When Liam Payne died, his fans and peers condemned the trappings of fame.
More than 100,000 people have signed a petition in support of legislation to safeguard the mental health of musicians since his death on Oct. 16, though there’s still so little known for certain about what happened to the singer and former member of One Direction before he fell from his hotel room balcony.
Robbie Williams, a fellow former boy band member, responded to the tragedy by calling for change in the way society treats celebrities, saying, “I am the problem if I do nothing. We are the problem if we don’t.” Bruce Springsteen also reacted, saying, “Young people don’t have the inner facility or the inner self yet to be able to protect themselves from a lot of the things that come with success and fame.”
Payne, who skyrocketed to success at age 16, previously spoke about his struggles with addiction and mental health through the peak of his fame. He’s far from the only pop star to speak up. Chappell Roan, whose popularity has escalated astronomically over the last year, faced backlash for calling out how fame can be “abusive.” It’s often something media outlets and fans apologize for after an artist has already suffered, as seen with Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston.
The horrors of pop stardom are so ingrained in culture that they’re the basis for three 2024 films.
Smile 2, which has had the biggest opening weekend of any horror movie this year and is now in theaters, follows a singer as she launches a comeback tour a year after suffering a tragedy. Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) isn’t just haunted by a parasitic demon hellbent on ruining her life — her own mega-stardom is torturous.
The film shows Riley pushing herself to endure fittings, photoshoots, meet-and-greets, stalker encounters and physically demanding rehearsals. She’s in recovery from substance abuse disorder, but her mom/manager forbids her from canceling charity event appearances or pushing back tour dates, reminding her of how fans and investors are counting on her. A photographer not-so-subtly prods her with a command of “give me more!”
“Music gave me everything I ever wanted, but then again, music almost killed me,” Riley says at an event when her teleprompter isn’t working, requiring her to go off script. When someone urges her to “think about the tour” — a possible nod to the oft-memed statement Justin Timberlake made to police after being arrested on DWI charges in June — Riley asserts, “F*** the tour!”
Writer-director Parker Finn told Entertainment Weekly he was inspired by Spears’s and Houston’s public struggles with fame, as well as members of the “27 Club,” a group of notable musicians who died at age 27, including Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain. In the movie, Riley is 27.
On the outside, it seems like Riley is slipping back into drug use — and that leads to the dismissal of her struggles. Even if she weren’t being slowly killed by a supernatural being, her treatment by the public would have been the same. They are complicit in her suffering.
In Trap, a thriller that hit theaters in August, law enforcement uses a pop star’s concert as a trap to catch a serial killer known as the Butcher (Josh Hartnett) who’s attending the show with his daughter. Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan pitched the film as “what if Silence of the Lambs happened at a Taylor Swift concert?”
The pop star at the center of the film, Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan), consents to the “trap” but accidentally becomes deeply involved in capturing the killer. She has more agency in this film than Riley has in hers, but that may be in response to the fact that real-life pop stars rarely do. A 2017 terror attack on an Ariana Grande concert killed 22 people, and Swift canceled tour dates in Vienna after a terror plot was exposed. Both were pressured to get back on stage quickly, despite their trauma.
In a short titled “Dream Girl” in the horror anthology film V/H/S/Beyond, which started streaming on Shudder in October, a Bollywood star named Tara is confronted by her manager after an intense performance of a pop song.
A paparazzo, who earlier said that the pressures of stardom shouldn’t be so overwhelming for her because of her wealth and success, approaches Tara in her trailer, which he had been hiding in. He tells Tara that she shouldn’t let herself be pushed around, and in response, she reveals that she’s a robot and begins terrorizing and killing people.
It’s an over-the-top gorefest, but the character endures the same kind of berating that Riley does in Smile 2, and that so many real-life pop stars face. She just gets to do something about it.
These films all followed the success of concert films that captured Swift’s “Eras Tour” and Beyoncé’s “Renaissance World Tour.” Instead of focusing on the jubilance of an onstage performance and the joy of fans, horror finally allows pop culture to confront the darker side of musicians whose lives have been picked apart on a massive scale.
Even when audiences aren’t demanding constant performances, stars still feel the pressure. That’s confronted in Sunset Boulevard, a 1950 movie that has an adaptation on Broadway starring pop star Nicole Scherzinger, and the new horror flick The Substance — both about aging starlets taking drastic measures to stay relevant.
If horror isn’t afraid to confront the demands of stardom, why are we? The genre is notorious for reflecting what’s truly terrifying society, from McCarthyism to terrorism and AIDS.
Maybe this time around, we can recognize what horror is reflecting back to us and do something to make it stop.
