Surprise, Eminem woke us all up this morning with a new album. Blasting his social media channels, Slim Shady dropped the next in his unexpected releases, this one entitled Music to Be Murdered By. Casual Slim fans were elated with what appeared to be a horror-themed album, showcasing Em with a murder weapon or two, blood dripping down the side, and a tiny hockey mask. But this isn’t Slim’s first foray into the horror realm; in fact, Slim has peppered horror references throughout loads of his music, and this is just his next installment.
You heard it here, everyone: Eminem is a Horror Movie.
Hip hop has had horror themes woven throughout for years, and this certainly wasn’t created by Eminem. Around 1994, there was a rise in horrorcore, a sub sect of hip hop that spun themes like slashers, the occult and psychological horror into lyrics. Guys like Jimmy Spicer, Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, and the Geto Boys were on the forefront of this movement that Eminem dances with. Horror scores have been sampled by Busta Rhymes and Ice T, and slasher villains have been referenced by Nicki Minaj, Jay Z, 2 Pac and Lupe Fiasco. Like those greats, Eminem has splattered blood over much of his music.
Eminem’s rap group, D12, released their debut studio album in 2001 referencing a night familiar to us spooky fans, Devil’s Night. This title, though, refers to the practice in Detroit where abandoned houses are set ablaze. Among the tracks is one for which the album gets its name, which leans into horrorcore.
I make music to make you sick of fake music
Hate music like devil worshippin’ Satan music
So say your prayers, your Hail Mary’s and Jesuses
Take two sticks, tape ’em together and make a crucifix
Try to stop it but you can’t do it
The album also contains the track “American Psycho,” which references horror faves Hannibal Lecter, Carrie White and Michael Myers.
No stranger to storytelling, Eminem often weaves a spooky yarn in his tracks. Long before “Stan” entered the vernacular as a reference to ruthless fandom, “Stan” was a Slim track that told a scary story of an obsessed fan who ultimately flies off the handle, setting up a twist ending. Though that isn’t even the spookiest tale Slim has told via rap.
2009’s track, “3 A.M.” is a pure slasher tale:
You’re walkin’ down a horror corridor
It’s almost four in the mornin’ and you’re in a
Nightmare, it’s horrible, right there’s the coroner
Waiting for ya to turn the corner so he can corner ya
You’re a goner, he’s onto ya
Out the corner of his cornea, he just saw ya run
All you want is to rest ’cause you can’t run anymore, you’re done
All he wants is to kill you in front of an audience
The song is a first-person narrative about a man who keeps blacking out and waking up covered in blood surrounded by bodies, ultimately coming to the realization that he is a proud slasher villain and pure evil, though not before referencing another horror icon.
She puts the lotion in the bucket
It puts the lotion on the skin
Or else it gets the hose again
Before this horror story, Slim paired up with Royce Da 5’9, a duo that goes by “Bad Meets Evil,” and dropped “Scary Movies,” sampling a Shirley Bassey song, flipped to sound like a horror score. The chorus played with the idea that the scary movie might be real.
Y’all want drama? Wanna make a scary movie?
Rappers comin’ in with they team and carry toolies
You can jump right out of the screen and barely move me
We hard-hittin’, directin’ and starrin’ in it
50 Cent’s song, on which Slim appears, “Psycho,” details what’s essentially a confession, or perhaps a warning, that these versions of Slim and Fifty are prone to slashing. “Psycho” isn’t quite the marked departure from Slim’s tendency to detail violence against real women, but it’s sandwiched with the slash happy chorus.
You see, I’m a psycho, a sicko, I’m crazy
I said I got my knife pulled, I’ll kill you if you make me
They wanna see me shot up, locked up and cage me
I’ll come back bigger, stronger and angry
Sound like any familiar villains? Slim and Fifty seem to think so, and make this comparison in the track: “Still as maniacal on the NyQuil and psycho as Michael Myers.”
Another one of Slim’s spooky tracks is “Psychopath Killer,” a collaboration with Slaughterhouse that showed up on Shady XV. Of note isn’t the lyrics but the album cover (above), part of Slim’s long history with dipping his feet into slasher blood. For his 2001 tour, he memorably popped around in an outfit that looked like a short-sighted creation of a unique slasher, or an homage to an old hockey mask-wearing favourite. He referenced this wild outfit in the trailer for MMLP2 in 2018, referring to himself as the “monster” Rick Rubin and Dr. Dre created.
Though certainly not the king of horrorcore hip hop, Slim Shady has danced with the devil throughout his illustrious music career. A fan of all things slasher, he’s worn a hockey mask, wielded a chainsaw, and cracked wise about Friday the… nineteenth. This graduation to Hitchcock references is a natural next step for the maturing Slim, a horror fan through and through.
