Kate Bush – Singer – Composer – Far Out Magazine (F) (Creddits: Far Out / IMDB)

The movies that influenced the music of Kate Bush

Wed 19 March 2025 17:06, UK

It is no revelation that Kate Bush has drawn inspiration from cinema and television to a great extent. Many of her works directly reference masterpieces loved and revered by movie fans and filmmakers worldwide, and Bush has cited these influences on multiple occasions to explain her artistic process.

Bush has used unconventional lyricism and an obsession with the literary domain to construct a brand of music that has often been described as “musical surrealism” by cultural commentators. Due to her elusive artistic vision, Bush’s work has resisted definite categorisations and has carved out a unique, instantly identifiable space for itself.

Even her breakout success, ‘Wuthering Heights’, owes as much to the films as to the book. Bush was interested not only in the novel, but in a BBC production she watched one night, which kindled her creative enthusiasm for the ill-fated love affair between Heathcliff and Cathy. This blend of literary and film inspiration became a hallmark of her work.

Thanks to her love for cinema, Bush has played around with genre constructs in music as well. Her songs contain elements of horror as well as comedy, with the latter playing a huge part in the development of Bush’s sensibilities. In fact, she has even claimed that she learnt a lot from the likes of Woody Allen and Monty Python.

“I love comedy,” Bush once commented. “I like to think that there’s a sense of humour in some of my music—obviously not all of it. But I think comedy and music are both things that we need as human beings. I think that both art forms can touch people. Comedy is a very big part of the English culture, the sense of humour; it’s a very dominant trait.”

In addition to comedy, Bush was also moved by iconic horror films such as Night of the Demon, which was referenced in her ‘Hounds of Love‘ as well as Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, which went on to become the primary source of inspiration for ‘The Infant Kiss’. She even cited François Truffaut’s 1968 crime drama The Bride Wore Black as the film that sparked ‘The Wedding List’.

But beyond overt allusion, Bush’s songwriting has always had a filmic quality to it. Albums like Hounds of Love don’t play so much as unspool, scene by scene, with the Ninth Wave sequence as a dreamlike short film about survival, fear, and recollection. You almost see the fog, you feel the freezing water, you hear the distant voices. Her videos, too, are not promotional vehicles but visual representations of her music, imbued with theatricality and often drawing on the language of silent film, expressionist film, and avant-garde film. ‘Cloudbusting’, with its dreamlike, unfolding narrative and Donald Sutherland cameo, constitutes almost a short film in and of itself.

Bush has also displayed her love of cinema through her music videos, collaborating with acclaimed pioneers like Terry Gilliam. While Bush was familiar with arthouse cinema from around the world, she also referenced popular classics like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

Check out the full list below.