“I’m Janelle Monáe. And we are in spooky season. And to be in this iconic closet is a nightmare come true. Or is it a scream come true? Hmm.”
So begins Monáe’s venture into the Criterion Closet. Shot and released ahead of Halloween, the actress and singer stayed on theme, wearing mostly black and keeping her selections to the frightful, dystopian, and surreal. First on her list was the 1958 version of “The Blob” starring a young Steve McQueen as he tries to protect his hometown from a gelatinous alien life-form that sucks up everything in its path.
“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 gonna consume all of us, so beware.’ So it’s super campy,” Monáe said in describing the film. “All the actors and everybody involved, 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.”
Selecting a different kind of scary movie, Monáe went on to discuss David Lynch’s debut feature, “Eraserhead,” and how the confusion around the film adds to its mystique.
“I remember watching this and getting to the end and being like, ‘I have no idea what the fuck this film is about, but I love it.’ It’s so bold,” said Monáe. “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 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.”
After picking up Michael Radford’s adaptation of George Orwell’s “1984” and discussing it alongside other futuristic sci-fi like Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” Monáe also compared the film with Terry Gilliam’s similarly dystopian “Brazil.”
“I think they use a different tone to talk about it. Like, humor is used in this,” Monáe said of how “Brazil” and “1984” compare. “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.”
Monáe’s final grab was George A. Romero’s 1968 spooky classic, the original “Night of the Living Dead.” In describing it, she called it “one of the most iconic horror films of its time and even now” and went on to state that it wouldn’t be Halloween without a viewing of the film.
Watch Monáe’s full Criterion Closet video below.
