Slash says he’d love to write music for a Mike Flanagan horror film

Slash has spent decades redefining what a rock guitarist looks and sounds like. But away from stadiums, solos and top hats, his truest creative obsession has always been horror, the bloodier, stranger and more unsettling, the better.

And now, in a recent chat we had with the Guns N’ Roses legend, he revealed he’d be more than happy to bring that obsession into the studio for one of modern horror’s most respected voices: Mike Flanagan.

The director behind The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor and Midnight Mass came up as Slash discussed the filmmakers who still get him genuinely excited about the genre.

“There aren’t a lot of directors where you can say you love this one, this one, this one,” Slash says. “Usually, someone makes one great horror movie and then moves on. But Mike Flanagan is definitely the newest horror-focused guy.”

When asked whether he’d be up for recording music for a future Flanagan project, Slash didn’t hesitate.

“Yeah! If Mike Flanagan called me and said, ‘I need a riff or a hook for this movie,’ I’d be all about it.”

Slash’s interest isn’t casual. Since 2012, he’s been deeply involved in horror as a producer through his company Berserker Gang, after becoming frustrated by how hard it had become to find genuinely great genre films.

“One of the things that turned me on about producing was being able to get involved with music,” he explains. “Scoring and stuff.”

While he’s not keen on composing full film scores from scratch, Slash is clear about where he thrives creatively.

“I don’t really have the patience to be a true scoring guy, sitting over a console with a time clock,” he says. “But I can write a theme and pieces of music, then work with a composer to flesh that out.”

It’s a process he’s already used on previous projects, building core melodies and working collaboratively to shape them into something cinematic, rather than leaning entirely on guitar-led compositions.

Flanagan, whose work is rooted in mood, character and slow-burn dread rather than jump scares, feels like a natural match for that approach. Slash’s own horror education runs deep: Hammer films in the UK, Vincent Price and Peter Cushing, Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Carpenter’s The Thing, and more recent favourites like The Witch and Let the Right One In.

It’s a shared language of atmosphere and unease, just one that, so far, hasn’t had a Slash riff running through it.

Whether Flanagan ever makes that call remains to be seen. But if he does, Slash sounds more than ready to help and with Flanagan's The Exorcist on the horizon, we reckon he should pick up the phone.

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