*Horror Movies was inspired by (and draws from): The Shining, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Evil Dead 2, Hellraiser, Night of the Living Dead, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, The Wicker Man, Videodrome, Sleepaway Camp, When a Stranger Calls, Last House on the Left, The Devil All the Time, Magic, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
Listen to Bobby Guard’s Horror Movies
*all tracks available to share*
RIYL: ’80s Bowie, Orville Peck, The National, Stone Roses,
Siouxsie & the Banshees, John Carpenter / vintage horror movie soundtracks
“Bury Me”
YouTube | Soundcloud | Spotify
“Shelley Duvall”
YouTube | Soundcloud | Spotify
“Franchise (It’s Only a Movie)”
“Laurie Strode”
YouTube | Soundcloud | Spotify
“Horror Movies”
For album reviews:
Stream / download Bobby Guard’s Horror Movies:
YouTube | Soundcloud | wav | mp3
Singles / focus tracks:
Bury Me, Shelley Duvall, Franchise (It’s Only a Movie),
All God’s Children, Laurie Strode, Boys in Blue, Horror Movies
Genres: Art rock, goth, indie, new wave, prog, post-punk
UPCOMING TOUR DATES
with CHUCK (Charlie Beaman):
11/12 – Laramie, WY – The Ruffed Up Duck
11/13 – Salt Lake City, UT – DLC Quarters
11/14 – Las Vegas, NV – Fergusons
11/16 – Los Angeles, CA – Junior High
11/17 – Tempe, AZ – Yucca Taproom
11/19 – Denver, CO – The Skylark Lounge
Oct. 29, 2026 – Denver / L.A.-based queer / nonbinary art rocker Bobby Guard (they / them) is gearing up to release 13-track debut album Horror Movies this week, on Halloween of course. The record was inspired by (and draws from) classic horror films such as The Shining, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Evil Dead 2, Hellraiser, Night of the Living Dead, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, The Wicker Man, Videodrome, Sleepaway Camp, When a Stranger Calls, Last House on the Left, The Devil All the Time, Magic and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.
When Guard was 11, weekends with their dad in Arvada, Colorado, often included a stop at the neighborhood video store, Video & Video Games, where a childhood fascination with monsters and Goosebumps was about to graduate to considerably gnarlier fare. “My dad was like, ‘Let’s see how this goes,” Guard says. “I’ll make sure you’re not grabbing anything too crazy, and if you’re getting freaked out, we’ll cut it.” Soon they were working their way through the classics—Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, all the gloriously gruesome ’80s stuff. Horror movies became a shared language between father and child. More than two decades later, those old video-store excursions have taken on a much deeper resonance with Guard’s sprawling, strange and wildly ambitious Horror Movies. A collision of art rock, goth, glam, synthpop, indie, post-punk and prog, the record takes inspiration from the grimy analog synths, eerie sound design and wild tonal swings of 1980s horror soundtracks, using them as a jumping-off point to explore grief, gender identity, trauma, politics, family and the unsettling business of trying to make sense of the world around you.
A Denver-based singer-songwriter, producer and USC film-school grad, Guard spent roughly seven years working in film production while living in L.A.—designing sets, wrangling props and, on horror shoots, occasionally ‘MacGyvering’ guts and gore—before turning their attention more fully to music. They’ve produced the bulk of their own material, releasing a half dozen singles and an EP collaboration, Stockholm, with Importer from 2019-2022, but Horror Movies is another beast entirely: a five-year undertaking created with longtime friend, co-producer & engineer Taylor Nelson and a killer supporting cast including bassist Bijoux Barbosa, drummer / percussionist Dean Oldencott and pedal-steel guitarist Ernie Martinez. It’s a big, layered headphone record—alternately dark, cinematic, campy, abrasive, theatrical or genuinely beautiful—that channels everything from ’80s Bowie and Echo & the Bunnymen to Siouxsie and the Banshees, John Carpenter, Genesis & Orville Peck. Throughout, Guard treats horror less like a costume than a language—one they’ve been learning since childhood, and whose significance and meaning have evolved considerably for them over the years.
In 2018, Guard’s father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer; by the time doctors found it, the disease was terminal. He died the day after Thanksgiving that year, just as Guard was beginning to take music more seriously following years of songwriting and bedroom recording taking a backseat to their film work. “There were just a lot of shakeups in life,” Guard says. “A lot happened that year. I lost my Dad. I lost my grandma. I lost my cat. I had the breakup of a two-and-a-half year relationship, which was the longest partnership I’d been in at the time, so life just felt like it was falling apart.”
Then came the pandemic. After a decade in Los Angeles, Guard moved back to Arvada and, stuck at home, they subscribed to streaming platform Shudder and plunged headlong into horror again. Only now, the movies they’d once watched for thrills with their dad offered something different. “With horror, you can experience all these really harrowing emotions and discomforts in a safe way because when the movie’s over, it’s just a movie, and you’re back in some stable sense of being,” Guard says. “I started writing these songs with the intention of meditating on horror movies and how we use them to process the world and the scary things happening in it every day.”
Guard knew from the start that Horror Movies was going to be 13 songs (naturally), and that the music should be steeped in vintage horror synths, dirty textures, spooky sound effects and big arrangements with plenty of room for camp amidst the darkness. Guard spent roughly a year at home building elaborate demos with programmed drums, bass, guitars, keyboards, vocals and percussion before co-producer Taylor Nelson—an old friend from high-school choir who’d studied recording through Berklee’s online program—convinced Guard to up the stakes and re-record the songs in a proper studio. The sessions for Horror Movies took place at Colorado Sound Studios, with engineer Don Bearie at the boards. There, the album’s foundational tracks—mainly drums, bass and vocals—were laid down, with Guard taking their time to experiment with adding guitars, synth patches, keys and samples at home over the course of the next year. Between the elaborate demos (which were unfortunately lost in a data transfer mishap) and the final studio recordings, Guard effectively made Horror Movies twice. The long gestation only encouraged the record’s maximalist streak. “I really wanted it to be a big sound. I wanted it to have a lot of flavor. I wanted there to be layers—maybe a guitar line you don’t hear the first time, but that comes to the surface after a few listens. I love the grandiose. I love Pink Floyd’s The Wall, I love Genesis The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, I love Talking Heads Speaking in Tongues, where there’s so much going on, but it all really works together. So I wanted to try something like that. Like, if we’re doing this, let’s do it. Let’s go big. We might not have a lot of money, but we have time, we have creativity, and that will eventually lead us where we’re trying to go.”
If horror gave Guard a safe container for fear, it also offered an elastic way to write about the real thing. Their relationship with the genre began changing during the political upheaval of the late 2010s, as Guard became increasingly aware of the limits of their sheltered suburban upbringing and the horrors unfolding outside of it. On Horror Movies, the slasher film’s most familiar archetypes become loaded with possibilities: victim and survivor, monster and mask, the final girl sprinting through the woods while something terrible closes in behind her. “I love the ways that female resilience or queer resilience, class struggles, capitalism, fascism—all of these very real, pertinent things we encounter on a daily basis, in all of their complexities, also exist within the last 20 minutes of a movie where a woman is getting chased through the woods by a strange man who has ill intent,” Guard says. “And we can project our own ideas of what that intent may be as viewers when it is that masked persona.”
That idea gets intensely personal on “Laurie Strode.” When Guard was 11, their mother—who passed away last year—married a man who, as Guard writes in the album’s annotations, hid his true nature behind “a veneer of public virtue, love bombing, and mediocre gardening.” The marriage lasted 15 years, and watching their mother survive it led Guard to see parallels between her and Halloween’s final girl—not simply as someone who escaped the monster, but as someone forced to continue living with what happened after everyone else has moved on. Their mother had long avoided slasher films because the terrifying men on screen hit a little too close to home. But while Guard was making Horror Movies, something shifted. She became curious about the films behind the songs. Guard took her to a local screening of Friday the 13th, which she found surprisingly fun; together they watched the likes of Sleepaway Camp, The Wicker Man and Death Proof, and she liked the latter enough for an encore viewing the following day. Guard gifted their mother an early version of the album for their shared birthday, complete with pages of annotations explaining its references. “My Mom—God rest her, she passed last year—she was very tuned into the deeper meanings in the films, or at least some of the things I was pulling from them,” Guard says. “She was a thinker. She was a teacher for 30 odd years, so she really was into text and subtext, and it was a blast going on that journey with her.”
Elsewhere on the new record, Guard turns horror’s monsters and misfits toward their own experience. Built around an off-kilter meter, syncopated bass, shimmery synths and the grotesque comic spirit of The Evil Dead, “Bury Me” emerged while Guard was questioning their gender identity. “Just as Queer folk have existed across time yet still are marginalized,” Guard says, “I wanted to raise a middle finger in the guise of a monster.” The song “Shelley Duvall,” meanwhile, is an unabashed love letter to an artist Guard first encountered as a kid watching Faerie Tale Theatre on VHS, then rediscovered as Wendy Torrance in The Shining. Guard bristles at the decades of lazy criticism surrounding Duvall’s performance, and at the exploitation she endured later in life; the song offers a small correction. And the glammy nearly 10-minute post-punk prog odyssey “Franchise (It’s Only a Movie)” drags Hellraiser into the age of late capitalism and techno-fascism, while the title track piles a Phantasm-esque Mellotron choir, orchestral sounds and what Guard calls “a healthy dose of malaise” into the album’s musical haunted house.
Guard’s winding path to making this singular vision of a record began conventionally enough: piano lessons at 6 years old, nine years of practice, and choir through middle and high school. Guard’s choir teacher introduced them to The Beatles via “Yellow Submarine,” opening the door to the possibility that pop music could also be deeply weird. From there, they became obsessed with Pink Floyd, and mom bought them an acoustic guitar junior year, along with an old Hootenanny folk songbook. As Guard’s tastes broadened, the Kingston Trio and The Ink Spots were rubbing shoulders with Tom Waits and the Velvet Underground. At USC, while studying film, Guard started fooling around with GarageBand, playing house shows and eventually venturing onto Hollywood open-mic stages like the Pig ’n Whistle. After college, film work paid the bills while songwriting and home recording continued in the margins, until a series of connections led to a manager and the release of early singles “Hi-Lo” and “Faith Alone” in 2019 and 2020 respectively.
Now, as Guard gears up for the release of their years-in-the-making debut opus, they’ve been in a reflective mood, taking stock, considering what the journey of making this new album has meant, and what they’ve learned along the way. “I had lunch with my old high-school English teacher a couple weeks ago, and he reminded me that, in his class, he always signed off with what might seem like a pretty basic idiom: ‘Be true to yourself.’ I kept thinking about that—”be true to yourself”—it’s a really solid, deceptively simple mantra. While making Horror Movies, I realized what it meant to me—’be true to the intuitions and inclinations you have.’ And that really did guide the way for this record. It was all gut feeling. And really learning to trust myself.”
steve@mythmakerpr.com
