Sabrina Carpenter & Jenna Ortega Kiss, Channel ‘Death Becomes Her’ In Gory ‘Taste’ Video
Just a few hours after the release of her new album Short n’ Sweet, Sabrina Carpenter dropped the music video to “Taste” Friday (Aug. 23) — but there’s nothing sweet about the Death Becomes Her-inspired bloodbath that ensues in the visual, unless you count the unlikely friendship she forms at the end.
The video opens with Carpenter singing a creepy lullaby: “Rock-a-bye baby, snug in your bed/ Right now you are sleeping, and soon you’ll be dead.”
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She then sneaks into her ex-boyfriend’s house to hack his new girlfriend — played by Jenna Ortega — to bits with a machete, before realizing that the Wednesday actress had set up a decoy in the bed. Ortega jumps out from hiding and starts shooting Carpenter with a rifle, sending her falling out the second-story window, with the singer impaled on the fence below.
Such begins a gory cat fight between the two ladies who keep coming back from the dead — à la the 1992 Oscar-winning film starring Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn — involving weaponized hospital defibrillators, voodoo dolls and Ortega chopping off Carpenter’s arm after the latter bursts in on the former and her nameless beau in the shower. It all culminates with the “Nonsense” singer and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice star having a steamy makeout sesh by the pool, before Ortega mistakenly murders their shared boy toy with a chainsaw.
“I heard you’re back together and if that’s true/ You’ll just have to taste me when he’s kissin’ you,” Carpenter sings. “If you want forever, I bet you do/ Just know you’ll taste me too.”
At the funeral for their late love, the girls realize they’re better off as friends than as enemies. “Very insecure,” Ortega complains of her lover-turned-murder-victim, to which Carpenter responds, cackling, “Very insecure! You kill me.”
The Dave Meyers-directed project marks the third music video in Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet era, following visuals for smash hit “Espresso” and Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper “Please Please Please,” which starred her boyfriend, actor Barry Keoghan. The new album marks the musician’s sixth studio album, following 2022’s Emails I Can’t Send, which reached No. 23 on the Billboard 200.
Watch the “Taste” music video above.
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