"A drink for the horror that I'm in": A Guide To My Chemical Romance's Horror Influences
Though it is one of the worst things you can do as someone who is trying to review something, I tend to get extremely personal when I write. I rarely talk about myself but, the moment I sit down in front of my keyboard, I just feel the need to tell the world about whatever is going on inside my head. Don’t get me wrong, I am still able to give a somewhat objective opinion on most topics, but usually I really want to make sure that I explain why I particularly enjoy something.
Why am I saying all this? Well, today I want to tell you about the most personal, important and special thing in the world to me, something I can’t have an unbiased opinion for the life of me, though I will still try my darndest. That is, of course, My Chemical Romance.
I’ve been a fan of My Chemical Romance for more than half of my life. However, the word fan might not truly define my relationship with this band. My Chemical Romance has been every single thing in my own private universe ever since they came into my life in late 2005. Somehow I was convinced I would grow out of it once I got older, but I have never stopped feeling this way, and I don’t think I ever will. I have done the craziest things for this band, worked for their record label and got to meet the most amazing people in the world through some sort of folie à deux. I’ve given to my passion more than what I have and I wouldn’t change it for the world.
But as much as they are my main inspiration in most things I do, most of the things My Chemical Romance have created are based on already existing stuff to some extent. Human beings, and especially those who have been blessed with the talent to create things that mean everything to other people, tend to need the world to inspire them in order to be able to come up with a new take, a brand new way to see life. And as someone who somewhat discovered how fascinating the world of horror is through the aesthetic of these four guys from Jersey, I felt it was my duty to write these very words.
Of course, it's not only horror what has inspired this band to create music and a whole aesthetic that works accordingly. For example, the story told through the songs from I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love (Eyeball Records, 2002) and Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge (Reprise Records, 2004) is clearly inspired by the timeless classic that is Bonnie and Clyde, and I would even dare to say that it borrows certain elements from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. However, and even in the colorful and fun Danger Days: The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys (Reprise Records, 2010), horror has always been a central element and the main source of inspiration for My Chemical Romance and all their alter egos and stories. From vague references to those moments where they address the source material directly, here are those I was able to find—and please, feel free to add more if you think I’m forgetting something!
The demolition lovers in My Chemical Romance’s A summoning…
As mentioned before, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love, the record that started it all and a personal favorite, starts the story that their following album, Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge, would resume and close later on. This story introduces us to the Demolition Lovers, a couple that is, as mentioned before, very much like Bonnie and Clyde and that, like them, ends up being gunned in the desert. However, Bullets is perhaps the album where horror elements and references are more prominent, the most obvious being the story told in the track Early Sunsets Over Monroeville, clearly inspired by George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead—and yes, this is my favorite song in the entire world, but that is not the reason why. In the film, the protagonists try to save themselves from the zombie apocalypse by shutting themselves into Monroeville Mall, in Pennsylvania. My Chemical Romance’s lead singer and songwriter, Gerard Way, described Monroeville as “a sweet song about Dawn of the Dead”. This movie is also believed to be the inspiration behind the track that opens the album, Romance, an acoustic cover of a piece known as Spanish Romance, Romance D’Amour or Romance Anónimo, since this song is featured in the movie.
Early Sunsets Over Monroeville, next to other tracks like Vampires Will Never Hurt You, show Gerard Way’s obvious interest in the universal monsters of horror and its most traditional themes, along with some clear aesthetic inspiration from the cult classic The Lost Boys (Joel Schumacher, 1987)—even with all these references to the most iconic zombie movie of all times, vampires will be the most prominent horror theme/element in My Chem’s production. Even more interesting, though, is the band’s choice for the video of their single Honey, This Mirror Isn’t Big Enough For The Two Of Us, where you can see the band playing the song mixed with some scenes from the horror movie Audition (オーディション, Ōdishon, 1999), directed by the legendary Takashi Miike and based on the 1997 novel by Ryu Murakami.
Even when Bullets seems to end the story of the Demolition Lovers, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, My Chemical Romance’s second studio album, resumes the story in the afterlife, where the guy from the couple finds himself in purgatory. He will make a deal with a devil in order to be able to reunite with his lover: he will come back to life and he will murder 1,000 evil men, after which the devil will reunite the lovers—as you can read in the booklet of the album: the story of a man, a woman, and the corpses of a thousand evil men. Explaining the concept of the album and how it can be understood as a “pseudo-conceptual horror story”, Gerard Way said, circa 2004:
“The concept for the record Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge, was the story of a man and a woman who are separated by death in a gunfight and he goes to hell only to realize by the devil telling him that she’s still alive. The devil says you can be with her again if you bring me the souls of a thousand evil men and so he hands him a gun and he says I’ll go do it. That was the idea behind the concept, the record ended up being much more about loss and real life than anything, so I would say it’s a good split.”
Revenge, with its iconic anthems and the aesthetic that would define the band and that would make magazines describe them as “rich vampires”, also offers some interesting references and sources of inspiration—and I’m not saying this just because the most obvious one is Hang ‘Em High, a Clint Eastwood western from 1968 that gives its title to a track in the album. Next to the same themes that we already saw in Bullets, along with the prominent theme of loss inspired by Way’s personal situation—his grandmother, one of the most important people in his life, died while he was far from her, which inspired the famous song Helena (So Long & Goodnight) —, Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge also draws inspiration from one of my favourite horror stories of all time: A Rose For Emily, a short story written by William Faulkner in 1930. I won’t tell you what this story is about because I remember how flabbergasted I was when I read it for the first time for a college assignment, but you can find it very easily online and read it yourself—I promise you won’t regret it. This story mainly inspired the song To The End, third track of the record.
Thus, we get to the album that changed the world forever for My Chemical Romance: The Black Parade (Reprise Records, 2006). Besides being My Chemical Romance’s most commercially successful album, Parade also became known as the album that almost broke up the band. Its creation was so eventful that some believe that the record is cursed, mainly because it was created in what is believed to be one of the most haunted places in the United States: the Paramour Estate, also known as the Canfield-Moreno Estate, a historic residence in Los Angeles. As its Wikipedia page offers:
“[...] it was the opulent residence of silent film star Antonio Moreno and his wife and oil heiress, Daisy Canfield Moreno, daughter of pioneer oilman Charles A. Canfield. [...] On February 23, 1933, Daisy Canfield died of injuries she sustained in a car accident; her chauffeur-driven car plunged off Mulholland Drive while en route home from a party. Since then, the 22-room estate has seen many incarnations, including the Chloe P. Canfield School for Girls. In 1950, it became a convent for Franciscan nuns. In the 1970s the Franciscan nuns ran a home for girls at the estate.”
The Paramour.
The reason behind the band’s decision to record their next album here was that they were convinced the mansion would set the perfect mood. However, they would regret their decision some time after, since they are convinced to this day that something was actually there with them, to the point that Mikey Way, Gerard Way’s brother and My Chemical Romance’s bass player, had to leave the mansion and the band altogether—though the latter was only temporarily. His departure would inspire the song Famous Last Words.
The psychological effect of this eerie place on its inhabitants can also be seen in the track Sleep, that opens with some recordings where you can hear Gerard talking about the nightmares and night terrors that would plague him during his time in the mansion—they're these terrors, and it's like, it feels like as if somebody was gripping my throat and squeezing and I feel like I’m being choked, and I can’t breathe, and I shake, and I convulse, and sometimes when I’m trying to sleep, and I have these, these waking, uh, dreams…
Ironically enough, and even when still a really dark album, the horror references are way less in this album than in the two that preceded it—actually, the things that inspired the album are all over the place, from Joan of Arc to The Smashing Pumpkins. Among the most prominent outside influences, Gerard Way himself said that the song This Is How I Disappear was inspired by the real-life seances that Harry Houdini’s wife held after he passed away, as an attempt to contact her dead husband. Harry Houdini is also the figure you can see hanging upside down in the cover of I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love.
The picture of Harry Houdini that you can see on the cover of I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love.
A fun fact about this album is that the creator of the uniforms the band would wear in order to portray The Black Parade, the fictional band they created to present this record, was Colleen Atwood, who often works as Tim Burton’s costume designer.
The outfits created by Colleen Atwood.
Danger Days, My Chemical Romance’s official last studio record, was mainly inspired by Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), that gives its name to the record, and Akira (アキラ, Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988). I wouldn’t consider these movies to be horror movies, but I always thought that dystopian stories can be included in the horror genre to a certain extent—what’s scarier than the end of the world, after all? Moreover, there is one remarkable mention to vampires again, that we can find in the last track of the album: Vampire Money. The story behind this track is rather amusing. As the Genius page of the song points out:
“My Chem had been asked to write a song for Twilight—as their band aesthetic had once been similar to vampires—but they turned it down. They were scary vampires, not romantic ones! When asked if Vampire Money was specifically an ‘anti-Twilight song,’ Gerard responded:
‘It’s not really an anti-Twilight song as much as it’s anti-anything you don’t want to be a part of any more that people keep asking you to be a part of that you’ve grown out of. […] It’s directly about my experience living in a world with being asked to be a part of that, but it’s not so directly about that film.’”
As I mentioned at the beginning of this, I am sure there are more references I am forgetting, but that’s the fun part of the internet, right? Before signing off like Doctor D, I would just like to add a couple of references that have been mentioned before by the band that I haven’t been able to place in an specific era or track: The Crow (Alex Proyas, 1994) and Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)—though, looking at Gerard Way’s look during The Black Parade, you’ll probably get the same idea that I have when I try to connect the dots. Another really interesting influence that has always been present for My Chem—probably because both bands come from New Jersey—is the Misfits, who, aesthetically speaking, have always been the most iconic representation of horror in music. And don’t get me started on Iron Maiden and their immortal Eddie.
The Misfits, aka one of the coolest bands ever.
Isn’t it funny that it is always harder to talk about the things you know the most about? When I decided I would write this article, I was buzzing with excitement… until I realized I wasn’t sure if I would be able to talk about one thing regarding My Chemical Romance and really stick to it. Whether I succeeded or not, that is up to you. Nevertheless, I would like to take the chance to encourage you to listen to My Chemical Romance if you haven’t in a while—or if you’ve never listened to My Chemical Romance: this band really saves lives.
So long and goodnight.
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