What band got you into metal?

I'm an old fart, but Metallica was still a gateway band for me like so many others here.

My AMAZING progression to Metal (hah!) went something like this (mind you, I'm was an 80s teen ...):

Vinyl my parents had laying around such as Elvis, Oak Ridge Boys, and for some reason they had a KISS Destroyer album...

That led into this: Culture Club > Rockwell > Michael Jackson's Thriller > Billy Idol > Night Ranger > Metallica's Ride The Lightning.

I remember hanging around riding BMX bikes in the street with my buddies and my friend Todd brings out his boom box (oh, those were the days...). He had Ride The Lightning blasting. I didn't know what to make of that except I liked it a lot!
 
That's a really odd chain of music leading to Metallica, but Culture Club is an amazing start...

The first extreme metal album I ever heard was Deicide "Once Upon The Cross". My uncle gave it to be along with a mix CD with Cradle of Filth, Rotting Christ, Hypocrisy, and a Theatre of Tragedy. The Deicide kind of scared me at the time. I was 10 or 11, and I'd never heard Satanic growly shit. I really got into Hypocrisy and Cradle of Filth though. Within a year from there I was rocking out to Deicide, Morbid Angel, Hypocrisy and Darkthrone every chance I had. Man, good times.
 
For me - pop punk > "regular" punk/hardcore > then I found Zeppelin and some old Slovak and Czech heavy metal LP's (Citron, Titanic) when my parents wanted to get rid of turntable, I really liked it, but I disliked the vocals a bit. Someone told me "hey, Slayer is something like these bands but they sing in English" and gave me their CD. Obviously, it was nothing like that LZ and SVK/CZ heavy, but I loved it and I was hooked.
 
Metallica. Started off mostly listening to thrash - Metallica, Megadeth, Pantera, Slayer. In Flames got me into stuff with harsh vocals, which for a while was a barrier for me.
 
Queen of the Damned soundtrack. I was really into movie and video game scores as a kid, and that was the first movie I saw that had an almost metal soundtrack. Plus I was a vampire wannabe Anne Rice fangirl. I took some pretty impressive efforts for a 12 year old in 2002 trying to find the John Davis originals off shady mp3 sites, which led to discovering a lot of bands tagged 'vampire' like Type O Negative and Cradle of Filth. Research of individual songs led to research of bands, and by freshman year of high school I was obsessed with impeccable categorization of my collection via sub-genres.

I had a strange journey, and am glad for forums like this. My parents aren't really music people and going to four different high schools kinda ruined any chance of friends who educated me on the classics.