“Out of the Hands of the Wicked”: The Holy Gasp Transform Grief into Surreal, Award-Winning Puppet Cinema

Toronto’s The Holy Gasp return with the video premiere for “Out of the Hands of the Wicked,” an award-winning live action puppet musical drawn from their critically acclaimed 2023 orchestral album …And the Lord Hath Taken Away. Rooted in good ol’ fashioned southern gothic, porch-stompin’ devil music, the track blends old time-y folk Americana, gospel fervor, and theatrical storytelling into something at once darkly comic and deeply human.

The cinematic counterpart for “Out of the Hands of the Wicked” has already racked up an impressive string of accolades on the festival circuit, including Best Music Video at the Regina International, Best Film Music at the Paris Film Art Festival, Audience Choice Award at Tiny Mountains Film Festival (Australia), and a Best Film Score nomination at Blood in the Snow. As Grimoire of Horror predicted, “it is the creativity and the memorability of [Benjamin] Hackman’s performance as Pa that are going to win this short some awards” – and they were right.

Lyrically, the song is part of composer Benjamin Hackman’s deeply personal reckoning with grief, conceived in the wake of losing his father, psychotherapist, best friend, and brother-in-law in quick succession. Seeking to comprehend such stacked tragedy, Hackman turned to the biblical Book of Job, mining its framing narrative to probe the age-old question: why do bad things happen to good people?

“I’ve yet to meet a person incapable of seeing their own suffering in the Book of Job,” Hackman says. “These sorts of complex concurrent tragedies force us to take stock of reality, question what is right and holy, and perhaps ponder, too, whether some cruel puppetmaster is not manipulating our lives for the entertainment of a small group of celestial psychopaths.”

The video itself tells the story of a family of southern dustbowl puppets. After a harrowing journey home from hell, their patriarch, Pa, boasts of his triumph over evil and how he came to lock the devil in his heart. Against the protests of his family, Pa must return from whence he came to save the ones he loves from the hands of the wicked. But though his family may be safe from evil, how far does any one man get with the devil locked inside his heart? The piece captures the razor-thin line between tragedy and comedy, lacing Hackman’s cathartic songwriting with the gallows humour that has become a hallmark of The Holy Gasp.

“…a delightfully subversive and entertaining romp.”

– Mary Ellen Cliff, Festival Director of the Makers’ Film Festival

Founded in 2011 by Toronto-born poet and composer Benjamin Hackman, The Holy Gasp is a multi-genre music, performance, and cinema collective that thrives on theatricality, dark humour, and literary ambition. The band’s output has ranged from cult-favorite debut The Last Generation of Love (2015), to the sprawling 27-person concept album The Love Songs of Oedipus Rex (2018), to Grief (2020), a 9.5-hour choral performance reciting over 17,000 names of the dead.

In recent years, The Holy Gasp has ventured into film and animation, winning awards internationally for works such as The Algonquin Bridge and Devil Oh Devil. Their most recent album, …And the Lord Hath Taken Away (2023), has been hailed as “a masterpiece” (Plethora Network, Absent Sounds) and “a towering example of originality and creative genius” (Viberate).

With “Out of the Hands of the Wicked”, The Holy Gasp continue to blur boundaries between music, theatre, and cinema – transforming personal grief into a work that is by turns harrowing, hilarious, and healing. The collective are currently finalizing a new animated project and composing an original opera, underscoring their ongoing commitment to ambitious, multidisciplinary art.