I am a night owl, so it’s normal for me to stay up until 3 AM working, watching a movie or playing video games. I am also a fan of concerts and live music. Still, it was highly unusual of me to drive into downtown Hollywood at 10 PM, stand in line outside of an establishment called Club Bar Sinister and mill around a stage for a concert that didn’t start until 11:30 PM, when many sensible almost-30-year-olds would be at home. Any tiredness or apprehension evaporated as an almost vampiric figure dressed in black from head to toe took the stage, and with a guitar in hand serenaded the assembled goths and geeks, witches and weirdos with songs about brain-craving aliens, dancing skeletons and zombie prostitutes. 

To list all the accolades and occupations of Cuban-American artist Aurelio Voltaire Hernández would take a lot of time and page space. To present a truncated list, he’s a stop motion animator, author and director. He’s been called the “Martha Stewart for macabre homemakers” by the New York Times. He’s “the Halloween music guy.”

For the past 30 years, Hernández has worked as a professional musician performing under the name Aurelio Voltaire, or just Voltaire. Most people of my generation know him from his work crafting songs for the 2000s Cartoon Network show The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy or from Daria Cohen’s fan-animated music video for his song The Night, which currently has over 56 million views on YouTube. When I asked him how he describes his style of music, he said, “If you put Johnny Cash and Dracula together, you get me.”

Check out the full interview with Aurelio Voltaire below:

Voltaire shared, “Like Johnny Cash, a lot of the songs are whimsical, maybe even humorous, but he also had a lot of really hard hitting material, and if you pick up any album of mine, you’re going to find a mix of things that are serious and really heartfelt,” Voltaire said. “You’re going to find things that are spooky and whimsical, and you’re going to find things that are completely ridiculous. The one thing that never, ever changes, is that all of the songs are stories. So I ultimately consider myself more a storyteller than I am a musician.” 

While his music has had a dark flair for the macabre and mentions of spooky creatures, Voltaire didn’t realize that people consider him “the Halloween guy” until a recent review of his Spotify statistics revealed a consistent spike in his listenership around October. Some artists might find this seasonal-only listenership frustrating, but Voltaire embraces it and even named his current musical tour the “Halloween Forever Tour.”

“There are so many people for whom every day is Halloween that I really thought that I could just bring that Halloween flavor to every show on the tour,” he said. “This tour started in April so I was doing this Halloween show in Phoenix, Arizona when it was 120 degrees. If you walk through a Spirit Halloween presently, you’re going to hear my song Raised By Bats on the official playlist. Halloween has become such a huge part of my life,” Voltaire said.

The love of all things dark and creepy brings joy to Voltaire and his fans now, but the root of that love comes from a painful past. Facing bullying and abuse both at school and at home, Voltaire found solace in the horror films that would play on television like Dracula, The Wolfman, and Godzilla. He often says that monsters were his “first friends.”

“I was already surrounded by monsters, but I was surrounded by human monsters,” he said. “I learned the hard way that, for example, just because someone’s a priest doesn’t necessarily mean they’re good or that they’re incapable of evil.Then I turn on the TV and I see Dracula, the Wolfman and King Kong, and I sort of immediately have this reaction of like,’ Oh, they’re monsters,’ but I start to realize that they’re safe. They’re honest, they’re easily recognizable.

“And then adults around me would then see me as a small child gravitating towards zombie movies and vampire movies, and they would be mesmerized. ‘How could this little boy not be afraid of these monsters? I’m an adult and I’m terrified of them?’ That made me feel powerful. So for the very first time in my childhood, there was something about me that made me seem like I was in control and made me seem like I had some kind of power,” he said.

Sensing safety in those shadows, Voltaire turned it into a lifestyle and to this day embraces the goth aesthetic when he dresses. Though in recent years horror and gothic style has become more normalized and socially accepted, he still encounters people who try to poke fun at him.

Voltaire said, “People come up to me in a bar, for instance, and they’ll go, ‘Are you a vampire?’ I’m like, no. This happened just a couple days ago. He’s got a Yankees cap, Yankees shirt. Like, do you think you’re a member of the Yankees?” he joked. “I love my life…and I don’t know if any of this would be here if I experienced a childhood full of kindness. If my very first memory of being a human on Earth wasn’t as dreadful as it is…I don’t know if I ever would have gravitated towards horror, towards goth music, towards the gothic subculture. Here we are, and I like to believe that I’ve made the best of it.”

Voltaire’s commitment to goth goes beyond clothing and guyliner. His New York apartment, which he dubbed “the Lair of Voltaire,” is full of horror themed trinkets and furniture that he has either purchased on his travels or crafted himself. For the past ten years, he has hosted his own YouTube show called Gothic Homemaking with Aurelio Voltaire in which he showcases the eerie decor available in shops, travels to fun and spooky destinations and teaches viewers how to craft their own horror themed recipes and furniture.

The show gained a following and was eventually noticed by the New York Times, which ran a story about him and gave him the mantle of the “Martha Stewart for macabre homemakers.” With this newfound recognition, Voltaire was approached by Quarto Publishing Group to create a book of spooky DIY crafts. 

For about a year and a half, Voltaire worked to develop the crafts and recipes for the book, combining both the greatest hits from his YouTube show with brand new creations. His initial plan was to work on the book the same way he works on Gothic Homemaking and create things in the moment as inspiration strikes him. The folks at Quarto had different ideas and required him to provide an outline of everything he would include in the book upfront. 

“For the very first time in my life, had to come up with the concepts for all of these things that I was going to make before I ever made them,” he said. “So I’m writing the names of all of these projects, the great majority of which I have no reason to believe are going to work. Let me tell you that making that book was 50 percent surprises and 50 percent crying.”

This is not the first book on Gothic style that Voltaire has written, and he said his  guiding principle when writing is to focus on accessibility and inclusion, ensuring that people of all skill levels could find projects they would be interested in. 

“There are people who are going to pick up this book who have been crafting for a decade, and there are going to be people who pick up this book who have never folded a paper in half,” Voltaire said. “I truly, truly dislike the concept of gatekeeping, and I find it very ironic especially in the Gothic world, where so many of us who who found our way to this culture because we were bullied. If you’ve experienced bullying, how could you bring yourself to bully other people, you know? So the very first objective, above and beyond creating a book that was visually stunning, was making sure that everybody who picked it up saw themselves in the book.”

Voltaire’s creative endeavours also extend to film. Though he got his start in entertainment as a stop-motion animator and even did some work for MTV, he has since moved on to live action film, with small roles in horror films like The Velocipastor and Nosferatu alongside actor Doug Jones. Most recently though Voltaire tried his hand working both in front of and behind the camera by writing, directing and starring in the upcoming film The Demonatrix. The film, inspired by one of Voltaire’s friends who was a dominatrix that lived across the street from a church, follows a dominatrix that accidentally summons a demon and must team up with a priest, played by Voltaire.

“I just used to get such a giggle out of that…and I always thought to myself, ‘What if her mail was accidentally delivered to the church and the priest had to come over to give the mail to her?’” Voltaire reflected.

With YouTubeing and directing under his belt, Voltaire hopes to one day focus on creating a “spooky travel show.” Due to his work as a touring musician, he often films travel episodes of Gothic Homemaking where he showcases spooky shops, bars and other locales in the places he performs like Salem, Scotland, Mexico and Malaysia. 

Travel shows can often veer into the realm of exploiting the culture and people they are showcasing. With his content, Voltaire seeks to maintain a level of respect. For example, one of his episodes explores Isla de las Muñecas in Mexico where, according to local legend, a man allegedly went mad after finding the body of a drowned girl and began hanging dolls all around his property. Many commenters on the video expressed how impressed they were by his level of humanity and how rather than sensationalizing the island full of dolls, he brought compassion and dark beauty into the episode. 

“It really is a matter of perspective, right? I have my perspective of why I’m going there and what I hope to encounter. My mind is open, I haven’t made up my mind about what I’m going to encounter,” Voltaire said. “My goal is different from that of the more exploitive, non scripted television world when it comes to reality shows. Let’s be very frank, they make their money by reeling people in because they’re going to show them something demented and weird and and they’re going to villainize someone. I want to learn, and I want to show you what I learned.”

When it comes to showcasing culture, as a Cuban American, Voltaire’s Latino heritage is important to him and often helps inform his work. Spanish was his first language and when listing his identities in order of importance,  “human would always be the first one, and then after human it would be Cuban, and then after Cuban, it might be goth.” Recently though he has become more in touch with Mexican culture as he has spent more time in the country with his Mexican-Japanese fiance and singer Mayumi Toyoda. 

“Five years ago, I was in Mexico City performing there…and I fell in love with Mayumi Toyoda…and I subsequently have been living in Mexico City and in New York City. We’re almost always together, and now I speak [with her] almost exclusively in Spanish, and it’s not just Spanish, it is really a Mexican Spanish,”he said. “When I filmed the demonatrix, when, you know, I played the part of priest whose name is Father Veto, I made him a Mexican priest and I bought all of his clothing in Mexico. I’m still Cuban, but my attachment to Latin American culture is now a lot stronger with Mexico.”

Latin culture has become more prominent in the mainstream American consciousness, especially in horror with films like The Curse of La Llorona, this year’s “Monstruos : The Nightmares of Latin America” haunted house at Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights and holidays like Dia de los Muertos. In Voltaire’s experience and estimation, contemporary American horror tends to lean into slashers and ultraviolence and leans into villains like Michael Myers and Jason Voorhies for similar reasons that Japan created Godzilla: to process a lot of the violence and trauma that society has experienced. Meanwhile, Latin and especially Mexican horror takes its cues largely from folklore. 

“I think that American horror tends to lean more towards the slasher element and the torture porn element because we live in a meat grinder. We live in a place where anybody can buy an AK-47 and walk into a shopping mall because they had a bad day and gun people down,” he explained. “In Cuba, the line between witchcraft and Catholicism is there isn’t one. The Spanish brought their tradition of Catholicism to Cuba, so what [the indigenous people] did was they just superimposed the names of all of these Catholic saints onto their gods and carried on with their with their magical traditions.

“In Mexico, a lot of the traditions [and] beliefs that are pre Hispanic are still there to this day. The concept of death was prevalent in daily life as I understand it. I’m not a scholar, so I’m always speaking from hearsay, from stories that have been told to me. But you know, human sacrifice was very common. And then, of course, I don’t need to tell you the level of death that was witnessed once the Spaniards arrived. So Mexican culture is…more aware of death than American culture is, and frankly [has] a more healthy outlook on it. And meanwhile, in America, we’re just afraid of death.”

There is an idea among film scholars and writers that all horror is political and that the genre has always been tied to politics. Voltaire personally does not share that perspective and feels that some horror can simply stem from “flights of fancy,” but some of the ideas he explores in his film seem very apropos to the current political and social climate of the United States. 

“We live in incredibly polarized times, and while this was not the impetus for making the film, one of the things that I really want to get across with The Demonatrix is that people can be friends [and] they don’t have to agree with each other,” he said. “To the untrained eye, you might say the priest is good, the dominatrix is bad. And that’s the world that we now live in, where if you vote for the wrong person, if you vote for someone I am not going to vote for…you’re bad and I can’t talk to you. This world is becoming really fractured. I think it’s extremely dangerous. And I want to show that two people who are on complete opposite sides of of life can, in the very least, be good neighbors. Is that political?”

For all his comfort around things that others might deem spooky and nightmarish, what does the King of Halloween really love about the season and what could possibly frighten this Master of the Macabre?

“My favorite thing about Halloween is jack-o’-lanterns, and it’s such a goofy answer, but you don’t see jack-o’-lanterns any other time of year. There is something about that color orange that connects me immediately to Autumn. Put a candle inside and it just becomes so magical and then, of course, the scary face really is the embodiment of the magic that is Halloween,” he said. “What scares me is having to do a job I don’t want to do well. [I want to] thank…every single person who has ever supported me in any way. You have helped me avoid my one greatest fear, and that’s having to go work somewhere I don’t want to work.”

You can find Aurelio Voltaire’s work on Spotify, on YouTube at “The Lair of Voltaire” and order his book Gothic Life: The Essential Guide to Macabre Style. 

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