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“I was outside digging a grave,” quips Lil’ Punkin at the start of our call. He’s running a few minutes late, perhaps a little out of breath, but slides into the conversation. Lil’ Punkin (Evan Kidd Bogart, who’s written hits for Britney Spears and Beyonce) joins Norman Crates (Peter Wade, producer with such credits as Jennifer Lopez and Kylie Minogue), and DeepKutz (Amanda Warner, who’s written/produced for Carly Rae Jepsen and Charli XCX) as we talk all things spooky and macabre.

The trio – known together as LVCRFT (a reference to author H.P. Lovecraft) – have built their careers on making infectiously gooey, throwback Halloween pop music. Think “Monster Mash” but with a glistening modern pop edge. They slashed onto the scene with 2019’s This is Halloween Volume 1, which introduces the pivotal character of Skeleton Sam (as seen in press photos and around town) and includes such tracks as a cover of Kim Wilde’s debut single “Kids in America.” The work is deliciously dark, often seductively playful, and always guaranteed to get your cold, dead heart beating again. Three more albums followed, including 2020’s The Sequel and the terrifying 15-piece Scream Warriors (2022).

For longstanding fans, a new LVCRFT album is a yearly ritual. As the summer fades, and the air grows cooler, you just know a skin-crawling new record is just weeks away. In only four years, they have officially swiped the Halloween crown away from Kim Petras, who’s only released one spooky album so far, TURN OFF THE LIGHT from 2020. Where many artists dip in and out of the genre, LVCRFT devote their every waking moment to the greatest day of the year.

With their new set, titled simply V, the collective prove they’re just getting started. Songs like “Purgatory” and “Scream! (For Halloween)” are among their best works yet. They’ve never sounded so good, so alert, so wondrously dangerous. In our conversation, Lil’ Punkin, Norman Crates, and DeepKutz discuss their 20-part found footage series (which you can find on their TikTok and Twitter), their favorite horror films of all time, and their new album.

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Bloody Disgusting: Seeing as how horror movies rake in millions at the box office, it’s wild that horror-pop hasn’t been bigger than it has. Why is that?

Norman Crates: I feel like there’s more coming. We put our first record out in 2019. GQ did an article that was that basically… the headline was the Halloween Music Renaissance is Upon Us. And the only people that were in the article were us and Kim Petras. Three weeks before that we didn’t even exist. We’ve been so ingrained in this and so committed to soundtracking spooky [season] for the next generation for four years. The spooky music community is growing. The fascination with all things spooky and horror and music-related is growing. We’ve seen it grow so much that I would honestly say now the Halloween music renaissance is upon us. But I don’t know how much people are fully dedicated to it. I think people are seeing it as like, ‘oh, I’m gonna make like a Halloween record’ or ‘I’m gonna do a spooky song. I love horror. So I’m gonna do a horror video.’ People are dipping in and out, but they’re not fully immersed in it like we are. I think that’s the next wave. I think that’ll come.

Also, we’re fully committed to the culture and the community. We found our people, and they have fully embraced us in so many ways and involved us. We’ve become friends with all the haunts and convention people and the immersive theater people – and writers, directors. Like any culture, people know when you’re committed to it and when you’re not.

BD: You mentioned being in the culture and making friends with those in haunts and immersive theater. I’m curious: are you into extreme haunts, like McKamey Manor?

DeepKutz: No, no, no… but I would do 17th Floor [Haunted House]. Sorry, I would.

It’s like with what horror movies you like. I’m not a huge torture porn lover. I love the first ‘Saw’, but I’m not a super fan of the entire franchise. I’m more of a spooky scary and less torture horror. I also love a campy scary. There’s a line between gore and torture. Great horror doesn’t need to be torture and gore for torture and gore’s sake. There are some great horror [films] that are torture and gore for torture and gore’s sake – but it doesn’t have to be that. And I think that sometimes people just rely on that instead of trying to be innovative and creative. What we’ve seen these last few years, though, is a lot of that cut through.

I don’t know. McKamey just feels cheap in that way, you know?

Norman Crates: In that sense, you can scare somebody without having to put a bag over their head and stuff them in the water.

BD: Speaking of torture porn, are you fans of films like 2008’s Martyrs?

DeepKutz: It’s on the line for me. I wanna be scared, and I wanna be troubled. I don’t wanna feel like grimy after I watch a movie. ‘Talk to Me’ fully flipped me out. It blew my mind. Even ‘Barbarian,’ it jumps the shark in the best way ever.

Lil’ Punkin: I love it when a horror movie reveals itself to actually be a cheap piece of not-well-made crazy. All those flaws make great art. That’s part of the thing that I love about it because I don’t find most of it scary, personally.

DeepKutz: To also say this, I’m a huge fan of ‘Terrifier’ and ‘Terrifier 2’ because that’s honoring the DIY. And it’s so artistically done, even though there’s a lot of torture. It’s a great slasher film that uses torture, and it’s scary. Art the Clown is iconic.

Lil’ Punkin: It’s hard to make a slasher iconic in 2023.

BD: In terms of your new record, V, what sparked the idea to follow the character of Skeleton Sam on his quest to find Seraphina?

Norman Crates: We try to lean into what aspect of horror we love, and we love the found footage genre. We were like, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be cool to make an album out of found audio? That’s a sick idea.’ We ‘found’ the audio and the story emerged about Skeleton Sam and needing help. I found the audio for us to finish these songs and try to solve this sort of musical puzzle.

DeepKutz: For me, horror is the only genre I watch. It’s soo much fun to look at how we’re gonna market the album in terms… what core trope are we gonna honor this year. So, and I think because Skeleton Sam this character that’s jumped out of our social media screens and is now going to events and people are recognizing him, that it was really great to honor a slice of his origin story. We’ve been building story arcs from the [start] of LVCRFT. We saw it as an opportunity to marry all that together.

Norman Crates: Every year we have a lot of fun making these albums. There’s no holds barred; we can do whatever we want. Do we want this spooky chord here or [there]? There was something so much fun about making this year’s record. We had a lot more collaborators than we normally do. We brought in lots of different friends who are also into the spooky zone and who go to all the haunts with us every year. My favorite thing about this album is that there are three songs that have the word Halloween in them. [laughs]

DeepKutz: The irony of it is that we realized in our fifth album that we had not written a song with the word Halloween in the title. The way we set up our writing sessions is we bring everybody to one studio and there are multiple rooms. There are two or three rooms going at a time. And so each room has three or four songwriters in there working on songs, and we’re all doing our own thing. At the end of the week, we went through all the songs, and we had three songs that had Halloween in the title – and they were all amazing.

BD: “Purgatory” is an unexpected treat on the album, particularly the spoken word sections toward the end.

Lil’ Punkin: When Monte [Revolta] is talking about taking over the world, it’s pretty funny. It just happened organically. We had left that section of the music open, and when he was singing the song and then he just started going off into these melodic [ooos and ahhhs]. He then started talking in the open part of the song, and we had the mic on and we recorded the whole thing. He was just sort of freestyling that part.

BD: The closing track “Fare Thee Well” is so different than the rest of the record. How did this one evolve?

Lil’ Punkin: In the Lore of Skeleton Sam and Seraphina, they fall in love, and they’re gonna get married. She makes a deal with the devil. She’s at the height of her fame. She wishes for fame and Fortune, and the devil takes her back. In this song, the devil snatches her off the stage in a concert hall where she’s performing. If you listen to the end of the song, you can hear her being grabbed by the devil and then everyone screams. We found this song in Skeleton Sam’s sacred box, and this was one of the things that was on a wax cylinder, and we basically just transferred it over to pro tools, and released it. We didn’t write it. This one actually sounds like found audio.

BD: “Scream! (For Halloween)” has one of the most immediate hooks on the record. Did this one come together pretty easily?

DeepKutz: Lil’ Punkin calls me up in September and goes, ‘I wanna write some Halloween music during the season.’ We generally write right after the season. So we get together with Sandy Chila from DBone and the Remains. We threw a little writing day, running two rooms. So there are two production and songwriting teams, and we wrote it the last week – exactly a year ago right now in the spooky season and in the spirit. We already knew the direction that we were gonna take. It’s a throwback spooky Bop, inspired by ‘Monster Mash’ and even older.

BD: Considering you’ve released your own 20-part found footage series, I have to ask: what are your found footage faves?

DeepKutz: Oh, ‘Blair Witch.’ I was in my late teens when that came out, and it blew my mind. I remember seeing it in one of those old theaters where they only have one screen or maybe a big screen and a little one, a neighborhood old movie theater.

Norman Crates: I was following it online with the website and probably looked at every page of the website and read all that stuff.

Lil’ Punkin: I was convinced at the time that that was real. I remember leaving the movie theater and picking up the pace and jogging to my car. And I was nowhere near the woods where the Blair Witch was. But for some reason, I was that freaked out. The next obvious thing we could say is ‘Paranormal Activity,’ but I wanna do a left-field one because I thought it was really innovative and it happened during COVID – I really liked ‘Host.’

DeepKutz: One that troubles me to this day, and that’s super gross, is ‘Cannibal Holocaust.’ That one is tough to get through because there’s animal stuff. That one makes me feel grimy, and it freaks me out.

BD: In a broader sense, what are your top three horror movies of all time?

DeepKutz: Oh my god, don’t do this to me. [laughs]

Norman Crates: Mine is always gonna be the scariest movie I’ve ever seen because I was probably too young to see it. My babysitter let me see ‘Amityville Horror’ when I was a child. I love ‘Halloween’ – absolutely everything about it, from John Carpenter’s music to the direction and Michael Myers. I loved ‘Hostel,’ as well. I like the gory stuff. That was thrilling to watch in a theater with the eyeball and stuff like that. You’re just like, no,

Lil’ Punkin: I was so scared as a kid of the original ‘Poltergeist.’ I just have such memories of it affecting me in both positive and negative ways. I would say that and obviously the OG ‘Nightmare’ [on Elm Street] and the OG ‘Pet Sematary.’ Those are some pretty iconic movies that are that played into my childhood love of horror.

DeepKutz: I have a hard time crowning new movies as iconic until they have some time under their belt. But there have definitely been some movies in the last 10 years that I feel are some of my top favorite horror movies of all time. My favorite horror top three is gonna ‘Evil Dead,’ ‘Get Out,‘ and ‘Cabin in the Woods.’ I love it when horror movies scare me, have camp, and jump the shark.

BD: Regarding your found footage series, had you ever done anything like this before?

DeepKutz: No – but I’m super into found footage horror on TikTok or Reels. I love watching new film creatives rolling out horror movies on these platforms. When we all talked about it, we just thought that it would be cool. None of us have made a film, let alone a film footage film. But we also saw it as an opportunity to take our characters that we’ve been building since ‘This is Halloween: Volume One’ – our first album was a graphic novel in look and style – out of the shadows and bring them forward.

Norman Crates: Every year, we make sort of a centerpiece piece of content. For the first couple of years, we made fake movie trailers for the album. If you watch [the one] for ‘The Sequel,’ we made one during COVID. It was very difficult to make at the time but came out really funny and good. Then, we made a trailer for ‘The Return.’’ Then with ‘Scream Warriors’ – the album is the most terrifying album ever made. But it’s also the soundtrack to a movie that you haven’t seen. When we premiered the album at our listening party, we put everybody inside the Dolby Theater, and we turned out all the lights and made them listen to the record for 45 minutes straight in the dark. It was scary, and it was amazing, and people were cheering. the idea of that was for everyone listening to imagine what the film is in their head. So after that, we ended up making a short film using some pieces of music from that record and that short film – it’s called ‘Tell Alice I Love Her.’

BD: Who did you work with?

DeepKutz; We worked with a filmmaker who actually did our ‘Every Night’ video that we filmed in Spirit Halloween. He’s an up-and-coming horror film director and writer named Mitchell V Slan. It was super fun to partner with him and his team. When we told him the idea and how ambitious it was, he saw it as such an opportunity to bring our origin story out of the shadows. Personally, as someone who’s watching horror films over social media, I think found footage really works on the platform. So, we all felt like this was a really great way to scare people without it being a performative, highly-curated movie.

Norman Crates: It was filmed over a long weekend. We shot here at the studio, at Delusion out in Pomona in the mansions out there – the Phillips Mansion and the Courier House.

DeepKutz: That’s where they do the Delusion on John Braverman’s Delusion Immersive Experiences, which are not to be missed. We were so excited that Delusion was down to partner with us and let us use the space for a whole entire evening. While being in there, we actually think the place is haunted. We have footage of a true haunting. I’m gonna run as BTS where we opened the door and a voice told us to stop. All of the actors could feel people behind them. They were freaked out.

You can listen to LVCRFT’s ‘V’ on Spotify now.