The Day Slipknot Finally Came to Mexico: Knotfest Toluca, December 5, 2015

On December 5, 2015, nine masked men from Iowa walked onto a stage at the Foro Pegaso in Toluca, just outside Mexico City, and faced a crowd that had been waiting for them for sixteen years. The Mexican fans — the Maggots, as Slipknot’s most devoted followers are known — had filled the venue past capacity. Some had traveled days, sleeping in lines outside the gates, to be there. Some had been listening to Slipknot, the 1999 self-titled debut, since they were teenagers, and were now adults. None of them had ever seen the band play in their country before. By the time Corey Taylor walked to the front of the stage in his red gas-mask and screamed the opening lines of “Sarcastrophe,” the entire foro was already moving as one body.

What unfolded over the next 90 minutes was one of the most emotionally charged Slipknot performances ever filmed. It would be released two years later as Day of the Gusano — Spanish for “Day of the Worm,” a nod to the band’s mythology and to the Maggots themselves — directed by Slipknot’s own percussionist M. Shawn Crahan, the masked figure known to the world simply as Clown. And it would become the first concert film of the band’s career to capture not just a performance, but a homecoming for a country they had never been to.

To understand why that night carried the weight it did, you have to understand what Mexico had meant to Slipknot — and what Slipknot had meant to Mexico — across the previous sixteen years.

Slipknot formed in Des Moines, Iowa in 1995, in the kind of cold Midwestern industrial landscape that gave the band its aesthetic. Nine men. Nine masks. Numbered jumpsuits. A sound that combined death metal, industrial, percussion, samples, and the kind of raw aggression that no major-label band had ever tried to release before. Their self-titled 1999 debut on Roadrunner Records sold over two million copies in the United States alone. Iowa in 2001 went platinum. Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses in 2004 made them one of the biggest metal bands on Earth.

By the time All Hope Is Gone arrived in 2008, Slipknot were headlining festivals across Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia. The band had become a global force. They had played hundreds of shows on six continents. But there was one country, repeatedly, that they had never made it to: Mexico.

It wasn’t for lack of demand. Mexican metal fans had been some of the loudest and most loyal Slipknot listeners in the world from the very beginning. The country’s metal scene, which had been growing steadily since the 1990s, had embraced the band with the kind of intensity that made Mexican audiences famous across the genre. Bootleg DVDs of Slipknot concerts circulated through Mexico City record stores. Fan-made T-shirts filled high schools. Online forums in Spanish dissected every album, every mask change, every interview. And every year, the same question went up: when are you finally coming?

In interviews stretching back across the 2000s, the band spoke about Mexico with a mixture of guilt and longing. “This is the one place we’ve always talked about coming and playing,” Corey Taylor would later say in the Day of the Gusano documentary, “and we just never really had the opportunity.” Tour routings kept missing the country. Logistics, scheduling, promoter issues — the reasons piled up. Sixteen years passed.

Then came Knotfest.

Slipknot had launched Knotfest, their own touring festival, in 2012 in the United States. It was a Slipknot-curated event — multiple stages, custom-built carnival attractions, side bands handpicked by Clown and Corey Taylor, and Slipknot themselves headlining. By 2015, Knotfest had become a brand strong enough to take to other countries. And the band’s choice for its first international expansion was the country they had been promising to visit for over a decade and a half.

Knotfest Mexico was scheduled for December 5, 2015, at the Foro Pegaso in Toluca. The bill featured Megadeth, Cradle of Filth, Lamb of God, and a heavy roster of other major metal acts. But the entire weight of the festival, for the Mexican fans who had bought tickets, came down to a single fact: Slipknot were finally coming.

Clown made the decision early that the entire trip would be filmed. He would direct it himself. The film would not just be a concert document — it would tell the story of the band’s arrival in a country they had never set foot in, the days leading up to the show, the meetings with fans, and the show itself. The camera crew was deployed with the band as they landed, watching their reactions to Mexico City for the first time. Clown filmed the band climbing the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán, north of the city, where they took part in the Mesoamerican tradition of making wishes to each of the four cardinal directions. He filmed Jim Root, Jay Weinberg, and himself walking through Mexican markets, talking to vendors, and watching street acrobats in the city’s plazas. He filmed band members meeting Mexican fans whose stories — of using Slipknot’s music to survive depression, abuse, addiction, the loss of family members — left some of the band visibly emotional.

And then he filmed the show.

When Slipknot took the stage at Knotfest Mexico, the energy in the foro was unlike anything the band had described in interviews from any previous concert. Tens of thousands of Mexican fans, many of them weeping openly, welcomed a band they had been waiting most of their adult lives to see. The setlist was a mix of every era of Slipknot’s career — “Sarcastrophe” and “The Heretic Anthem” from Iowa, “Psychosocial” and “The Devil in I” from the newer records, “Wait and Bleed” and “Spit It Out” and “(sic)” from the self-titled debut. Corey Taylor’s command from the stage — the famous “Jump the f–k up” — sent what observers described as a seismic wave through the crowd, with footage from the night showing the entire venue floor moving in unison.

The cameras were placed everywhere. Clown’s plan was to put the viewer not just in the audience but on the stage with the band, close enough to see the masks, close enough to feel the breath behind them. Some shots in the final film are nose-to-nose with Slipknot members in their masks. Others pull back to capture the impossibly vast sea of Mexican fans stretching to the horizon line, their hands in the air, their voices going. The show was filmed in high definition with multiple cameras, with audio captured at studio-quality levels.

In one moment that would become legendary in Slipknot lore, Clown later confirmed that during the concert a child was actually born in one of the venue’s bathrooms. “One of the craziest things to happen during a Slipknot concert,” he called it. The Maggots had not just shown up. They had brought their entire lives.

When Day of the Gusano was released in September 2017, premiering as a one-night-only theatrical event in cinemas around the world before its DVD and Blu-ray release on October 20, it was met with the kind of emotional response that few concert films receive. At a screening in Los Angeles, the audience opened up a mosh pit inside the movie theater. Critics praised the documentary’s portrait of the relationship between a band and a fanbase that had waited sixteen years to be in the same room.

What set Day of the Gusano apart from most concert films was that the music was not the entire point. Clown’s film took its time. It listened to fans. It let Mexican Maggots tell their own stories about how Slipknot’s music had carried them through the hardest moments of their lives. The interviews with band members — about what it meant to finally arrive in a country that had been waiting for them for so long — gave the film an emotional weight that pure live recordings rarely achieve.

The legacy of that night extended far beyond the film. Knotfest Mexico has returned to the country every single year since 2015, becoming one of the most important metal festivals in Latin America. The bond that was forged on December 5, 2015 — between a band from Iowa and a country full of Maggots who had waited sixteen years for them — became the foundation of one of the most enduring relationships in modern metal.

For Slipknot, who had played some of the biggest stadiums and festivals in the world, the night in Toluca remains, by their own account, one of the most overwhelming experiences of their career.

Sometimes the best concerts aren’t the ones in front of the most people. Sometimes they’re the ones in front of the people who needed you the most.