Exploring the horror influences behind Billie Eilish’s music videos
Billie Eilish’s unique hushed vocals and dark lyricism shot her to mainstream popularity following the release of her 2019 debut of When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?. Throughout her short but highly successful career so far, Eilish has continued to cycle aesthetic phases with her hair and style but always maintained a baseline creepiness in her music videos. Physicality is at the heart of all of the clips, constantly showcasing bruises, blood and black tears. It gives the heartbreak and depression she sings about a tangible nature, as well as adding an eerie edge that separates her from her pop-sanitised peers.
In Eilish’s most overt foray into the horror world, the singer-songwriter collaborated with Michael Chaves, the director and visual effects artist behind horror movies like The Curse of La Llorona and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It. When the video for ‘bury a friend’ debuted, Chaves took to Twitter to say: “Here’s the Billie Eilish video I directed. She’s one of the most talented people I’ve ever worked with – smart, creative, funny, and a great collaborator. This video was so much fun to make.”
Chaves’ creepy touch can be felt across the entirety of the video, which plays on childhood fears of monsters under the bed. It’s shot from the perspective of a nightmare who stalks around a bedroom and is later revealed to be Eilish herself. The camera pans slowly to the bed, and Eilish blinks her entirely jet-black eyes unnervingly. She struggles through a hallway, fighting off black-gloved hands who claw at her. When she’s eventually captured, she’s held down and injected with a black serum, an allusion to how she got the murky eyes she revealed earlier in the video. It’s dark and freakish, but as she frantically whispers, “Why aren’t you scared of me? / Why do you care for me? / When we all fall asleep, where do we go?” it’s clear that the direction of the video suits her lyrics perfectly.
The creepy black liquid is a recurring theme for Eilish, who used it even more shockingly in 2018’s ‘When the Party’s Over’. Collaborating this time with director Carlos López Estrada, the video’s opening is stark and white, with Eilish head to toe in the colour. She stares dead-eyed at a glass of black liquid, eventually drinking the entire thing despite her mild disgust. Black tears start flowing from her eyes, covering the white floor and her pristine clothes.
The liquid is an extension of the toxic relationship she sings about: “I’ve learned to lose you, can’t afford to /Tore my shirt to stop you bleedin’ / But nothin’ ever stops you leaving”. It’s volatile, but she still can’t remove herself, and the black tears reflect the pain that comes with continuing to stay. Fans were quick to draw comparisons to the alternative cover of Lady Gaga’s EP The Fame Monster, but Eilish claims the video was a recreation of a drawing a fan had done: “I thought it was visually really dope, and I wanted to physically create it.”
Eilish’s hit single ‘bad guy’ isn’t tinged with the same dark palette as the previous two, but it’s the bold colouring of the Dave Meyers-directed video that truly highlights a bloodied and bruised Eilish as she sings about her role as a villain. It features eccentric dancing, and the way in which Eilish crawls around is reminiscent of The Exorcist, which is spooky even if the background is bright yellow. She also suffers a heavy nosebleed which drips onto her white shoes, wiping it all over her face as she sings. Eilish is dominant in this video, pouring milk into men’s mouths and sitting on their backs as they do push-ups. It’s actually one of few videos where she has command of her physical world, not crying and restrained like in ‘bury a friend,’ or fleeing a flooding house like in 2021’s ‘Happier Than Ever’. Eilish is in control, almost enjoying the violence of her bloody nose and bruised knees.
The ‘You Should See Me in a Crown’ music video is another rare one that relies less on gruesome special effects and more on Eilish’s real-life love of spiders. She wears a crown adorned with arachnids, at one point holding a tarantula in her mouth and letting the arachnids crawl all over her. She debuted the track on Annie Mac’s BBC Radio 1 show, following it with the clip of the tarantula crawling from her mouth on her Instagram. Her playful caption of “u scared?” shows just how much she revels in the shock of her videos.
Sometimes it’s not the visual effects that make her videos so impactful, it’s actually her ambivalence toward them. Eilish is still and unmoving whilst covered in the spiders, flaunting them the same nonchalant way she does her chunky silver jewellery. The horror never overtakes the concepts driving her songs, which is impressive, given how much she has pushed the boundaries of creepiness.
