“We’ve gone from a jack-o’-lantern to a plastic pumpkin:” Creeper on the best horror-themed albums
Two Octobers ago, on Friday the thirteenth, Creeper released their third album, Sanguivore, a sprawling, electrifying glam-rock concept record centring on vampires. This Halloween, they’re following it up with Sanguivore II: Mistress of Death. Writing a sequel was new territory, especially for a band who, much like their chosen subject matter, tends to kill off and rebuild their artistic iterations after each record. “I imagine Creeper like American Horror Story,” guitarist Ian Miles tells Guitar.com. “It’s the same cast, but a different theme per season. And this is Season Sanguivore.”
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Sanguivore II doesn’t continue the first record’s storyline, but instead pivots to exploring a different set of characters within this fictional universe. Set against the backdrop of the Satanic Panic, Sanguivore II follows a hedonistic vampire rock band, played by Creeper, as they’re chased by a vampire hunter called the Mistress of Death. Bodybuilder Sarah Page takes on the character of the “anti-hero,” as Miles calls her. “We were very typical cliché rock stars, and so it’s the Mistress’s job to hunt us down and end our reign of terror,” Miles elaborates. “Will [Gould, frontman] was really keen on the idea of it being a powerful female to turn that role on its head.”
Creeper often play with conventions – particularly regarding gender and sexuality – in their music and visuals. “We’re not a serious political band, but we like to challenge when we can,” Miles explains. That comes from the hardcore scenes they grew up in. “Ethics has always been deeply ingrained in everything we do. But that’s not what we’re telling you,” Miles laughs. “What you’re getting is silly gay vampires dressing up and running around and drinking vials of blood like they’re cocaine.” He’s referring to the music video for Blood Magick (It’s a Ritual), which subverts rock’n’roll excess.
In the opening of Blood Magick, after the swaggering guitars, and before the verse kicks in, “There’s that little motorbike revving guitar part, and then a squeal,” guitarist Lawrie Pattison details. It allowed him to tap into a particular sound. “I just have a lot of fun doing that kind of shit,” Pattison explains. “That’s where the virtuosos I got into when I was a teenager – like Steve Vai and Joe Satriani and Frank Zappa – that’s where those guys come into my playing style a little bit more. That’s what works really well for this record, because it’s that eighties metal vibe.”
Sanguivore II leans into that era and embraces bigger, pop-style singalong choruses than its predecessor. “We wanted to make this record more anthemic, more of a hard rock record,” Miles says. It also marks a shift in tone between the two Sanguivores. “We’ve gone from a jack-o’-lantern to a plastic pumpkin,” Miles laughs.
They’ve dialled up the humour, which has always been integral to Creeper. “In this band, we’re a bunch of goofballs, aren’t we?” Miles asks his bandmate. “We’re a bunch of idiots.”
“When the six of us are together, it’s just chaos, but very silly,” Pattison agrees. “It sounds like a bunch of kids in a playground.”
Pattison had been a session player for Creeper since 2021 and joined the band full-time shortly after the release of Sanguivore. “After touring Sanguivore I with Lawrie fresh in the band, we felt like we unlocked a new part of Creeper with dual guitar work,” Miles says. “We never really had that before.”
They were then able to take Creeper’s guitar playing to another level. “We’ve worked on harmonized parts together purposefully built for the live setting, to try and put fucking those big guitars back in rock music,” Miles enthuses.
Having two guitarists opened up a lot of new possibilities, whether it’s playing at the same time or more of a back-and-forth, like for the solo on blistering single Headstones. “It feels like a question-and-answer, that classic call-and-response thing,” Pattison adds.
For Sanguivore II, and playing live with Creeper, Pattison has stuck to Charvels. “The first time I played the Charvel, must have been a couple years back now, [I] just had a quick little go on one in the music shop, and was just like, ‘Man, I feel like it’s been custom built for me,’” he elaborates.
Miles alternated on his choice for guitar. “There was something about holding that white Gibson James Hetfield Explorer in the studio, and lots of the rhythm, the big chuggy parts, I was just like, ‘Oh, this feels just right,’” Miles says. He opted for his Gordon Smith on the lead parts.
And the album does feature some intense lead parts. The nearly six-and-a-half-minute epic album closer, Pavor Nocturnus, showcases Creeper at their most expansive – it has an interlude that runs close to two minutes, going from sweeping piano accented by strings to a wailing guitar solo to dramatic choir vocals. “The outro was going to be shorter, and then we were both just like, ‘We need more time for our solos,’ because we felt like we were rushing them,” Pattison recalls. “Initially, we just went once around the chord progression each and we were both like, ‘Nah, we’re gonna have to double this,’ double both of the guitar solos, double the piano solo as well.’”
It’s a suitably grand conclusion for the album, capturing the band’s all-out approach to music, as well as narrative and worldbuilding. In the same spooky blood-soaked vein, we asked Miles and Pattison to pick their five favourite scary records for Halloween:
Misfits – Famous Monsters (1999)
Miles: “The first visual representation [of Misfits] I saw when I was younger was the video for Scream! which is obviously massively Halloween-coded. It’s the first video I ever saw with blood in it. So that was a big first look into… horror music in general. And seeing that video when I was younger, I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is like all the B movies that I grew up watching secretly away from my mum’s eye.’”
Slipknot – Iowa (2001)
Pattison: “I remember seeing Slipknot videos on TV when I was a kid, and it was before I really knew their music, and this was when some of their videos could only be shown past 10 p.m.
“I turned the TV down a little bit because, you know when you’re watching a horror movie, and you’re like, ‘If I turn the sound down, it’s not scary anymore’? I don’t know what age I would have been, but I remember seeing it and being kind of freaked out… It’s just so hectic, visually. To be fair, that was probably before I’d really gotten into horror movies in general. It’s weird to think that it was probably bands more so than movies that became a gateway into horror movies for me.”
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Murder Ballads (1996)
Miles: “That flips what we’ve been talking about on its head in terms of, aesthetically, it’s just some dudes wearing suits, but the music on that record – you don’t need a visual… It conjures up the image in your head, and it lets your imagination do the work. And the content of the songs is scary. I remember [the] first time, listening to that record. I just had to stop and sit and listen to the words and be like, ‘Oh my God. He’s getting away with writing lyrics like this? They’re literally all about killing people.’ And some of them are so beautifully subtle as well. That record is aggressive, scary, dark and timeless.”
AFI – All Hallow’s EP (1999)
Miles: “They just opened my eyes to a whole new view of music, rather than it just being something that I would sit and listen to and enjoy sonically, it added a new element of visuals to it for me, which has become, obviously, super important with where we are as a band… Marrying the image and the audio is something that resonated with me from being a big movie nerd as well and it’s like, ‘Oh, people do that with music.’”
Honourable Mention: The Cramps – Off the Bone (1983)
Miles: “I listened to The Cramps [for the first time], and I was like, ‘This is fucking sick.’ And I could see why the likes of Tiger Army and AFI reference The Cramps, because you can hear it in their music, the more psychedelic surf-rock and the fucking punk rock attitude that The Cramps have.”
Creeper – Sanguivore II: Mistress of Death (2025)
Pattison: “I think the stuff that I do like about Halloween is the stuff I liked about Halloween when I was a kid, and it is the more kitsch, silly, fun things, rather than the really horrific horror stuff. And I think that’s the cool thing about this record, is that it’s just fun… The video for Prey For The Night does that so well, because it’s fun and it’s silly, but you can still see the horror elements in there. It’s still a vampire story.”
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