Janelle Monáe

“Okay, this one, The Blob. So this deals with like a whole town of teens that are trying to warn the community like this alien, like blob is taking over, and it's basically going to, consume all of us, so beware. So, a super campy. All the actors and everybody involved, they, they were imagining this. Like it was them that sold it, because The Blob itself wasn't that scary, but it was how they reacted to The Blob that made it scary. It's one of the godfathers of, of horror. And then I love the opening music, "The Blob" of this, like, oh, if you guys didn't know, in addition to being an actor, I also make music. So a lot of these films that I'm going to pick, I love the music in them too.”

“Eraserhead. This is David Lynch's debut, but I remember watching this and getting to the end and being like, I have no idea what the this film is about, but I love it. It's so bold, it's surreal, it's fantasy, it's, you're in a dream state. It feels like you're probably on five different drugs at the same time. Like I don't know what David Lynch was thinking about when he wrote it. I, I, I heard an interview with him that he doesn't even remember writing it. If you're a lover of horror and you're looking for a new language, this is going to give you your new language.”

“Yep, we are going to get into 1984. This film, 1984, along with Metropolis, Fritz Lang's German Expressionist film, both of these films have absolutely inspired my work, as a concept artist, especially on the music side. I try to have work that celebrates and uplifts, marginalized people. And so when I think about 1984 and what it said then to what it says now, it is still relevant. It talks about surveillance, culture, it talks about the totalitarian societies and what happens when power goes unchecked.”

“Oh, wow. Yeah, we have to do this one. Brazil. Look, you think it's all that, but it's so much more. Oh my goodness. There's a connection between 1984 and this film, but I think they use different, a different tone to talk about it. Like humor is used in this. How it's shot, the zoom-in, shots, the color palette. Everything about Brazil to me just represents creativity at its finest, and it has something to say, and you're rooting for the protagonist the whole time.”

“When you think about ghouls, when you think about, zombies, when you think about The Walking Dead, none of that would have existed if this had not come out in 1968: Night of the Living Dead. This is one of the most iconic horror films, of its time and even now. And it talks about, our environment and how our environments, I think it has something deep to say about, radiation and what that does to our people, what that does to communities. The radiation in this film made all of the people in the cemetery who were dead come alive to eat other people and then infect them. So it did have something to say, and I think that it, you can't talk about Halloween, you can't talk about horror without Night of the Living Dead.”