Sampling a Séance – Hounds of Love

Horror Moments, Kate Bush Edition

[Spoilers: Night of the Demon (1957)]

‘Horror Moments’ is a weekly series examining horror-inflected scenes and themes in unexpected places. The ‘moments’ are published weekly on Thursdays, and I share articles on the history of magic, theatre, storytelling, and more on Monday afternoons – don’t forget to subscribe! Catch up with the Kate Bush series here and the full back catalogue of horror moments (from Wallace & Gromit to Shakespeare) here.

It’s in the trees! It’s coming!

So begins one of Kate Bush’s best known songs, Hounds of Love, the title track of the 1985 album of the same name. Throughout this series of horror moments, we’ve explored the surprising number of Bush’s songs that are inspired by the horror genre, from ‘The Infant Kiss’ which retells the story of The Innocents (1961) to ‘Hammer Horror’ which celebrates the studio most famous for creating scary films. Yet, to my knowledge, ‘Hounds of Love’ is the only song to sample audio directly from a horror film.

The opening lines, ‘it’s in the trees, it’s coming’ are sampled from the 1957 film Night of the Demon, an adaptation of M.R. James’ ‘Casting the Runes.’ It’s an admittedly slightly messy film, damaged by arguments between the producer Hal E. Chester and the director/writer team Jacques Tourneur and Charles Bennett, but I still think it’s an underrated classic. Niall MacGinnis as the sinister magician Dr Julian Karswell is one of my favourite horror antagonists of all time. I included him as one of my black and white menaces in another horror moment from last year.

Halfway through Night of the Demon we get a brilliant scene where our protagonists consult an eccentric group of ‘believers’ who claim they can speak to the dead. What unfolds is a pastiche of parlour séances where little old ladies sing the twee song ‘Cherry Ripe’ because ‘the spirits like it’ and the medium trembles.

The hero of the film, Dr John Holden, and the heroine, Joanna Harrington, are submitting themselves to the process of the séance to find out what happened to Joanna’s uncle who died under mysterious circumstances, possibly as the result of a curse. Holden is distinctly sceptical, but Joanna is open-minded.

It’s easy to side with Holden as we watch the medium channel ‘Crimson Eagle,’ his Native American spirit guide, and when he bursts out in the genial greetings of Scottish ghost Mr McGregor, a regular. The medium becomes a dead child looking for her doll — it all feels as manipulatively theatrical as such sessions often do — and then a voice speaks through the medium:

“Joanna! Are you there Joanna?”

And it is Joanna’s uncle, she knows his voice. He warns Holden to give up the investigation, that the black magician Karswell has translated a book of dangerous spells, but the spirit doesn’t get long to explain any further before something distracts him. He cries out suddenly:

“It’s in the trees! It’s coming! The demon! It’s coming! No!”

And then the medium screams in pain. Holden storms out, horrified by what he still thinks is a tasteless con, but the audience has seen the opening scene, we know that this was indeed how Joanna’s uncle died, that the spirit was telling the truth, and that Holden’s life is now on the line (the railway line, to be specific, it’s a great final scene).

Of all the horror films that inspired Kate Bush, this line from this film was the one she chose to sample in the opening of the title track of the Hounds of Love album. What’s slightly odd about this decision is that the rest of the song isn’t anything to do with the plot of ‘Night of the Demon.’ It’s about being afraid to fall in love but being hounded by it nonetheless, the narrator identifies with a fox that is being hunted down:

I found a fox caught by dogs
He let me take him in my hands
His little heart, it beats so fast
And I'm ashamed of running away

The motif of something lurking in the trees, which appears in the chorus, is intermingled with erotic anticipation as the person fleeing begins to hope that they will be caught after all:

Hold me down
It's coming for me through the trees
Oh, help me, darling
Help me, please
Take my shoes off
And throw them in the lake
And I'll be two steps on the water

The music video is inspired by The 39 Steps (1935), although a section where Bush and a man dressed not unlike Dr Holden run through a woodland lit only by a strange white light somewhat resembles the chase sequences from Night of the Demon.  An alternative earlier version of the song doesn’t feature these opening lines at all nor the refrain ‘it’s coming for me through the trees’ in the song itself:

Why then make this addition? What is the benefit of weaving this horror motif through the song? In a way the answer to this is the answer to why horror matters as a genre in the first place. Fear is a primal and important emotion which has the power to shape us for better and for worse. It injects stories with an urgency and intensity that they couldn’t otherwise possess, and its imagery ranges from the disturbingly grotesque to the hauntingly beautiful. The presence of the sample alerts us to the importance of fear in the narrator’s complex feelings about falling in love; this isn’t just a love song, it’s a fear song, and love has to fight with that fear and conquer it to win out at the happy climax of the story.

Kate Bush is such a horror-literate writer that the songs we have considered in this series contain a vast array of horror tropes and motifs. Songs like ‘Wuthering Heights’, ‘The Red Shoes’, and ‘Misty’ play on folkloric lessons about being careful whose advice you listen to, and who you let in through your window from the cold night air. ‘Hammer Horror’ and ‘The Infant Kiss; let their protagonists explore whether or not they should feel guilty about their actions and desires. ‘Get Out of My House’ stages the psychodrama of a besieged psyche through the imagery of a haunted house. ‘Waking the Witch’ explores the fear of being othered and persecuted, yet provides the victim with metaphors of resilience and escape. ‘Experiment IV’ and ‘Breathing’ teach us important lessons about dystopian futures that we might still be able to avoid.

But ‘Hounds of Love’ uses fear in a completely different way. It’s a song about putting aside an irrational fear and succumbing to something that seemed frightening but was in fact a source of joy. It’s not a demon coming through the trees after all, it’s life and love and fulfilment, it’s a happy ever after. The adrenaline of terror here transforms into a different kind of high:

Do you know what I really need?
Do you know what I really need?
Love, love, love, love, love, yeah

Well, that’s the end of this edition of horror moments, although I could probably have gone for another ten articles because there are even more horror-inflected Kate Bush songs to explore from a retelling of the Dr Crippen case in ‘Coffee Homeground’ to a fantasy of falling for the devil in ‘Heads We’re Dancing.’ What songs would you have added to the list? Do make sure to check out the rest of the series if you’ve missed any, and get ready for a new adventure next week when I begin a mini-series of five articles on an absolutely bonkers internet series turned tv show.

Until then, raise our hats to the strange phenomena of Kate Bush’s wonderful horror-themed story songs and, as always, happy nightmares everyone!

Horror moments are posted every Thursday and a wide variety of articles exploring the history of magic, theatre, storytelling, and more are published on Mondays.