Amazon’s Swarm sees Chloey Bailey doing yet another love story as horror

Its opening episode features: Swarm goes hard for the horror — though not quite in the way you’d expect. Janine Nabers, Donald Glover and Donald Glover have created a new Amazon Prime series that reveals the dark underbelly to stan culture. Drawing much of its inspiration from Beyoncé and her Beyhive, the series tracks how Dre’s (Dominique Fishback) participation in and devotion to fandom unravels her life and drags her into incredibly dark places.

Nonetheless, it’s Chloe Bailey’s casting that adds a layer of nuance to Glover’s flashy new series. Bailey, one of Beyoncé’s proteges alongside her sister Halle Bailey, adds a layer of realism to Ni’Jah, the fictional pop star that anchors so much of the series. Swarm is Bailey’s first acting project of 2023 — she is also set to star in Georgetown ProjectHorror thriller. Salute ThisBlack church musical comedy. Between the lyrical and visual aesthetics of her solo music (in addition to her releases as a part of Chloe x Halle) — and her pivotal turn as Marissa in SwarmChloe Bailey clearly finds inspiration in the interplay of horror and love. She seems to be particularly interested in how horror’s aesthetics are influenced by love. Her career choices, and her nuanced portrayal of Marissa in particular, reveal a throughline of horror-streaked explorations of love that has characterized much of her artistic output as she continues her ascent from Radio Disney’s Next Big Thing to one of the premier voices of pop and R&B.

While Dre’s story guides the series, the larger arc of SwarmMarissa provides the foundation for examining how parasocial relationships can spill over into real-life actions and decisions. Marissa’s deeply caring yet at times dysfunctional relationship with Dre, her “sister,” eventually catalyzes the twisted, visceral progression of Swarm’s storyline. Marissa is a relatively more grounded Ni’Jah (Beyoncé in the world of Swarm(stan) than her sister. While Dre is constantly consumed with the buzzing of her devotion to Ni’Jah as a card-carrying member of the Swarm, Marissa is more concerned with pursuing her career as a makeup artist while working her day job at the mall. Dre is loved and supported by Marissa, who provides a home and helps her get out of trouble when it’s necessary.

Bailey plays Marissa with the same earnest tenderness that make her feel so personable and familiar whether she’s acting in Grown-ishInterviewing a reporter on the red carpet. But there’s a darkness there, intertwined with how selflessly she loves and trusts other people. And the way Marissa as a character blends sweetness with darkness recalls Bailey’s own melding of the two elements in her larger musical oeuvre — which is to say that love, or rather Bailey’s capacity to have faith in love and trust her heart, often drives her to periods of heightened emotion best communicated through horror aesthetics.

Photo by Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images

Swarm’s premiere on Amazon Prime comes just a week shy of the five-year anniversary of It’s okay for the kidsThe debut studio album by Chloe and Halle is titled. It was released in 2018, to great critical and Grammy nominations. It’s okay for the kids kicked off the musical careers of the sister duo, and saw them riffing on manifestation imagery and Christian iconography — something they have continued to explore in their careers. On “Everywhere,” the singers display their understanding of the uselessness of prayers without work, while they thread their examination of the relationship with God later on the album with the tracks “Baptize” and “If God Spoke.” While the latter tracks the duo finding solace and security in God’s words, the former introduces their penchant for subverting Christian imagery. “Hold me in the water as you will baptize me / Dunk me underwater, I come out the same,” they sing, transforming the imagery of the Christian baptism into a larger commentary on the inefficacy of submitting to assimilation.

The second album is theirs The Ungodly HourThe sister duo, Chloe & Halle, produced the album. It earned them three Grammy Award nominations. This artwork was created by The Ungodly HourThe Bailey sisters are adorned in silver angel wings and pose side-by-side against a blurry amber backdrop while wearing black, skin-tight mini dresses. Both the album’s title and artwork evoke the story of fallen angels hurtling through a vacuum that connects heaven and Earth. It opens with haunting synth sounds, hypnotic harmony, and come-hither vocalizations reminiscent of the seductive voice of sirens from Greek mythology.

These choices seem to give Chloe an opportunity to show how her love explorations intersect with her fascination with horror. Alongside her sister, she indulges in a murder fantasy spurred by the depths of her love on “Tipsy,” and asks to be loved and held in the “ungodly hour” during the title track. The Ungodly Hour’s darker aesthetic made for an easy marker of progression from Chloe x Halle’s debut album, but the album’s nods to Greek mythology — their fan base’s name changed from Bailiens to Sirens during this time — and horror aesthetics presented the duo, and Chloe specifically, with a way to reconcile their seemingly disparate musical influences and their Disney-fied journey to mainstream stardom. For mainstream pop artists, it is not surprising that a second album will be more sexy and daring than the first. For an artist who was previously tied to Christianity or the Black church, however, the darkest parts of the music are a revelation. The Ungodly HourYou will feel more grounded when you follow a unique, authentic aesthetic. Chloe isn’t necessarily running away from her roots in the Christian church, she’s challenging how she can express her own maturation and sexuality as a coexisting truth (much like her mentor did on “Church Girl”).

Columbia Music

Columbia Music

As an artist who has been working in the industry since childhood and has a solid connection with Disney, it makes sense that Chloe leans into horror — an aesthetic that is almost completely antithetical to the glimmer of the Mouse House — to ground her maturation in the public eye. Prior to signing to Beyoncé’s Parkwood Entertainment as the older half of Chloe x Halle, Chloe appeared in church movie musicals such as Fighting Temptations Joyful Noise. In 2012, she and her sister won the fifth season of Radio Disney’s Next Big ThingIn the same year, Chloe was born in Let It Shine — a Disney Channel Original Movie musical based in, you guessed it, church. Her sister will star alongside her as Ariel in this live-action remake. The Little MermaidLater in the year, and their stints Grown-ish not far behind them, Chloe isn’t that removed from the puritanism of the Walt Disney Company. So, she finds a way to be a woman and an artist through her love of horror aesthetics.

And her work — no matter what medium she’s working in — is emblematic of this: In an interview with Dazed, Chloe cited Grimes, Tune-Yards, and Missy Elliott as some of her production influences, alongside Beyoncé, who has of course inspired her and shaped her sound and performance style. The glitchy witch-pop of Grimes and the experiment loop drums of Tune-Yards don’t have many natural points of intersection with the bombastic populist gloss of Beyoncé, but Chloe bridges the two worlds with her utilization of horror aesthetics.

The merging of those two worlds is, perhaps, best executed on “Have Mercy,” Chloe’s debut solo single. A raucous ode to large derrières, “Have Mercy” blends Beyoncé’s signature rap-sung cadence with hip-shaking production courtesy of Murda Beatz. It is the song’s accompanying music video, however, that more clearly outlines Chloe’s continued penchant for horror, further exploring The Ungodly Hour’s use of Greek mythology as she assumes the role of a Medusa-esque sorority president who seduces dumb jocks and frat guys with her voice, body, and general sensuality.

“Pray It Away,” the lead single from In Pieces, Chloe’s forthcoming debut solo album, continues this blend of tragedy and horror. The song marries Chloe’s explorations of the sacred and the secular as she turns to God to soothe her want for vengeance after being wronged by a lover. She blends praise dancing and gospel choirs with a firestorm of expletives (she begins the song with six of them in a row) and proclamations that her “halo is gone,” a natural progression from the fallen angel imagery of The Ungodly HourThe religious foundation of It’s okay for the kids. The music video for “Pray It Away” finds Chloe dancing in a church in search of some sort of solace from God — her devotion to the purity of love has ultimately driven her to a point where she no longer recognizes herself.

This is the same emotional arc that leads Marissa to her death; when she’s strung out on pills and calling on Dre to be an anchor for her in the midst of a gut-wrenching spiral, it’s that innate sweetness that sets in motion the serial killer sheen of Swarm. Marissa is so obsessed with Dre and her boyfriend that she spends her time pouring her love on them. Marissa is plunged into an emotional depression when she realizes that her two closest friends cannot love her as much. The glassiness of her eyes, the slackness of her unconscious body, and the heart-wrenching desperation in her pleas for Dre to pick up her phone calls make Bailey’s Marissa both tragic and terrifying — this is what love can transform you into. The power of Bailey’s Marissa is, as with so much in her music and lyrics, how it alternates between sweet and scary. Of course Marissa’s death kicks off Dre’s murderous instincts — love, and related feelings that are often misunderstood as love, makes us do crazy things.