STRAIGHT OUTTA HADDONFIELD
Culture journalist Thomas Hobbs on the ties that bind rap and horror
By guest writer THOMAS HOBBS
“Sasquatch, Godzilla, King Kong, Lochness,
Goblin, ghoul, a zombie with no conscience
Question: What do these things all have in common?
Everybody knows I'm a motherfuckin' monster”
- Jay-Z, Monster
The pioneering 1980 single “Adventures of Super Rhyme” by Jimmy Spicer contains a cartoonish verse in which Count Dracula turns into a bat and flies off to Brooklyn. “He didn't like blood, not this vampire,” Spicer raps, “the disco beat was his desire.”
Another early hip hop innovator, Lovebug Starksi, famously rapped amid the lumbering funk of 1986’s “Amityville (The House On The Hill)'' about making love to Frankenstein’s bride.
These court jester-like emcees shared an affinity for the Universal Studio monsters of the 1930s, envisioning an alternate universe where infamous ghouls weren’t chased out of town by the locals with pitchforks and fire, but were instead embraced within the sanctuary of an inner city block party.
Thematically, hip hop and horror have been linked from the get-go. Both have historically been treated like industry outsiders by critics, despite consistently revitalizing music and film as art forms. It’s no wonder that time and time again rappers have taken on the personas of Hollywood bogeymen, with many emphasizing their ostracization from society.
“Horrorcore” — a conceptual style of rap centered around emcees pretending to be larger-than-life serial killers — truly cemented the ties between rap and horror movies in the 1990s. The Geto Boys’ 1991 deep cut “Chuckie” features Bushwick Bill using his microphone a lot like a shovel as he digs into his own twisted yet surprisingly deep affinity with Hollywood’s most murderous doll. Bill, who died in 2019, was born with dwarfism, leading school bullies to dub him “Chucky.” He reclaimed a playground taunt and turned it into both a shield and dagger. Over three minutes and 48 seconds he boasts about throwing frog legs into cake mix and explains that downing gin inspires an appetite for dog brains, all while the cackling, B-movie synth line encircles the listener like they’ve just fallen into a lake filled with pissed-off piranhas.
Bill’s blood-thirsty punchlines were a hint of anthems to come. Across a decade widely known as the “golden era” of hip hop albums, the RZA-led Gravediggaz rapped about existentialism and suicide over beats more inspired by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre score than the Wu-Tang Clan; Kool Keith transformed into the vengeful sadist Dr. Octagon; DMX sung a twisted lullaby about murdering children that contained knowing winks to Freddy Krueger; 2Pac and Biggie compared themselves to the Candyman and Alfred Hitchcock; and Brother Lynch Hung — the self-proclaimed Black Hannibal Lector — told dissenters to “rest in piss.”
By embracing twisted horror imagery, these rappers arguably put out career-best material and cemented their roles as industry pariahs, while also injecting the sometimes gaudy and overly serious 1990s with a surrealist creative edge.
As the new millennium dawned, horror and rap solidified this bloody partnership, even if the pace somewhat slowed. Unless you dressed like a Juggalo or worshiped Tech n9ne and Necro, horrorcore rap just wasn’t anywhere near as zeitgeisty in the early 2000s as it had been in the ‘90s. Eminem, then, deserves enormous credit for reviving horrorcore ideals in mainstream pop culture via his decision to stand on huge stages rocking the rampaging Jason Vorhees’ signature hockey mask and unleashing horrifying rhymes about throwing his wife’s corpse into the Atlantic ocean. Remarkably, these were both the central tenets of Diamond-selling albums.
Em’s fascination with horror arguably peaked with 2009’s Grammy-winning comeback album, Relapse, where his raps — which include a fantasy about lynching Britney Spears (“Same Song and Dance”) and another (“Stay Wide Awake”) about opening an umbrella up inside of a, well, you can find out that one for yourself — unravel with a bizarre elegance akin to a half-naked Buffalo Bill dancing in his basement. On Relapse, the biggest selling rapper of all time treated the Dr. Dre beats at his disposal less like head-nodders and more like visceral special effects supplied by gore master Tom Savini; Em dares and dares you to take his Slim Shady persona seriously. Crucially, Relapse proved that rap and horror could still be a potent mix.
Aside from the likes of clipping, Sadistik, Fatboi Sharif, and Backxwash, a more recent rap act with a notable love for transgressive horror references has been Drakeo the Ruler. The late LA rapper’s dry, cryptic vocal cadence is perhaps better suited to reading campfire ghost stories on Halloween night than sliding on bouncy DJ Mustard’s beats.
“If I could write a movie I would re-write The Exorcist,” he bragged on his biggest song “Impatient Freestyle.” Another banger, “Flex,” contains an ominous threat about using a machete to “gut” his opps just like Halloween’s Michael Myers when faced with a Haddonfield babysitter.
“To be able to be bigger than who you are; I think rappers have always been fascinated with that.”
Drakeo’s music contained an atmosphere that titillated and terrified in equal measure. When he threatened to shoot a baby in 2016, he continued in that rich horrorcore rap tradition of pushing the envelope as far as humanly possible. Horror director John Carpenter took the artistic risk to shoot a child dead in 1976’s Assault on Precinct 13, so Drakeo felt like he was entitled to do the same, even if the legal system disagreed: the lyrics for “Shoot a Baby” were later used against Drakeo in court.
“The whole point of me starting to rap is I get to rap and talk about these things and not do these things,” he told the Guardian at the time. “It’s not real. Rapping is rhyming and pretending. It’s a persona.”
Just like horror, rap music has historically been dismissed as a serious artform due to its violent imagery and rule-breaking approach to storytelling. Whether through Mary Whitehouse’s video nasties or Delores C. Tucker’s hatred of gangsta rap, horror and hip hop have both long been victims of sustained censorship campaigns designed to besmirch artistic merits and conflate subject matter with criminality. It doesn’t matter that both have kept the entertainment industry alive during historical financial slumps or pushed storytelling to new heights: the harsh reality is that rap albums rarely win Grammy Album of the Year gongs and horror movies rarely take home Oscars.
Aside from the shared experience of being pushed to the critical fringes, I sense rappers — particularly from Black, working class backgrounds — also see something relatable in the way horror cinema and its characters are branded societal outcasts or ostracized because of their appearance. The fantastical idea that these souls might finally strike back — just like Leatherface with a chainsaw — and gain superhuman powers to terrorize the invading yuppies with, appeals directly to rap artists who similarly feel pushed into a corner by society, usually because of the color of their skin, systemic injustices, or just an outright ignorance toward their art.
“[In horror] there are little moments where if you're under the right stars and the right light hits you, or when the northern lights are going by, you could become a superhuman being,” horrorcore architect and Geto Boys’ member Bushwick Bill said in a 2015 interview with VICE. “To be able to be bigger than who you are; I think rappers have always been fascinated with that. That you could turn into a werewolf and be strong, or that you could use electricity and bring something back to life.”
However there’s also a nagging sense that rap loves horror much more than horror loves rap. Rap-fueled horror movies like 2000’s Leprechaun in the Hood and 2001’s Bones (where Snoop Dogg plays a stoned vampire) are insultingly bad, with narratives that treat the ties between the two artforms like they’re superficial and silly. When I interviewed horror film auteur John Carpenter a few years ago, I told him that I believed his eerie music inspired the sound of modern trap composer Metro Boomin and also the atmosphere of a lot of dread-inducing drill songs. He bluntly replied: “I don’t care for rap music.” It felt revealing, even if a new generation of horror filmmakers and rappers now have an opportunity to start afresh and become much more visible allies.
Perhaps the raucous horrorcore-fueled energy of the 1990s won’t be repeated across the 2020s, not on a mainstream level anyway, with the grip of auto tune-driven trap still far too strong. Yet rap and horror’s relationship will also never fully fade either — the two artforms share a deeply ingrained outsider’s perspective and creative philosophy built around bedazzling fans with both satire and nihilism. So long as America’s low-income neighborhoods and inner cities feel stalked by death, and their occupants are marginalized by those in power, the rappers who emerge will reference horror villains in their bars. To give the legendary Bushwick Bill the final word:
“The idea for horrorcore rap was lyrical Hollywood — to [take horror cinema and] make a rhyme for people in the neighborhood. People in extreme impoverished situations, well, if they ain't reaching out to God, they’re reaching out to the other side. The whole horror thing is our break from the monotony.” 🪱
Thomas Hobbs is a UK-based freelance culture, film, business, and music journalist. He has interviewed the actors behind Jason Vorhees, Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, and the Candyman across titles including BBC, Dazed, Guardian, Financial Times, Vice, Okayplayer, Little White Lies, New Statesman, Billboard / Telegraph.