If there is a video clip director who likes to play with film references, it is Christian Breslauer. As he already demonstrated in his tributes to ‘Kill Bill’ and ‘Forget about me!’, the Floridian director once again uses the cinematographic imagination to construct the aesthetics of the video for ‘hate that I made you love me’, the first single from Ariana Grande’s new album, ‘Petal’.
From the opening credits, Breslauer places the viewer in a universe that refers to the horror and B-series thrillers of the 1950s. The yellow typography (like Ariana’s dress), painted like a brush on a stormy sky, anticipates the combination of romance, black humor and supernatural elements that structures the entire video clip.
The leading role of Justin Long, who has become almost an icon of contemporary horror cinema thanks to titles such as ‘Barbarian’, ‘Tusk’ or ‘Jeepers Creepers’, reinforces that reading. His presence works as a complicit pinch for the viewer familiar with the genre and helps place the story in a territory halfway between psychological thriller, retro horror comedy and ghost moral tale about guilt and its consequences.
Added to this is an aesthetic that combines the idealized suburb of the fifties with echoes of classic supernatural comedies such as ‘The Mocking Spirit (1945) or ‘I Married a Witch’ (1942). Ariana successively plays the girl on the curve, the ghost of the haunted house and the vengeful ghost bride, three emblematic figures of the fantastic imagination that turn the video clip into a small anthology of female ghosts eager to settle scores.
