The Hellfire Club has a new member. Bringing the “Master of Puppets” revival full circle, Metallica frontman James Hetfield used Halloween 2022 to pay homage to the guitar-shredding Stranger Things character Eddie Munson, who performed the band’s 1986 single during the show’s epic two-and-a-half-hour season four finale.
“Eddie Munson says Happy Halloween,” the band captioned the photo of Hetfield sporting the character’s signature look: black jeans, denim jacket, an unruly head of hair, and a Hellfire Club t-shirt, the official uniform of Eddie’s Dungeons & Dragons society.
More from Rolling Stone
“Master of Puppets” received similar treatment to Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” as part of a wave of Stranger Things-fueled musical resurgences. Joseph Quinn, who plays Eddie, shared that he spent two years mastering the song on guitar in order to be able to replicate it on the show.
“The way The Duffer Brothers have incorporated music into Stranger Things has always been next level, so we were beyond psyched for them to not only include ‘Master of Puppets’ in the show, but to have such a pivotal scene built around it,” Metallica shared in a statement earlier this year.
They added: “We were all stoked to see the final result and when we did we were totally blown away… it’s so extremely well done, so much so, that some folks were able to guess the song just by seeing a few seconds of Joseph Quinn’s hands in the trailer!! How crazy cool is that?”
Eddie delivered the thrilling performance while standing on top of a roof in the Upside Down, expertly shredding the song on his electric guitar. When the performance wrapped and the mission – mainly to distract a swarm of villainous bats linked to their evil ringleader Vecna – proved to be a success, Eddie celebrated with Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), who declared: “Dude. Most. Metal. EVER.”
Best of Rolling Stone
