By The Landlord
“There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.” – Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
“The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;
We find delight in the most loathsome things;
Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,
And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.” – Charles Baudelaire
“Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer--both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams.” – Bram Stoker, Dracula
“No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.” – H. P. Lovecraft, Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales
“Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in.” – Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
“Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.” – Edgar Allan Poe
“We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.” – Stephen King
"We all go a little mad sometimes." – Norman Bates, Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock
"The horror, the horror." The twisted recesses of human imagination moulded into artistic form? A willing suspension of disbelief about viscerally rendered violence, madness and death? A stylised presentation of architecture, dress, makeup and lifestyle? As a genre, a trend, a gothic nod, it's all of the above. But when Kurtz utters these dying words at the end of Joseph Conrad's 1899 novel Heart of Darkness, a trip down the Belgian Congo into the violence and exploitation of colonial rule, he may be a fictionalised character, just as his equivalent in film form in Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War-based Apocalypse Now via a mumbling Marlon Brando, he's glimpsing, in his last, twitching corpse mind's eye, a truly horrible reality, images of the plummeting, dark degradations of actual human action, total terror and disgust. True horror.
So this week's theme, with a bony hand tapping at the window of forthcoming Halloween, might bring up songs that include people wearing black, heavily gelled back-combed hair and lots of eye-shadow, and various creatures of the night, but it's not so much a genre topic, nor is it just a lyric one, but seeks as much as anything songs that send shivers up the spine, that are frightening and horrible in all sorts of ways. They might also be amusing, and stylish, and pertain to a whole spectrum of horror too, but they need to have a creepy aspect that might mess with your mind or make your skin crawl.
Bela Lugosi
Naturally many other parallel topics have been summoned from the grave and marked within our wonderful, old, dusty ledger, from songs about halloween to death, fear, zombies, and even a long time ago a short list of scary songs, but there's a whole lot more to discover and share, and the aim this week, hopefully will be to compile a whole range of timbres, styles, tones, stories and images that expose a whole gaping wound of musical wonders to capture horror in its many forms.
On the fictional and stylised side of things, the first port of call might well be those songwriters and bands that are directly influenced, in their entire identity by horror, obsessed by fiction writers, film forms and more as inspiration for their own work and identity as well as the deeper roots of the gothic, that style of medieval art that developed in Northern France out of Romanesque art in the 12th century AD, as well its concurrent architectural form of spires, towers, pinnacles, arches, gables, ribbed vaults and gargoyles that spread across Europe and into Britain.
Brasov Black Church, Romania
Here's Mervyn Peake describing the famous castle in his 1950 novel, showing how the very building inspires particular emotions:
"Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracts. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet beats away from a choked river. Deep in a fist of stone a doll's hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the frozen palm. A shadow shifts its length. A spider stirs... And darkness winds between the characters. Gormenghast.”
So on a purely stylistic level, the obvious artist starting points might be the likes of Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, the Cure, Joy Division, The Damned, early Adam & The Ants, UK Decay, Virgin Prunes, Killing Joke, The Birthday Party and many others who among other places frequented the Batcave club in Soho. Perhaps one of their biggest influences, pushing Dracula aside, was Theda Bara, the 1910s Hollywood femme fatale known for her dark eyeshadow.
Theda Bara, the original goth vamp
But this topic is not about goth bands or the genre, but the songs themselves.
Fiction that may play a part in influencing horror song came from at a century or two before, such as Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, Washington Irving's Headless Horseman 1820 story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow as well as the famous works of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Charles Baudelaire with his Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil), Emily Brontë, all the way up to Mervyn Peake and Stephen King and all the films they inspired.
So where might the horror aspect of these writers appear in song? And just as, if not even potent, what about those inspired by the horror film genre itself? There are many of course that define horror as a physical as well as a psychological state, and this genre began in the 1890s, possibly with Georges Méliès and his short Le Manoir du Diable (1896), also known as The Haunted Castle or The House of the Devil. Many more followed of course, but while early horror is often clunky and hilariously bad, from the earlier period, it's hard to beat Nosferatu (Symphonie des Grauens), that 1922 silent German Expressionist horror film directed by F. W. Murnau and starring Max Schreck as Count Orlok, who has such a physically disturbing presence, especially when you see his face out of that famous shadow, it's horrifically disturbing, and his slow-moving, but unstoppable presence perhaps inspired the monster in Pan’s Labyrinth, a fantasy film set during the horror’s of the Spanish civil war.
Pan’s Labyrinth
So your song suggestions, when referencing horror films, might include anything from the early Frankenstein and Dracula films to Hitchcock, to those massive franchises - Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Hellraiser, as well as those outstanding one offs such as Rosemary's Baby, Don't Look Now, The Exorcist, Pan’s Labyrinth, and perhaps more potently, for me at least that most frightening of all, especially when trying to write, is The Shining. I'm not repeating myself am I?
While the subject matter horror might all be familiar territory, and some of these might have come up before, remember it's the scary and creepy aspect that's important with anything to with the idea of horror from ghosts to vampires, werewolves, witches, cults, black magic demons, and demonic possession, Satanism, monsters, mummies, extraterrestrials, zombies, dystopian or apocalyptic worlds, disturbed children, torture, cannibalism, murder, natural forces, evil clowns, psychopaths and serial killers. Of course these may overlap with past topics, but if they are scary, creepy and horror-infused, they all count.
So this might also summon up many other artists inspired by a sense of horror in film or any other form or experience. Kate Bush is hugely influenced by Stanley Kubrick for example, The Pixies were inspired by a famously disturbing surrealist film from Luis Buñuel, Bob Dylan and David Byrne are both big fans of Hitchcock, and other artists stunned into inspiration from a film experience include Blue Oyster Cult, Deep Purple, Vampire Weekend, John Fogerty with Creedance Clearwater Revival and The Ramones.
It’s alive!
But horror of course comes in many forms beyond the fictionalised and filtered forms of fiction and film. Might your songs expose these too? As Stephen King writes in his novel - It, “Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters."
Stephen's also decided to visit our Bar. Why? Because it's a haven from the terrors of the night, his imagination and solitude. “Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym," he tells us.
He's joined by others eager to finish off this aim to define horror too, but how does he put it? "The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...”
“Well,” taking off his own Halloween clown headdress, Robert Bloch arrives and sits down and announces. “Horror is the removal of masks."
In Nemesis, meanwhile H.P. Lovecraft opines a greater all-consuming horror:
“I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge, or lustre, or name.”
But he also tells us: "from even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.”
So to end on a lighter note, let's enjoy a lighter side of horror, first from Young Frankenstein, and then in the Simpsons' rendition of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven. Genius.
So then, it's time to turn the true horrors over to you, dear readers, to summon music from your nightmares and creepy tunes covered in spiders' webs from your collections. Conducting this atmospheric orchestra, I'm delighted to welcome back this week's guest guru, our own Queen of the Night, the excellent AmyLee! Place your song suggestions in comments below for 'dead'line on Monday at 11pm UK time, for playlists published next week. Shudder.
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