Design has always been a powerful medium for rap artists, helping them define the genre’s visual language from its beginnings in the 1970s, when hand-drawn party flyers littered the Bronx, to the 2000s, when glossy music videos and album covers proliferated. 

While hip-hop imagery often reflects the harsh street environment that produced the music, or the aspirational wealth that seeks to transcend it, its artists have long injected occult symbols and horror-inspired iconography into songs and visual packaging. This lineage, though little known, has existed as long as the genre itself, helping its practitioners ramp up shock value and excavate societal injustices ranging from slavery and segregation to historic homicide rates. 

U.S.A. hits NYC

In the late 70s and early 80s, rap music’s fascination with horror was mostly limited to a handful of artists cheekily referencing the classic movie monsters of the past. Songs like Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” and Jimmy Spicer’s “Adventures of Super Rhyme” were early hits that name-dropped Dracula, while glam-rocker Edgar Winter experimented with the genre on “Frankenstein 1984 (Monster Rap).” 

A wider embrace of dark themes in hip-hop soon followed with the emergence of “horrorcore.” The subgenre took the violent and often anti-social lyricism of gangsta rap to its most macabre and disturbing extremes. One of the essential horrorcore albums from 1994, U.S.A. (Under Satan’s Authority), by Brooklyn rap trio Flatlinerz sported a striking cover befitting the dark, murderous music inside. Set against a blood-red backdrop, the group is flanked by masked and skeletal figures, who seem to be conducting a shadowy ritual beneath a raised white cross. 

The same year that Flatlinerz released U.S.A., another New York–based group emerged to help bring horror-tinged rap to the foreground: the Gravediggaz. Their 1994 debut, 6 Feet Deep, took the subgenre to previously unexplored depths. The core and foundational horror of 6 Feet Deep is the slave trade, whose torture and violence are ubiquitous themes. The “madness” and pain the group expresses in songs like “1-800 Suicide” and “Diary of a Madman” are less rooted in macabre fantasy and more in how the descendants of slaves today live with generational trauma.

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The psychological implications of this trauma are also conveyed through the album’s stark, claustrophobic cover. Shot and composed via collage by veteran photographer Christian Witkin, the cover depicts the four group members, dressed in black, against a bright white background. Framed in a slightly disorienting, two-point perspective, the men peer directly into the eye of the camera — and thus the viewer — wearing expressions ranging from stoic to angry and ecstatic. Frukwan holds the point of a knife to his eye; RZA sports long, vampire-like canines. 

Memphis mixtapes get macabre

While northern acts like Gravediggaz and Flatlinerz were making noise, a delightfully unhinged rap scene was in full swing down south. 

In 1995, Memphis-born Three 6 Mafia — not yet the mainstream icons they are today — released the album Mystic Stylez, a dark, brutal sendup of the Southern Gothic aesthetic for the hip-hop generation. The cover is built around a simple, yet affecting image of the group hoodied and masked up in a crucifixion scene. The text plays up the dark and macabre imagery with the words “Three 6 Mafia” and “Mystic Stylez” in a bloody, B-horror–influenced font. 

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Also in the 90s, Memphis rap trailblazer Tommy Wright III released a slew of hardcore tapes fueled by real-life horror. The cover for 1994’s Ashes 2 Ashes, Dust 2 Dust, for example, depicts Wright — shovel in hand — digging a grave in a Memphis cemetery. This chilling image and the album’s murderous lyrical themes evoke the violence and trauma that permeated Memphis in the 80s and 90s, when the city faced record homicides.

Music videos go to Hell

While the horrorcore acts of the 90s never truly took over mainstream rap, the era’s influence paved the way for modern hip-hop artists to explore their dark side, often through playful or pointed visual subversion. 

In 2001, the cover of Tech N9ne’s Anghellic depicted the underground rapper as a fallen angel being crucified. As Tech N9ne screams in agony in a close-up photo for the cover, the CD booklet reveals shots of his bloody wings bound by chains and his arms with iron spikes driven through them. The result is a brutal, hellish spin on traditional religious imagery. 

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The cover of rapper Cage’s 2002 album Movies For The Blind directly referenced John Carpenter’s classic 1988 horror/sci-fi film They Live (known for its scathing critique of Reagonomics). Released less than a year after the collapse of the Twin Towers, the album presents a gory vision of post-9/11 New York. The unabashed images of violence, homophobia, and misogyny that Cage spouts throughout the record feel like an updated and amped up version of Reagan’s 80s.

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Today, hip-hop’s horror-inspired visual tradition lives on through music videos. 

Trippie Redd’s 2021 single “Demon Time” feat. Ski Mask The Slump God is a manic collision of demonic imagery and slasher film aesthetics. Directed by Tyler Griffin, the video finds The Slump God and Trippie Redd — complete with two stylized devil horn braids — committing murder in a dimly lit motel room. The duo is also shown performing the song with their clothing covered in violent blood spatter. 

Rapper/singer Doja Cat put her own spin on demonic imagery in rap with her 2023 single “Demons.” Pulling visual inspiration from The Exorcist, she dons all-over black body paint, red eyes, horns, and a tail as she seeks to possess and terrorize a young woman in a dark bedroom. The video is another entry in a long line of satanic imagery in popular music that aims to shock viewers and challenge established norms around religion and respectability. 

Lil Nas X’s 2021 video for “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)” evokes the image of Satan with a playfulness and homoeroticism that hadn’t previously been seen in hip-hop. The absurdly colorful and psychedelic video, directed by the rapper and Tanu Muino, plays like a reverse redemption story. Lil Nas X’s character opens the video playing guitar and chilling in an idyllic Garden of Eden–like paradise. From there, he is tempted (or killed?) by a serpent, uncoiling himself from the biblical tree of knowledge. Halfway through his ascent to heaven, Nas is tempted once again as a stripper pole descends from the sky, beckoning him into the depths of hell. He obliges. Once there, Nas finds the devil seated on a fiery throne atop a glowing pentagram and, through a seductive lap dance, takes over the role of tempter before snapping the devil’s neck and claiming his place as the king of the underworld.

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Despite its lighthearted, party-centric origins, rap music has always possessed a palpable darkness. Perhaps, then, hip-hop’s fascination with the macabre is an attempt to embrace — and even exorcise — the poverty, struggle, and trauma from which it was born.