Pop singer and actor Lady Gaga is no stranger to the horror genre, having starred in two seasons of Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story,” and she’s always been a fan of the creepier side of entertainment. After all, this is a woman who calls her fans her “Little Monsters,” wore a dress made of actual meat, and had the world’s coolest live performance at the VMAs in 2009 when she started pouring fake blood from her abdomen mid-song. Even her turn as a very different take on Harley Quinn in “Joker: Folie à Deux” is horror-tinged, and she has a fabulously fierce, fearsome sense of style that’s clearly inspired by gothic and horror aesthetics, too. It’s clear that Gaga loves horror, but which horror movies rank among her favorites?
Over the years, Gaga has hinted at which horror films have influenced her the most, either by revealing on social media how much they terrified her or by including references in her music, and there are at least five incredible horror flicks that are certain to scare the pants off audiences. Let’s look at some of Gaga’s favorite freaky films, from the slightly scary, like “Donnie Darko,” to the seriously spooky, like “The Exorcist.”
Gaga’s longtime love of Alfred Hitchcock
Gaga has been a big fan of horror and mystery director Alfred Hitchcock for a long time, as the lyrics from her song “Bad Romance” hint. She sings, “I want your psycho, your vertigo shtick, want you in my rear window, baby, you’re sick,” referencing the films “Psycho,” “Vertigo,” and “Rear Window.” In an interview with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show in 2015, Gaga explained that she finds thrillers and horror to be calming, and elaborated on her love of Hitchcock:
“It’s very strange, you know, dangerous things and horror relaxes me. […] It’s like a nice cup of tea. […] I know it’s not for everyone, but I imagine I would have been one of Hitchcock’s groupies, I just love it so much and find it so interesting. And the dichotomy of sex and horror at the same time, there’s something really fascinating about that.”
Gaga takes that fandom a step further in her song “So Happy I Could Die,” in which she compares herself to “Vertigo” star Kim Novak by describing herself using one of the classic starlet’s nicknames, “Lavender Blonde.” She also sampled Bernard Herrmann’s “Vertigo” score for her song “Born This Way,” which is about as direct an homage as one can get. All three films are bonafide classics from one of the masters of the genre, so it’s no wonder that Gaga’s a die-hard fan.
Donnie Darko and the Exorcist frighten Mother Monster
But what about the other two films that freak out Lady Gaga? One is the absolutely terrifying “The Exorcist,” which she tweeted about once, saying it “scares the Jesus out of me.” William Friedkin’s 1973 horror film stars Linda Blair as a young girl who becomes possessed by an evil spirit, forcing a pair of priests to contend with it in a battle for not just her life, but her very soul. Gaga’s Catholic upbringing is sure to make this one even scarier (seriously, it’s a distinctly Catholic nightmare), but “The Exorcist” is pretty regularly understood as one of the scariest movies of all time.
“Donnie Darko,” on the other hand, is Richard Kelly’s surreal 2001 sci-fi thriller that has some seriously horrific elements. The movie follows Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal), a teenager who starts seeing visions of a man-rabbit named Frank who tells him about the impending apocalypse. Trying to explain “Donnie Darko” is pretty tricky (you can read our ending explainer here), but Gaga is apparently a hardcore devotee. In a Variety Actors on Actors interview with Gyllenhaal, Gaga gushed that she had seen the movie “so many times.” She said that, “In the world of music, but in fashion as well, ‘Donnie Darko,’ it’s religion.”
While I’m a pretty big fan of Kelly’s movies, I’m not sure if I could go quite that far, personally. But Gaga’s love for the film is clearly intense, and it should be interesting to see if she references it directly in any future work. Even if she doesn’t, I’m sure there will be plenty of horror-inspired goodness in Gaga’s future as a musician and an actor.
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