
Prior to filming and recording the music for Rocktober Blood, in which Eisley would have appeared as the “vocals” of Billy Eye Harper, Eisley joined ex-Angel keyboardist-founder Greg Guiffria’s eponymous band that scored a 1984 MTV video and U.S Top 40 radio hit with “A Call to Your Heart.”
Stepping in for Eisley was a singer who, to make ends meet as he scratched by with his rock ’n’ roll dreams, took up production crew work and acting as his “day job.”
Nigel — in the film as Chris — during a party-club scene.
Like Rick Springfield (for U.S television series), Kim Milford (of the films Song of the Succubus, Laserblast, Corvette Summer), and Lane Caudell (of the films Goodbye, Franklin High and Hanging on a Star) before him, Nigel Benjamin, while waiting for that big hit record, got his first movie job as “Chris” — Billy Eye Harper’s manager and producer.
As with Springfield (who recorded and toured with Australia’s Zoot), Kim Milford (who replaced Rod Stewart in the Jeff Beck Group), and Lane Caudell (several singles-only deals as a solo artist; fronted Player precursors Skyband), Nigel Benjamin’s rock ’n’ roll pedigree was his replacing Ian Hunter in Mott the Hoople from 1975 to 1976 for two albums as the truncated Mott — touring the world with REO Speedwagon, Thin Lizzy, Humble Pie, Kiss, and Judas Priest.
Benjamin’s first bands in the early seventies were the London Southend-based glam-groups Grot and Fancy; after issuing their 1973 single “Starlord,” Fancy transformed into the Billion Dollar Band, and then Royce — the latter out of the ashes of another London-based band, Merlin, that gave birth to England (all three bands centered around Robert Webb and Jamie Moses; Royce’s four-song EP demo with Benjamin was digitally reissued in 2023; playlist featured at the end of this essay).
After Mott’s demise — to transform as British Lions with Ray Major of Mott, then John Fiddler, formerly of Medicine Head, on lead vocals — Benjamin formed English Assassin. Signed to Arista Records, Benjamin recorded a still unreleased album. The one English Assassin “album” that did see a release was Just for the Record — a 1978 solo album by famed British motorcycle and film stuntman Eddie Kidd, an album that English Assassin backed and Benjamin produced.
On his departure from Mott, Benjamin had this to stay at the Mott the Hoople fansite, Just a Buzz:
“One of the last things [Pete] Overend [Watts] ever said to me on the road was, ‘Nigel, I know you’re upset, we’d like to do more of your material. But you don’t understand, this is my last chance.’
“I thought, ‘So we’re not playing music because it’s good, we’re doing it because it’s your last chance to make a few bucks?’ I think about an hour later I picked up a phone and I started making moves.
“I don’t know if he’ll remember it, but the one time I talked to Ian Hunter was at the Hammersmith Odeon, in a pub across the street. I forget who we went to see — [Richie] Blackmore, I think it was — and I came to the conclusion that I had left the band for the same reasons he had.”
After relocating from England to Los Angeles, the city’s nascent hair-metal scene adopted Nigel Benjamin and, beginning in 1979, he fronted the city’s infamous hard-luck hopefuls London (replacing second vocalist Henri Valentine, who replaced Micheal White). Perpetually centered around its founder-guitarist Lizzy Grey (died August 2019) — with the Benjamin-era also featuring bassist Nikki Sixx — London was a band with an ever-evolving roster that, while never scoring a deal of their own (at least not until 1985 with a wholly-new Grey-led roster featuring Nadir D’Priest on lead vocals), served as a rock ’n’ roll boot camp for musicians who joined the more commercially successful bands W.A.S.P, Guns N’ Roses, and Cinderella.
Nikki Sixx, left, with Nigel Benjamin, center, with London.
Then, one day, Nigel Benjamin’s ex-London bandmate, Nikki Sixx — who himself went through the ranks of Circus Circus alongside Blackie Lawless, later of W.A.S.P; Lawless was a one-show vocalist for London — was forming his next band: Mötley Crüe. (After his London stint: Lawless found work as a touring bassist for the on-their-last gasp New York Dolls.)
Benjamin, in interviews over the years, expressed there was no love lost between him and Sixx. So when Sixx asked Nigel to join the “new band” as lead vocalist, Nigel turned him down. Sixx and his new drummer, Tommy Lee, then went to a rock club and saw a cover band, Rock Candy, with a tall lean, blonde-belter named Vince Neil . . . and Mötley Crüe was born . . . and Nigel Benjamin once again turned down Nikki Sixx when asked to give “singing lessons” to Vince Neil. During this period — continuing his connection to Mötley Crüe: Nigel was dating the sister of Tommy Lee’s future wife, actress Heather Locklear; the Locklear sisters and Benjamin shared a rental home.
Nigel Benjamin — in a promotional photo and live on stage — with Nikki Sixx in London.
Nigel Benjamin was then hired for his first film job as “Chris” in Rocktober Blood for a non-singing role. While some web-Intel indicated Benjamin was reluctantly drafted — after being hired as an actor — to become the “vocals” of Billy Eye Harper, what really happened: Benjamin came onto the film as a production assistant, then stepped in to handle the vocals for the Billy Eye Harper character when David Glen Eisley abruptly left the band Sorcery for Giuffria, then when another actor bailed from the film, Benjamin was given his part (as the manager-producer of the film’s fictional band, Headmistress).
According to Benjamin, regardless of the band’s onset bragging about their “career,” Benjamin claims he never heard of Sorcery until meeting them on the film set. And while Sorcery believed Benjamin “joined” the band, Benjamin insists he never joined and wanted no part of the band. It was also on the Rocktober Blood set that Benjamin met Mötley Crüe’s future drummer, Tommy Lee, for the first time — brought to the set by a visiting, Nigel-was-still-on-speaking-terms Nikki Sixx.
Sorcery on the ‘Rocktober Blood’ set in 1983, left to right: Richard “Smokey” Taylor, Lon Cohen, Richie King, and Perry Morris — then without an official vocalist — and Nigel Benjamin serving as their guest/ghost vocalist.
Prior to the departure of David Glen Eisley (his 1982 recordings with the band went unreleased until 2000), the band’s original vocalist was ex-Legs Diamond frontman Greg McGee, aka Magie — who appears with Sorcery in the 1978 film, ‘Stunt Rock,’ the soundtrack served as Sorcery’s debut album. Doug Loch, the masked keyboardist in Stunt Rock, was not a member of the band and hired as an actor.
Richard Taylor himself was an ex-member of a pre-Mercury Records signing Legs Diamond alongside McGee in the mid-1970s — which led to the formation of Sorcery.
Greg McGee — who got his start with the Southern California recording bands the Grim Reepers, a ’60s garage rock outfit, and the proto-metal concern Sudden Death — died in June 2025, via social media posts by Ancient Grease Records. According music journalist Lucy Hall at Twisted Pulp/Screaming Eye Press, Perry Morris passed away in March 2023.
Why Not Hire Benjamin to be Billy Eye Harper on Camera?
So, why didn’t Nigel Benjamin change acting roles and portray Billy Eye Harper in the film — instead of having another actor lip-sync his vocals?
Well, Sebastian International Pictures was a family affair. While their son, Benjamin, worked behind the scenes on their film’s business and technical aspects and took on occasional, small support roles, their younger son, Tracy, always appeared in the family’s films as a co-star or lead actor. Making his early-teens debut in Flash and the Firecat, Tracy had his first leading man role in the Sebastians’s other rock ’n’ roll flick: On the Air Live with Captain Midnight, a film best known to the over-50 crowd from its incessant early-Eighties airings on the USA Cable Network’s weekend-night rock video programming block, Night Flight. (Other oft repeated rock movies on the program were Rocktober Blood, the Ramones’ Rock ’n’ Roll High School, and Ladies and Gentlemen: The Fabulous Stains.)
For many years the fans of Rocktober Blood — those unaware of Nigel Benjamin’s musical past — believed Tracy Sebastian, who starred in the film under his stage name of Trey Loren, sang the vocals and the ersatz-band “Headmistress” was a real band. Exasperating the confusion as to who composed and performed the film’s songs: the film’s scant opening titles sequence and end credits failed to properly credit the musicians.
Rocktober Blood VTG Video Dealer Advertisement.
The names of Sorcery’s guitarists Richard Taylor and Lon Cohen, bassist Richie King and drummer Perry Morris appear — without a reference to their band; the same holds true for the uncredited vocals for Donna Scoggins’s “Lynn Starling” character by Susie Rose Major — which fans believe were done by Scoggins.
In addition: some minor, incidental tunes heard throughout the film in the background of various scenes (appearing in-full on the subsequent vinyl-only soundtrack) were recorded by Susie’s band Facedown — with Susie and her fellow band members of Paul Bennett, Michael Zionch, and ex-Angel (1975 to 1981) drummer, Barry Brandt receiving no credits and, as result of the way the credits read in the film: for many years fans were lead to believe the members of Sorcery wrote and performed the tunes that Facedown contributed to the soundtrack.
During a July 2022 interview with It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine (Internet Archive-back up) to promote the reissue-restoration of the Stunt Rock soundtrack on Rising Easy Records, founding guitarist Richard “Smokey” Taylor spoke about his involvement with Rocktober Blood:
“The filmmakers for ‘Rocktober Blood’ already knew about Sorcery [through the film ‘Stunt Rock’]. [The Sebastians] approached us about doing the movie and we said yes. All of our music in the film was written specifically for that movie. Richie [King] and I agree that ‘I’m Back’ [the film’s set piece] is still one of our favorite Sorcery songs.”
Sorcery’s drummer Perry Morris shared his memories of working on Rocktober Blood in a May 2019 interview with the Overlook Theatre (Internet Archive-back up) — which he previously touched upon in a previous, July 2017 interview with Heavy Makeup (Internet Archive-back up).
“I actually got a call out of the blue [from a friend at Warner Bros.] about a band needed for a horror-rock picture. At first, we were only hired to do half the album for the film, but after meeting with some people involved, they told us what they were looking for and I said, ‘we can do that!’ Unfortunately, our singer [David Glen Eisley] got sick after playing [a gig] in Las Vegas, so the singer of a band called London filled in [Nigel Benjamin]. So, really, the filmmakers hired three members of Sorcery [Perry, Taylor, and bassist Richie King]— and not the full band — even though they put ‘Sorcery’ as the credit for the music.
“The film was much bigger than we expected; it was released in twenty-two theatres throughout Southern California. We wrote all of those songs specifically for the film and every song is ‘about’ the film. ‘I’m Back’ is just about the killer in the movie, Billy Eye. Susie Rose Major [the vocals of the Lynn Starling character] knew the Sabastians. We were asked to write a song for her to sing [written by Richard Taylor with the late Riba Meryl] and that’s how ‘Rainbow Eyes’ happened. [Susie] had her own band, Face Down. [The soundtrack’s songs] are some of Sorcery’s most downloaded songs.”
Theatrical advertisement for the Portland, Oregon, market in May 1985.
The home video version issued by Vestron Video.
During an interview with the online publication Full In Bloom (Internet Archive-back up) Nigel Benjamin had this to say about his Rocktober Blood experience:
“[There’s] nothing to tell. They [Sorcery] asked me to sing the songs for Tracy Sebastian to lip-sync to, [and] then somehow thought that I had joined them! [Then,] when I got asked to star in the movie, [Sorcery] wouldn’t pay me to finish singing because I was being paid to act! I stopped singing, and [Sorcery] lost the gig. I finished the soundtrack with Pat Regan, my then keyboard player [which was the band Eyes]. I didn’t know who Sorcery was. Nobody I knew did either. According to [the guys in Sorcery] they were huge . . . go figure. Some of the guys were cool, though.”
And, again, from Just a Buzz (Internet Archive-back up), Benjamin had this to say about the film:
“If it had been a little bit worse, it would have been a cult classic. It was just not quite bad enough to be bad. I’ll tell you something very strange about it, though. I acted in it, I was a production assistant in it, I sang some of the soundtrack, and I wrote some of the music — but I still did not know the story until I went to the screening. I never saw a script for more than twenty minutes before I was supposed to do it, and any script they gave me the night before changed to a completely different scene the next morning. I went to the movie screening and I had no idea what the movie was about until it was all finished!”
Benjamin’s insights with the publications Full In Bloom and Just a Buzz seem to explain how Susie Rose Major’s Las Vegas-based Facedown came to contribute “Watch Me Rock,” “(Would You Let Me) Touch You,” “You Can’t Kill Rock ’n’ Roll,” and “High School Boys” to the film: Sorcery was fired from the film and the Sebastians needed songs to fill out their proposed — and poorly distributed — film soundtrack.
This is, in fact, true, as Susie Rose Major opined in December 2019 to Lucy Hall at the online publication, Heavy Makeup (Internet Archive-backup):
“Side two of the soundtrack was my old band’s demo, actually. Ben Sebastian was working at Warner Records back then [by way of the success of the Sebastians importing the French-made ‘AC/DC: Let There Be Rock’ concert film] and was interested in shopping us for a deal.
“So, the Sebastians, as a filler, used our demo, which honestly was never supposed to be in the public ear. I was 17 when I wrote those songs and was hoping for a development deal so I could get around professional writers to hone the craft. It’s a bit embarrassing that those songs got out.”
During a 2018 interview with Videoscope Magazine, Beverly Sebastian spoke about the distribution morass that plagued Rocktober Blood for decades.
“Oh, we have people all the time who ask [distributors wanting to buy their film catalog]. When you say ‘sell,’ that is not a word I like. We’ve never ‘sold’ a film, the copyright for it, to anybody. In fact, we just got ‘Rocktober Blood’ back [2016] because Lionsgate [Films] had it. They had bought the rights from Vestron [Video], who was the [home video] distributor [that] went bankrupt. Lionsgate picked it up and they’ve had it for twenty years or whatever they’ve done. We tracked it down and found where our originals were. I said, ‘You do not have the right to that motion picture.’ We got into the legal [matters] with them and they found out they didn’t have the rights. They said, ‘Oh, we bought it.’ And I said, ‘[Vestron] didn’t own it to sell it to you!’”
“Three days later,” Ferd continues, “[Lionsgate] came back and said, ‘You’re right. We don’t own it!’”
Well, I Have it on VHS and BETA . . . So, Where’s the Vinyl LP?
And with that, our analog-celluloid years faded into video snow and vinyl static. Then, years later, the digitally-aged versions of our teenaged selves began to search for the “parts” of our beloved Rock ’n’ Roll Frankenstein online. Where is and how can we find the album or any other music from Trey Loren and his band Headmistress? Back in the pre-Internet epoch of a teenager’s high school years in the eighties, your weekend’s and after-homework-was-done entertainment revolved around your local video store’s 5 Videos-5 Days-5 Bucks cinematic honey hole. Then some video outlets came up with the idea to “rent” out record albums; then vintage vinyl shops began to provide album, as well as video rentals. Sadly, the soundtrack to Rocktober Blood — one of the most sought after movie-inspired albums by the fans of slasher films and metal music, its acquisition rivaled only by the obscure soundtrack to Matt Dillon’s 1978 movie debut, Over the Edge (which featured the first appearances of Cheap Trick, the Ramones, Van Halen, and the Cars) — could never be located for home taping.
So, we young, analog-drunk metal heads did the next best thing: popping VHS-rented copies of Rocktober Blood into the VCR and, with our little G/E portable tape recorders, we taped the films’ majestic theme song of “I’m Back” from the film’s opening recording studio scene and the Giallo-inspired crescendo featuring Billy Eye Harper going out in a blaze of blood ’n’ gory in the film’s closing concert sequence featuring “Killer on the Loose,” “Rainbow Eyes,” and a reprise of “I’m Back.” And what in the Sam Hell is going on . . . deep underneath the backmasked track “kcaB m’I” — with all the “evil kills” chanting?” It’s a “Satanic Panic” dream!
Thanks to our dual cassette decks we dubbed copies for our fellow rockers; those tunes became a permanent fixture in our car’s cassette decks as “Headmistress” ended up on mix tapes alongside our beloved Iron Maiden, Raven, Venom, and Ronnie James Dio-era Black Sabbath. For us metal lovin’-slasher film connoisseurs, Headmistress was the coolest Rock ’n’ Roll Frankenstein to bloody a heavy-metal horror flick. They were a Giallo-soaked lab experiment that rivaled anything rock ’n’ horror luminaries such as Alice Cooper or Dio and Iron Maiden or Venom could cook up in their electronic laboratories.
So, Where are the Members of ‘Headmistress,’ Now?
Riba Meryl — who co-wrote the faux-rock epic “Rainbow Eyes” with Sorcery’s Richard Taylor — became an actress and portrayed “Janis Joplin” in the speculative 1984 rock ’n’ roll conspiracy flick Down on Us (released to video in 1989 as Beyond the Doors as a cash-in on the film’s Jim Morrison connection; the Doors’ label, Elektra Records, reissued the band’s catalog to CD for the first time that same year) and on a 1987 episode of the rock ’n’ roll U.S television series Throb. After her lone, non-Janis character acting role in 1987’s Banzai Runner, Meryl concentrated on television and film session work and contributed the song “Brand New Start” to a 1987 cop-murder drama, The Jigsaw Murders. Sadly, Riba passed away in 2007 at the age of 52 from breast cancer. (Why didn’t Riba Meryl provide the vocals for the song she wrote? We may never know.)
Donna Scoggins, who made her only acting appearance as “Lynn Starling,” went onto a highly successful international modeling career, and then became an equally successful copywriter in corporate advertising.
As for the voice behind Lynn Starling: Susie Rose Major is still rocking today . . . in Las Vegas with her ever-popular Aerosmith tribute act, Rag Dolls. Most recently, Susie provided guest-lead vocals for the cleverly-named Quint (remember 1975’s Jaws?) that recorded a quartet of original tunes for the SyFy Channel’s Sharknado film series. (Quint is led by Robbie Rist, best known to the over-50 crowd as “Cousin Oliver” from the early-Seventies American TV-comedy series The Brady Bunch.)
After his stint with Mott, Nigel Benjamin formed the band Satyr with bassist Chuck Wright (ex-Rough Cutt, Quiet Riot, Greg Guiffria’s House of Lords), then Eyes (Satyr without Wright; along with Bob Steffan, guitars; John Telsco, bass; Pat Reagan, keyboards; Richard Onri, drums — they appear on the Rocktober Blood soundtrack), and then gave up the rock ’n’ roll dream and retired from the music business. Working behind the scenes as a session musician, Benjamin found success in designing and building recording studios; he came out of hiding in 2003 to appear as an expert car builder and TV personality alongside Jesse James (Sandra Bullock’s ex) on Monster Garage, one of U.S television’s earliest reality series. Benjamin came to work for that show’s producer Thom Beers for a decade, behind-the-scenes on the highly-rated, U.S television reality shows Biker Build Off, Deadiest Catch, Ice Road Truckers, Bearing Sea Gold, and Storage Wars. By the early 2000s, Benjamin returned to making music with a trio of digital-only solo albums self-released through the Soundcloud and ReverbNation online platforms.
As for the physical embodiment of our cinematic rock god Billy Eye Harper: Tracy Sebastian and the rest of the Sebastian clan retired from the movie business. While Tracy forged a career in the hospitality industry and managed his own specialty barbeque restaurant on Central Florida’s Gulf Coast, his brother, Benjamin, formed Panama Films to reissue lost drive-in favorites of the 1970s to the home video market; their parents, Ferd and Beverly Sebastian, started The National Greyhound Association, a non-profit organization to save and shelter greyhound racing dogs.
In 2016 an online campaign was initiated to raise funds to film a proposed sequel: Rocktober Blood 2: Billy’s Revenge; those plans crumbled in the midst of a fan-controversial DVD/Blu Ray-disc reissue of Rocktober Blood. The tale of the troubled reissue is chronicled in epic detail by The Analog Archivist, Blu Ray.com, and Horror Digital regarding those $50 Blu-ray and $30 DVD pressings, which also included a bonus compact disc-version of the soundtrack, with the film “restored and remastered from the film’s original 35mm negative” — but were actually VHS and vinyl rips-to-recordable discs.
The members of Sorcery continued their successful careers as session musicians in the television and film industry; inspired by the band’s newly acquired Internet fan base, Sorcery continued to market their music and movie catalog in the digital realm. Today, surviving members, guitarist Richard “Smokey” Taylor and bassist Richie King, continue to remaster, record, release, and market Sorcery music in 2026.
And while Nigel Benjamin claimed to never hearing of Sorcery before their meeting via Rocktober Blood, it turned out that horror film director Eli Roth did — and was a huge fan — courtesy of Quentin Tarantino, who first used the band’s “Mark of the Beast” from Stunt Rock in his 2007 drive-in homage, Grindhouse.
Roth, in turn, used Sorcery’s Stunt Rock-era tunes with Greg McGee, “Talking to the Devil” and “Sacrifice,” in 2015’s Knock Knock and 2018’s Death Wish, respectively, while “Sacrifice,” “Wizard’s Council,” and the previously unreleased instrumental, “Bats are Flying,” appeared in Roth’s 2023 holiday-horror, Thanksgiving. A third, overlooked soundtrack contribution by Sorcery — in addition 1978’s Stunt Rock and 1984’s Rocktober Blood — was the never-released, 1982 studio-single “Born to Rock,” featuring David Glen Eisley on lead vocals, as part of the soundtrack to the 1988 horror film, Twice Dead; for legal reasons lost to time, Sorcery was credited as Wildcats.
Sorcery with Van Halen.
Sorcery with Dick Clark.
Sorcery — featuring Perry Morris, David Glen Eisley, Lon Cohen, Richie King, and Richard “Smokey” Taylor — during their ‘Dick Clark’s Halloween’ television specials in the early 1980s, with the shows’ host, Master Magician Harry Blackstone (center).
Album Banner: Sorcery’s debut album, ‘Stunt Rock,’ issued in 1978 — with Greg McGee on lead vocals; ‘Sorcery 2,’ recorded in 1982 and issued in 2000 — with David Glen Eisley on lead vocals; and ‘Sorcery Live’ — recorded in 1982 and issued in 2000 — with David Glen Eisley on lead vocals.
In 2024, Sorcery released the long-gestating digital-only albums, ‘Sorcery Instrumentals,’ ‘Metallum Fortis,’ and ‘Sinister Love Songs.’ An EP “sequel” to ‘Stunt Rock’, ‘Return of the Wizard’s Council,’ was issued in 2025.
Single Bottom: Sorcery’s vanity-press, 45-rpm debut-single issued in 1982 featuring David Glen Eisley — later issued as a track on ‘Sorcery 2.’
So, Raise a Cold One!
Thanks to the digital realm that hosts the You Tube video-sharing platform and a plethora of vanity sites designed by horror film aficionados, Rocktober Blood never left our metalhead conscious.
Forty-two years later, fans are discovering the film and its music for the very first time and they love it — in a Tommy Wiseau’s The Room fandom style. Hey, it’s a heavy-metal horror film thing our parents just don’t understand. Nor should they ever understand. Let ’em watch their Billy Haley and the Comets in Don’t Knock the Rock and Joey Dee and the Starlighters doing the “Peppermint Twist” in Let’s Twist. We’ll keep flashin’ our Ronnie James Dio-horns for Billy Eye!
So, raise ye steins of ale to Nigel Benjamin and Tracy Sebastian and the guys from Sorcery. Cheers to Riba Meryl, Susie Rose Major, and Donna Scoggins. You may not have become the rock stars or famous actors that you wanted to become; you didn’t receive the recognition or money you deserved for your hard work and dedication to your respective crafts.
But know this: You’re the “parts” of our beloved Rock ’n’ Roll Frankenstein — Billy Eye Harper and Headmistress. You rocked us and gifted us with one of our most cherished teenaged memories from the bouncy ’n’ bloody heavy metal ’80s. We still remember you, talk about you, watch you, and listen to you. And, believe it or not, fans of music and film obscurities are still — to this very day as this writer enters these words into a word processing program — discovering you for the first time and feeling the same joy this writer experienced all those years ago as a wee-teen rocker haunting video and vintage vinyl stores.
As Billy Eye Harper — by way of Tracy Sebastian, Nigel Benjamin, and Sorcery — opined in the lyrics of “I’m Back”: there is always hell to pay . . . in this business we call “rock ’n’ roll.”
And we’re glad you paid that hell for us lovers of Metalsploitation films.
END
All reference-sources for this essay are linked within the text above — and will launch in a new Internet-browser tab for additional reading. All Sorcery images courtesy of either Perry Morris Sorcery Facebook or Richard Taylor Sorcery Facebook pages.
Learn more about Ferd and Beverly Sebastian’s Career
As well as more insights to the world of Giallo Cinema . . .
And the Media-Obsessed ‘Satanic Panic’ era of the 1980s
The Music of ‘Rocktober Blood’ and Sorcery
A curated, seven-track playlist of the film ‘Rocktober Blood’ featuring the official trailer, the open credits studio sequence of “I’m Back,” the end credits concert sequence featuring “Killer on the Loose,” “Rainbow Eyes,” and “I’m Back,” the creepy backmasked song “kcaB m’I” / “Help Me,” along with the film’s complete soundtrack — featuring Sorcery on “Side A” and Susie Rose Major’s Facedown and Nigel Benjamin’s Eyes on “Side B.”
A curated playlist of Sorcery’s singles featured on film soundtracks, live appearances — both in concert and on television — during their David Glen Eisley-era, along with all their scenes from ‘Stunt Rock’ during the Greg McGee-era, and the ending concert sequence from ‘Rocktober Blood’ featuring the guest-vocals of Nigel Benjamin. Pre-Sorcery tracks by Greg McGee’s earlier bands are also featured.
The music from both films are available on the Bandcamp online record store platform. Sorcery’s entire, digitally remastered catalog is also available on Spotify and You Tube to enjoy.
The Music of Susie Rose Major
A curated playlist featuring Susie Rose guest-fronting Sorcery, as well as with her Pat Benatar-to-Joan Jett-flavored Facedown — both featured in ‘Rocktober Blood’ — guest-fronting Quint in the ‘Sharknado’ films, her Aerosmith tribute group Ragdolls, and various solo endeavors.
Susie’s music is also available on Soundcloud, featuring tracks from her post-Facedown concerns Cry Wolf and Radio Graffiti.
The Italian version as ‘Seven Notes of Terror,’ the U.S/English version as ‘Rocktober Blood,’ and the Belgium-version as ‘Rockill’ issued for the German market place.
On the above video boxes, notice the Italian Giallo-inferred title of ‘7 note di Terrore/Seven Notes of Terror’ — and its similarity to the 1970s Giallo titles of ‘4 mosche di velluto grigio/Four Files on Grey Velvet’; ‘Il gatto a nove code/The Cat o’ Nine Tails’; ‘Sette note in nero/Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes’; ‘La dama rossa uccide sette volte/The Red Queen Kills Seven Times’; ‘Sette orchidee macchiate di rosso/Seven Blood-Stained Notes’; ‘La morte negli occhi del gatto/Seven Death’s in the Cat’s Eye’.
Alternate Titles in Foreign Markets
Argentina — Concierto de sangre — Concert of blood
Belgium — Rockill
Brazil — Concerto d o Horror — Horror Concert
Italy — 7 note di Terrore — Seven Notes of Terror
Mexico — El fantasma del rock — The Ghost of Rock
Soviet Union/Russian — Семь ночей ужаса — Seven Nights of Horror
Spain (video) — Terror En El Concierto — Terror in the Concert
Spain (theatrical) — Concierto de sangre — Concert of Blood
Known U.S Theatrical Releases
According to a search of the publication repository, Newspapers.com, the following theatrical release dates for Rocktober Blood are noted as occurring in the following markets:
Macon, Georgia (September 1984)
Anniston, Alabama (October 1984)
Birmingham, Alabama (October 1984)
Knoxville, Tennessee (October 1984)
Nashville, Tennessee (October 1984)
Rocky Mount, North Carolina (November through December 1984)
Salem, Oregon (May 1985) — Portland market
Corvallis, Oregon (May 1985) — Portland market
The Tennessee publications The Knoxville News-Sentinel of Knoxville, and The Tennessean of Nashville, both ran theatrical advertisements for the film on October 19, 1984.
While the film was exhibited across Southern California, as per Perry Morris, no advertisement at the time of this writing were found.
More on the Lost Musicians Discussed . . .
The Music of Nigel Benjamin
A twenty-song playlist featuring Nigel’s solo work, guesting with Sorcery on the ‘Rocktober Blood’ soundtrack, fronting the British bands Fancy, Royce, and Mott, the Los Angeles-based London with Nikki Sixx, and his early ’80s new-wave concern, Eyes, which reissued their four-song EP in 2025 — first issued in 1982. The EP’s lead track, “Living for the Beat,” was featured during the 2025 second season of the Paramount+ television series, ‘School Spirits.’
No digital uploads by Nigel’s bands English Assassin and Satyr are available. The music of Eyes is equally available on Spotify.
His solo digital albums ‘Buffalo,’ ‘In the Absence of God,’ and ‘Relentless Hammer of Dreams’ were pulled from release shortly after his July 2019 death; his likeminded ReverbNation hosting those works is also defunct.
Nigel Benjamin’s official Soundcloud portal with two rare, non-You Tube, live Mott-era songs. Check out that Doors cover!
The full ‘Gooseberry Demo’ sessions from the spring of 1975 featuring Nigel Benjamin auditions with the newly-minted, Mott.
Nigel’s first full album with Mott — ‘Drive On’ — issued in September 1975.
Nigel’s second and final album with Mott — ‘Shouting and Pointing’ — issued in June 1976.
Below are the spring 1975, four-song Royce demos with Nigel — digitally issued to Bandcamp in January 2023.
