My Horror Anatomy: Blake English bewitches with gnarly punk attitude -

Welcome to My Horror Anatomy, a terrifying series in which artists and creators dissect their five most influential horror films.

Blake English handles his particular brand of pop-punk with an alarming volatility. His debut EP, Spiders Make Great Poets, an apt title hooked into his fascination with all kinds of creepy-crawlies, smacks of classic My Chemical Romance (“United States of Depression”). Songs like “The Neighbors,” depicting how rumors spread like wildfire in small-town America, and “Sad Girl Dance Party” creak with severe emotional traumas, and he cashes in his past for truly spellbinding and deliciously tempting art.

As you’ll surmise from not only his EP’s twisted, lush, and irresistibly disturbing cover art (left), English loves his horror films. He often tinkers with some of the genre’s classic stories, reapplying them as skins to his own, and ultimately fusing timeless narratives into fresh new interpretations. “I pull a lot of inspiration from the stories, structure, and timing of horror tales. I think it’s an amazing formula that can be done over and over again and still be surprising and ‘scary’ to the audience,” he says. “And I love a good scare.”

Daring to swerve into such icky darkness, mimicking horror films’ innate role as a mirror to society, English’s proclivity just comes natural. “I’ve always found comfort in the darkness. I’d say it’s much harder for me to write about what makes me happy, rather than what makes me angry or sad,” he observes. From mining his own deep-rooted pain, and lifting provocative imagery from the cinema, he emerges as one of pop’s newest visionaries; he’s like if Billie Eilish and MCR were trapped in some sort of mind-melting body horror flick.

Below, English walks us through five horror classics from which he draws his own unique aesthetics and stylistic turns.

**5. Aliens (1986)**

This movie right here has been my favorite since I was really young. Don’t get me wrong, Alien is the original in the story and deserves recognition for what it was able to accomplish. However, James Cameron’s vision for the second installment was downright masterful. I’m a huge fan of practical creature effects for many reasons, but one very blatant one is that if done well, it stands the test of time, which Aliens does with flying colors! H.R. Giger’s designs are breathtaking and inspire my own art in so many ways. James’ design for the queen alien is one of the most brilliant creatures created for film, period! As a child, I often turned to things otherwise deemed creepy or scary and found solace in beauty in them. The xenomorphs have always been at the center of that thought process and are a through-line in my EP.

4. Insidious (2010)

From the scoring to the directorial vision of James Wan to the creature design, this film is one of my all time favorites. It uses jump scares in the midst of telling a fairly complicated and multi-faceted story. The score itself, I have used as reference for several sounds in my songs. I just find it so brilliant that the movie is able to perfectly fuse together a demon “possession” movie with a beautiful ghost story. It’s the fusion that I find so masterful.

3. The Strangers (2008)

PACING, PACING, PACING. The pacing of this film in how it builds terror is absolutely genius. The scene where our protagonist is on the phone and the one stranger is just standing in the background staring at her for quite some time is a shot that, even to this day, makes me always keep an eye on my surroundings during my mundane house activities. And let’s not forget the end where we finally find out why all of this is happening: “Because you were home.”…uh after all this terror, you finally find out that the only reason this has happened to these people is simply “just because.” Pretty horrific. The male stranger of the film was used as inspiration as a creature in my music video for “Sad Girls Dance Party.”

2. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

OK, I know that in the midst of all these horror juggernauts, it’s hard to imagine something as campy as Rocky Horror to be on the list. However, my music and performance would be non-existent without this film. Frank N. Furter is someone who I always felt connected to and is responsible for making me feel the power of being my authentic self. This is one of those films I always turn to whenever I’m in need of a creative pick-me-up.

1. The Neon Demon (2016)

This film is visual art at its finest. The score is genius, and the story is another lesson in pacing, in regards to how we get to the climax of the film. Nicolas Winding Refn put a lot of love into this film. It is something that I will often reference for visuals or moods. Also, the content encapsulates the fantastical, dark parts of Hollywood, and the subject matter is something I explore in many of my upcoming songs.