Sabrina Carpenter's Tears Music Video With Colman Domingo Takes Cues From A Cult Horror Classic

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It's common practice for music videos to pay homage to famous movies as visual shorthand — from Madonna cosplaying Marilyn Monroe's "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" look in "Material Girl" to The Smashing Pumpkins taking a trip to the moon in "Tonight, Tonight." Now, pop star Sabrina Carpenter is the latest to do this in her new video for "Tears," the second track on her just-released, hotly anticipated seventh album, "Man's Best Friend."

Carpenter released a video for the album's opening track, "Manchild," depicting her as an unlucky hitchhiker. The "Tears" video takes a turn into phantasmagoria right out of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." Carpenter's co-star is Academy Award-nominated actor Colman Domingo, who appears as a Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry) like drag queen lip-syncing to vocals of "Tears," guiding Carpenter to embrace her inner freak.

Now, the song is called "Tears," but it's not about crying or sadness. The whole album is about lust, and "Tears" is no different. Carpenter's chorus includes lines like "I get wet at the thought of you" and "Tears run down my thighs." But that's Sabrina Carpenter's star image; her songs are unapologetic in focusing on sex and desire, and her performing outfits range from lingerie to corsets. Her lyrical sexuality is as unfiltered as Liz Phair's "Exile in Guyville" but delivered with a wink and camp (just like "Rocky Horror" is). Not everyone is on board with her style; the "Man's Best Friend" album, showing Carpenter on all fours with a man holding her hair like a leash, has been accused of evoking everything from BDSM to antifeminism. Carpenter herself remains unbothered. Interviewed on CBS Mornings, she said:

"The album is not for any pearl clutchers but I also think that even pearl clutchers can listen to an album like that in their own solitude and find something that makes them smirk and chuckle to themselves."

The "Tears" video is directed by Bardia Zeinali, who previously directed Carpenter's video for "Please, Please,b Please." The "Tears" video is five minutes long, about twice the length of the song alone, due to a long build-up and epilogue. Carpenter, who is dressed in a blue version of Janet's (Susan Sarandon) pink hat and coat combo from "Rocky Horror," walks away from a car crash. She comes upon a house in the middle of nowhere, just like how Janet and Brad (Barry Bostwick) followed a light to Frank's mansion.

As Carpenter walks towards the house, blood red titling appears onscreen, lettered just like '70 grindhouse horror. While no horrors or mad science are going on in the house, Carpenter still takes a journey as wild as any time warp.

While Frank brainwashes Brad and Janet during "Rocky Horror," he's bringing out their buried desires. He and his minions do literally strip them of all but their underwear after they enter the mansion. The same un-repression happens in "Tears." Sabrina's singing only kicks in once she enters the house, and Domingo (first dressed in a midriff-bearing pinstripe blazer) pops into frame. Along the way, the video threads in references to other horror movies. The initial pinkish red lighting inside the house suggests "Suspiria," but when Domingo pushes Carpenter into the next room — a fully-stacked drag dance floor — that's full "Rocky Horror."

Carpenter next walks cautiously down a hallway as hands stretch from the walls, suggesting (as /Film's Bill Bria noted) "Repulsion" or the Jean Cocteau "Beauty and the Beast." Only these disembodied hands have foot-long, red-painted fingernails. They strip Sabrina of her hat and coat, and with it her inhibition. Clad in lacy white lingerie, she gives herself over to the music, performing a pole dance in a cornfield, a dance in a hall of mirrors with Domingo (cross-cut with extreme close-ups of their glossy eyes and mouths), and more.

Domingo isn't the only part of the song or video breaking gendered conventions. "A little respect for women can get you very, very far," Carpenter sings, because the thing that makes "tears run down [her] thighs" is her man being responsible and caring. That's why it bums her out in the last minute of the video, when she has to kill her "nice" boyfriend with a sharp stiletto heel because, without a death, it's not a Sabrina Carpenter music video.

Compare Carpenter's last horror music video homage, "Taste," featuring her and "Wednesday" star Jenna Ortega brutally, but unsuccessfully, killing each other over and over. Ortega, wearing Elle Driver's (Daryl Hannah) eye-patched nurse outfit from "Kill Bill," shocks Carpenter with a defibrillator. After that, Carpenter tries to ambush Ortega in her shower with a knife, Norman Bates style. But Ortega was hiding a sickle, and she slices Carpenter's own arm off.

Sabrina is of no relation to John Carpenter, but she does seem to know her horror movies. Before she became a singer, she was a child actor. If she ever pivots back into movies, there's got to be a full-length horror film in need of a final girl that's waiting for her.