The Horrors - Sheena is a parasite

What this video is

Released April 2006 as The Horrors' debut single on Loog Records, 'Sheena Is a Parasite' arrived at a moment of intense UK indie ferment, post-Franz Ferdinand and contemporaneous with the rise of angular post-punk revivalists. The song title and lyrical DNA draw explicitly from The Ramones' 'Sheena Is a Punk Rocker' and The Cramps' 'Sheena's in a Goth Gang,' positioning The Horrors as conscious inheritors of punk…

Why it matters

A landmark artifact of mid-2000s UK horror-punk, this video crystallized the aesthetic convergence of garage-rock minimalism and body-horror surrealism. Cunningham's return to music video directing—his first in seven years—lent the project outsized critical weight. The track and video together…

The director

English music video director and video artist born in Reading, Berkshire, 1970. Pioneered visceral, body-horror-inflected music video aesthetics with landmark works including Aphex Twin's 'Come to Daddy' (1997) and 'Windowlicker' (1999), and Björk's 'All Is…