'It's Coming For Me Through The Trees': Kate Bush & Gothic Horror

There are few other creative figures of a more distinct, visionary and idiosyncratic nature to have emerged from the music industry in the twentieth century, than that of Kate Bush. Not only is she an artist who has accomplished the rare feat of combining musical innovation with commercial success, but she is one who also managed to do so on her own terms, whilst maintaining complete creative control of her work. Bush, in the words of one critic, ‘got all the madwomen down from the attic and into the charts.’ She is heavily inspired by the world of art, philosophy, literature and indeed cinema, drawing upon an almost encyclopaedic array of influences. When one takes a closer look at her work, it becomes apparent that Bush is something of a horror aficionado, drawing on a number of sources to lend her compositions rich, blood-dark depth.

Out on the wiley, windy moors.

‘Wuthering Heights’ was a Gothic novel by Emily Brontë in which the conventions of the Gothic novel were reflexively explored and deconstructed as much as they were lovingly utilised. The Gothic genre of literature combines elements of horror and romance, and had a tremendous influence over early horror cinema. Bush revealed that while she had never read the novel in its entirety prior to writing her song Wuthering Heights, one of her biggest hits, she had been influenced by a film adaptation. The song is really about the events occurring towards the end of the story where Catherine has already died and is coming back as a spirit across the moors to be with Heathcliff. Bush is thought to have been touched by Catherine’s longing to never be alone, and her overwhelming desire to be with Heathcliff – even from beyond the grave.

Bush’s second album Lionheart, closes with a return to similar Gothic notions – a dark and dramatic number entitled Hammer Horror. Inspired, not only by the sensuous chills elicited by Hammer Horror movies, Bush had also been heavily influenced by the film The Man of A Thousand Faces, in which James Cagney plays Lon Chaney playing the Hunchback of Notre Dame. This song tells the tale of an actor who is thrust into the lead role of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and ends up being haunted by a jealous Lon Chaney.

The artwork of Bush’s third album, Never For Ever, featured her dressed as a bat, mirroring the haunting appearance of Mephisto in FW Murnau’s expressionistic adaptation of the Goethe play, Faust. This image was also used on the cover of her single Breathing – a song about the fears of an unborn baby. The cover of the album features Bush with a plethora of grotesque creatures emerging out from underneath her billowing dress, hinting at all manner of fairytale-inspired nightmares. The title of this album hints at the transient nature of life and the inevitability of death – we are ‘never, for ever.’

Never For Ever contained several songs which were inspired by horror films. The Wedding List, a twisted revenge narrative was inspired by Frances Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black, in which five men make a young bride a widow on her wedding day. She goes on to extract her revenge, methodically killing the five men one by one. Second is The Infant Kiss, inspired by Jack Clayton’s chilling and unsettling 1961 film, The Innocents (itself an adaptation of Henry James’ ‘The Turn of the Screw’). Bush’s song unfolds as the story of a governess who is frightened by the passionate feelings she has for her young male charge, who is actually revealed to be possessed by the spirit of a grown man – with whom the governess has fallen in love.

With her fourth album, the dense, self-produced The Dreaming, Bush conjured a truly experimental work that stunned critics and fans alike. Heavily inspired by old crime movies, the life and times of illusionist Houdini and the plight of Indigenous Australians, Bush once again also drew on sources of horror for inspiration. The closing track Get Out Of This House was inspired by Stephen King’s chilling novel ‘The Shining.’ In this track, Bush utilises the image of the house, with its labyrinthine corridors and many forbidden rooms, as a metaphor for her psyche. Erotic insinuations also contain hefty horror undertones, exemplified in lines such as ‘no stranger’s feet will enter me/I wash the panes/I clean the stains.’ We of course assume that as it was inspired by ‘The Shining’, the stains she refers to are blood…

Jacques Tourneur’s moody horror film Night of the Demon, and to a lesser extent Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, would form the basis of the eponymous track from Bush’s fifth album (and this writer’s favourite), Hounds of Love. Opening with a line of dialogue from Tourneur’s film, Hounds of Love unfurls as a testament to the stifling, all-consuming nature of love. No ordinary love though – this is Kate Bush after all – anthropomorphised love, appearing as a pack of hounds chasing down and ripping to shreds those who experience it – much like the titular demon from the film Bush was inspired by.

Hounds of Love is a concept album of two halves – the first weaves itself around different ideas of ‘love’, ranging from the aforementioned anthropomorphised love, to the fierce maternal love of a woman attempting to protect her murderous son (Mother Stands for Comfort). The second half – entitled The Ninth Wave – is a seven-song suite that forms a complete work: the narrative of a young woman lost at sea in the night, waiting to drown in the dark. As she fights to stay alive, the songs explore her thoughts, fears and dreams, including Waking the Witch, a vivid dramatisation of a medieval witch trial in which Bush is accused of being a witch and condemned to a death beneath the waves...

The penultimate song on Hounds of Love, Hello Earth contains a traditional Georgian choral piece entitled Tsintskaro that swerves delicately between incomprehensible majesty, deep mourning and intimate contemplation, and is overwhelmingly moving. Bush initially heard this piece of music in Werner Herzog’s atmospheric Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht – a film positively saturated in morose dread and exhibiting a stifling preoccupation with decay and death. A scene in the film, depicting Lucy wandering trancelike through a town square as the population, who have accepted their fate (death by plague) and decided to live their lives in stilted and debauched celebration before they die, is accompanied by this solemn, theistically tinged choral piece. Fortunately Hounds of Love ends on a positive note as the narrator is rescued from the water at dawn.

This wouldn’t be the last time Bush dallied in the dark realms of horror though. The title track of her 1994 album The Red Shoes boasts the twisted Hans Christian Anderson based concept of a girl who puts on a pair of enchanted/cursed ballet slippers and is unable to stop dancing as a punishment for being vain. This tale also inspired the Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger film The Red Shoes and the 2005 Korean horror film, also called The Red Shoes. Anderson’s unsettling tale featured a desperate girl cursed to continue dancing, even after she was dead. In an attempt to be free, she chops her own feet off – only for them to continue dancing before her. By the end of the tale when the girl finds redemption, her heart becomes so filled with joy that it bursts, killing her instantly. Miranda Richardson appears in the accompanying video – directed by Bush – as a Mephistophelian dancer who grants the singer’s wish to be able to dance, with a high price; her soul…