Lou DiBella speaks on producing the House of Grief video:

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"I don’t know if produced is the right word. That makes me sound important. Basically, I just “cut and pasted” bits and pieces of art and footage that I could find to make sense of the song visually, how I see it. Not downplaying the process. It was tedious and mentally draining. It took months to peel through thousands of images until I was satisfied with each one. I enjoyed the challenge of putting it together AND absolutely hated it a the same time. And as much as I hated it, I never wanted it to end, cause then what do I do next? 

In some way, it's sort of a positive and therapeutic process. I wanted to piece together this story with random yet significant clips that follow the dark content of the lyrics and the music. In a way so that it would reflect the feelings and emotions that come with depression and mental health, which is what the song is really about. That and how to hold yourself up mentally, physically and emotionally during those agonizing moments. Other people might interpret the song / video differently and I think that’s cool. The viewer’s own imagination in regards to what the song and video means to them is what’s most important. 

 

As positive as I try to remain, I’ve been struggling with depression and mental health issues for greater part of my life. When we all went into lockdown this past year and the chaos began to rise, my mental health began to decline. I fought through it, but It was just a fucked up WEIRD time that I couldn’t fully grasp. Really, it was like nothing I or WE had ever been through before in our lives. If that wasn’t enough, my cancer resurfaced amongst all of this. It was all weighing heavy and triggered a lot of dark emotions that were beginning to take tolI. I needed a way out. 

 

Many people don’t understand depression and that makes it not only hard to talk about, but dangerous to one's self. Arrogant fools use terms like “get over it” or “how bad can it be” etc. Depression doesn’t just go away whenever you will it to. It's the same level of emotional pain as any cancer that I’ve had to deal with, if not worse. It's not a person just being “dramatic” or “looking for attention”. It’s fucking real and it fucking hurts. It’s an unimaginable, uncontrollably painful disease that is impossible to describe unless you’ve gone through it. Nobody wants to feel that way. It’s not something they asked for. So many deaths and tragic suicides may have been prevented if this country took this illness seriously. Something more needs to be done. 

 

Unlike so many struggling, I was lucky to have some sort of outlet to help me focus on something outside of my depression and health issues. Video directors were scarce. Budget was tight. So we took it back to the early days of when we had to use whatever we had around us to create with.

 

In the early days of Subzero, Larry and I would promote the band by making fliers with magazine and news clippings cut and pasted together. The fliers had underlying meanings and messages with twisted, often violent imagery. We would go out in the dead of night and paste hundreds of them all over the city. Every now and then we’d get caught and spend the night in jail for vandalism. Not much different than the whole graffiti bomber mentality/lifestyle, which I was also involved in. We were, in a way, getting our ups. And with that gritty, guerilla style promoting, more people started coming around showing interest cus they could relate. 

 

For a brief time back then, we would have up to a dozen TV sets stacked behind us on stage. All playing different clips of old, obscure footage that we would dig up and copy from VCR to VCR for days so that they would match up with the songs on stage. It was a grueling process, but we had a lot of drive and determination to get it done. 

 

This “House of Grief” video isn’t much different in that way. It’s actually the same concept. Visually, it was important to have it transfer an emotionally strong message even if the music wasn’t playing behind it. Just like the TV’s or those flyers pasted up all over the city. They revealed an underlying message that reflected what was going on around us at the time. 

 

From a different perspective, it’s also a deep nod to those nostalgic, DIY punk/industrial/metal/hardcore/ videos we grew up watching on VCR compilations that we would order by mail and trade amongst other kids in the scene. Or videos from Night Flight, cable access shows, 120 Minutes or whatever we could find on TV in the 80’s and early 90’s. They were put together very creatively with what they had to work with, all the while leaving a sense of mystique to the band. To us, it was way cooler than the flashy, big budget videos that would mainly focus on the band's image and not the message. 

 

Today, we have the choice to have this video redone with a legit crew and a professional director, but I’d rather not. To me, personally…the dark, morbid imagery and emotions within this video were compiled while I was very much living in them. I don’t think there’s a more honest way to have captured that misery other than during the moments that I existed in it. 

Some of the most creative ideas and concepts come out of the darkest places in your mind. I don’t think anyone could really TRULY understand or appreciate the absolute very best in even the smallest things unless you’ve been through the worst of things. There’s always some kind of beauty within the sorrow. You just have to open up your mind to see it."