FEATURE:
Directors’ Cuts
IN THIS IMAGE: Kate Bush in the Hammer Horror video/IMAGE CREDIT: iniminiemoo
Kate Bush, Suspense and Alfred Hitchcock
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I know that I have used this title…
IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush directing the Hounds of Love video/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush
in a couple of features but, as I am thinking about Kate Bush directing and an interview where she name-checked Alfred Hitchcock as an influence, it is appropriate to use it once again. The video that I have embedded below was conducted after the release of 1989’s The Sensual World. It is one of my favourite video interviews with her. I have explored Bush’s relationship and love of horror. She has brought macabre and darker elements into her tracks and videos. From Never for Ever’s The Wedding List, to Lionheart’s Hammer Horror and even Wuthering Heights from The Kick Inside, there is something tense and ghostly about these songs. Indeed, Get Out of My House from The Dreaming (inspired by the Stephen King novel, The Shining) is perhaps her most overt explosion of terror and anxiety. I am not sure how many people discuss Kate Bush as someone who provides suspense and terror in her music. Indeed, were one to think of one word to describe Bush’s music, they might use ‘eccentric’ or ‘beautiful’. From her debut hit, Wuthering Heights, through to some of the material on 2011’s 50 Words for Snow (especially Lake Tahoe), there has been this sonic world that has some darker and windier elements. I love the fact Bush is inspired by Alfred Hitchcock. Hounds of Love’s title track had a video directed by Bush. The concept and look was partly inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's film, The 39 Steps.
It is fascinating hearing an interview where Bush talks about directing and masters of suspense such as Alfred Hitchcock. One of things I notice about the videos Bush directed is that there is an element of the classic. In terms of the costumes and colours, I get a sense of her nodding to classic suspense films. This comes to the fore in Experiment IV (1986), Kate Bush: Eider Falls at Lake Tahoe (2012), and even The Sensual World (1989). Bush’s choice of shots, camera angles and her casting is always superb. I feel she is one of the more underrated directors. It is not something she had opportunity to do early in her career, yet I wonder what she would have done with the videos for Wuthering Heights or Wow. I feel she would have added something Hitchcock-esque to them! Whilst, in previous features, I have talked about how Bush was offered film roles, including horror parts. Seeing Kate Bush in a horror or suspense film is one of those great missed opportunities. As it is, one can feel elements of Alfred Hitchcock and horror right through her songs and live performances. An artist who wanted to go beyond the conventional and introduce something edgier and more challenging than what was around her, one can feel suspense, drama and horror run through her albums. In fact, Scary Studies gave us some examples in their article from December:
“Bush enjoyed a great deal of commercial and critical success after Wuthering Heights and her accompanying debut record, The Kick Inside. Following that, things started to get weirder. By 1980, her songwriting was taking even darker turns. 1980’s Never for Ever had The Infant Kiss, a disturbing ballad based on The Innocents.
But in 1982, Kate Bush released The Dreaming, an album full of songs that were stranger and more frightening than ever before. Her vocal performances in particular started to become lower and more grisly; songs like Pull Out the Pin and Houdini featured her nearly growling to set tense scenes about war, love, and (of course) ghosts.
It’s an exhausting album, and the finisher acts as the ultimate climax of the entire ordeal. Get Out of My House is, in many ways, solely a work of horror. While it still maintains certain aspects of pop songwriting, all of the brightness is gone.
For the most part, the song follows a narrative that most horror fans should be quite familiar with. At its simplest, it’s the story of a woman who has locked herself in her house while some unknown force tries to fight its way in. Often pegged as being inspired by The Shining, it’s unclear whether the protagonist has gone mad from some sort of cabin fever or if they are truly being haunted by some malevolent presence. Like all great scary stories, that uncertainty is what keeps you up at night.
And make no mistake: this is a truly terrifying song. Musically, it’s characterized by a pounding drum beat that lies somewhere between an uneven heartbeat and a violent knocking upon the door of a house.
Dissonance rules here, and Kate’s vocals reach a fever pitch unheard in any of her other work. Throughout the entire song is Bush screaming, “Get out of my house!” It’s built into the skeleton of the song as if the entire house is shaking back and forth and bellowing for the stranger to leave.
Indeed, Bush swaps between narrating from the perspective of someone clearly in the house (“This house knows all I have done!”) and the house itself (“No stranger’s feet shall enter me”). This ambiguity further links the house with a feeling of insanity. Just like in The Shining, it feels like whatever violence inhabits the structure has leaked into those inhabiting it.
But it’s the peak of the song that leaves listeners wide-eyed. About halfway through, Kate’s screams break into a subtle guitar riff that sounds like a twisted lullaby. After crazily pleading for the force to get out of her house, a male voice begins to speak. The narrator (or perhaps the house itself) begins to speak back, and the two enter a conversation.
It’s a negotiation of sorts, with the force outside the house threatening to “bring in the Devil dreams” while the narrator fights back by changing into other forms. She first changes into a bird, and when that doesn’t work, she turns into a mule. Bush then gives one of the most unique vocal performances of her career: she begins braying like a donkey before her voice fades out, overtaken by the outside force.
There are many ways to interpret this song, but I personally like to simply listen to it as a horror story. While Kate’s friends (and undoubtedly many modern listeners) supposedly found her donkey noises to be humorous, I can’t help but feel truly frightened every time I hear them. In the context of the narrative, it feels like a moment of true madness and transformation. The energy with which this moment is portrayed only heightens it.
Much of Bush’s music since The Dreaming has been quite unsettling as well. The second half of Hounds of Love is uniquely dark, and even her latest album features the disturbing Misty, a song about a woman who creates a snowman and then makes love to it. It certainly makes for an interesting example of a Kate Bush music video.
Her oeuvre, whether it’s her music or the idiosyncratic Kate Bush music videos, shows someone committed to exploring pop beyond what is comfortable. That discomfort is a defining feature of her work, and she remains one of the only musical artists so deeply connected to horror”.
Bush has said how she is an emotionally based person. Her music often addresses love, hope, fantasy and sex, yet there is this thread of something more harrowing and strange. From the tense and heart-aching scenes she directed for the This Woman’s Work video to the sheer drama and suspense that runs through Hounds of Love’s The Ninth Wave (which was spectacularly brought to the stage in 2014), you feel Bush, like a director such as Alfred Hitchcock, is creating suspense, subverting expectations and taking her music and videos to the deep recesses of the mind. A masterful composer and visionary, listen back to her albums and pick up the references to horror and suspense – whether they are obvious or mixed with subtlety into the music. Her videos (like the 2011 version of Deeper Understanding or Hounds of Love) have this blend of darkness, gorgeous moments and scenes of fear that one can draw to the horror genre and Hitchcock. Not to get too fixated on him but, after watching again the wonderful interview Bush gave after The Sensual World came out (it features the video for Love and Anger, so it would have been in 1990 or later), I was minded to explore Bush’s music in the context of suspense, horror, drama and darker tones. Whether it is a song like The Infant Kiss, Get Out of My House or the video for Experiment IV, Bush projects this power and pull that one is…
HELPLESS to resist.