How Horror Films Fueled Bartees Strange’s Latest Indie-Rock Triumph
It’s Friday the 13th, and Bartees Strange has some thoughts on the 1980 slasher of that name. “I love that the mom is killing everyone,” he says, spoiling the movie for anyone who’s resided under a log for the past 45 years. “This kid [Jason] had disabilities and everyone’s making fun of him, and the mom is just so fed up, like, ‘I’m gonna take all these kids out.’”
A critically acclaimed alt-rock star who’s toured with acts like Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers (as memorably noted on his 2022 song “Cosigns”), Strange, 36, loves to catch up on horror movies in his downtime. If he shows you his extensive -Letterboxd, you’ll see that they make up nearly all of his recent watches. And although he’s down with the chills and thrills, he’s really all about the humanity of the genre. Just take his POV on Jason Voorhees’ plight. As such, his third studio album, Horror — out Feb. 14 and co-produced by Jack Antonoff — is both an ode to scary movies and a look at his own life and background through that lens.
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“I was always kind of a nervous kid,” he says, adding that he was one of the few Black people in the small Oklahoma town where his family lived. “I grew up with all the stories of my parents’ upbringing in the South, and they started to prepare me and my brother and sister for a similar life. I started watching horror movies as a way to train myself to be good at being scared. Then I fell in love with them.”
After seeing The Ring in theaters arguably too young, Strange threw himself into the horror realm, delighting in the slow, inexorable terror of 1978’s Halloween, the murderous entity surrounding premarital sex in 2014’s It Follows, the nuclear-family meltdown of 2018’s Hereditary, and the parallels he saw between his own life experiences and Get Out, director Jordan Peele’s 2017 tale of thinly veiled racist violence. “I feel like the best horror movies are the ones that speak to things that are scary within society,” he says. “I feel like records work in a similar way. Great records can be so tied to a time period that it almost defines it — or at least plays a part in the story of that time.”
More recently, Strange contributed the slinky “Big Glow” to the soundtrack of I Saw the TV Glow, director Jane Schoenbrun’s trippy 2024 film about identity and the allure of the shows we loved as kids. “I remember watching it for the first time and I was like, ‘I’m gonna have to watch this again,’” he says of the movie, which follows a pair of teen pals who become obsessed with a TV show called The Pink Opaque — which may or may not bleed into their realities. “The vibe of the movie was the coolest thing about it.”
While “Big Glow” is very much a song from a movie — transporting us into the protagonists’ heads as they become “hypnotized by the bluest note” — Horror is more of a personal affair, in keeping with Strange’s past work. “My last record was more like ‘Here’s where I’m from, here’s my family, here’s the things that have made me who I am,’” he says of his breakthrough 2022 LP, Farm to Table, which won rave reviews as he grappled with heavy subjects like the George Floyd protests and showed off his rich emotional and musical range. On Horror, he continues: “Now that you’ve seen where I’m from, let me show you the underbelly of those same places and those same people and those same feelings. Things that I would talk to a therapist about — I realized that that’s what the songs were becoming about.”
He adds, “These are moments in my life that have made me who I am, but not in a fuzzy, warm-memory way. It’s about the scary things that shape you and the things that you end up facing over and over again until you get over them.”
See the somber “Sober,” in which Strange deals with a relationship in turmoil — and not knowing what you want — or the soulful, swaggering opener “Too Much,” the first track Strange wrote for this album. “I grew up moving around a lot — always kind of felt like I needed to figure things out on my own,” he says. “I felt like I was in this little capsule, traveling through all these experiences in life and trying to make sense of it all. That song is kind of like: I’m overwhelmed with all of these feelings that I’m about to talk about through the rest of the record.”
“Baltimore,” meanwhile, is full of yearning as he sings about trying to find a place in America that’s safe for a Black man to call home. (He ended up in the Maryland city in the song’s title, after time in D.C. and New York.) Strange connects that idea — finding a place in a world full of terrors — to films like Peele’s. “I can totally see myself in those movies,” he says. “I live that shit. Like, I have definitely been the Black boyfriend.… So the record, I called it Horror because these are the fears that have shaped me and the fears that I continue to struggle with in my journey to become a better version of myself.”
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