Boy Harsher and Vex Ashley on the Art of the Porn Soundtrack

One unlikely product of the folk horror revival—signaled by the viral success of Ari Aster’s Midsommar, Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, and the eagerly awaited release of the A24 slasher flick Bodies Bodies Bodies—is the emergence of the raunchy camp horror parody. The timing of this resurgence couldn’t work better for Boy Harsher, the experimental dark wave duo out of Western Massachusetts whose electronic sound conjures all things seedy and ominous. With one studio album under their belts, the band—composed of vocalist Jae Matthew and producer Augustus Muller—has already earned a cult following for their lusty, cinematic approach to the electronic genre. Earlier this year, the duo made their directorial debut with The Runner, a Lynchian 30-minute short film released alongside an accompanying soundtrack of the same name, which takes place in the decrepit dive bars, motels, and forested back roads of Western Massachusetts. The eerie film also features an appearance from the British porn actor, and longtime Boy Harsher collaborator, Vex Ashley. Ashley, who works under the name Four Chambers, first approached Muller to score a few of her sci-fi-inspired adult films in 2020, initiating a creative partnership now spans the realms of porn, music videos, and feature films. Below, the trio discuss the art of the porn soundtrack, the downsides of “fucking in the forest,” and their love of campy horror.

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AUGUSTUS MULLER: Vex! How are you?

VEX ASHLEY: I’m good! I didn’t say congratulations yet about The Runner. It is so good, and I’m so stoked for you both.

MULLER: Thank you. I mean, yours is one of the most important parts. What have you been working on since we collaborated?

ASHLEY: I’ve been working on feature films for the first time, so my tits and my pussy are going to be in two actual films, rather than porn films.

JAE MATTHEWS: That’s a good segue for the question I wanted to ask you. If you were to act, either outside of or within pornography, what’s like the character you’d most want to play?

ASHLEY: I think about this a lot. I’d love to play a sci-fi succubus creature, some kind of alien fetus. I like a character that goes from being seen as weak and feeble to, like, annihilating you. That’s my jam. But I was Betty Parris in The Crucible in school—that’s a character with some good energy. I grew up Quaker, but in the most hippie chill kind of way. So, I was always fascinated by The Crucible, and the whole idea of original sin.

MATTHEWS: We’re in Massachusetts now, really close to Salem where The Crucible takes place. Did you like Benedetta?

ASHLEY: It’s not out in the U.K. yet! So many people keep telling me I’m going to love it.

MATTHEWS: There are a lot of really over-the-top, explicit lesbian sex scenes which are so funny. They’re like, “Oh, a dildo made from The Virgin Mary!” and you’re like, “Okay.”

ASHLEY: I have a collectible dildo that’s in the shape of a crucifix. It’s called The Jackhammer Jesus. They had to stop making it, because the religious Right started sending the manufacturers death threats. Now in the sex industry, it’s a prized item.

MATTHEWS: We just have to find a good woodworker to replicate it, and we’re in business.

ASHLEY: I just shot a folk horror porn film in Portland about a guy who was really into whittling his own spoons… so that guy might be up for it.

MULLER: Yeah, I want to hear about that Portland trip.

ASHLEY: We spent a lot of very cold days filming in the forest. Fucking in the forest, in winter, is not ideal at all. The film is going to turn out really good, but I couldn’t feel my feet for days. Are all of the sets in The Runner shot locally in Massachusetts?

MULLER: Yeah, most of it is shot where I’m from in Western Massachusetts. We spent last summer driving to every dive bar within three hours of where I grew up, looking for good places to film.

MATTHEWS: It was tragic though, because during COVID so many great seedy bars and motels and restaurants did renovations, and ripped out all their wood paneling and grimy textured linoleum and replaced it with that “clean” look everyone’s obsessed with now. It was hard to find good spots to shoot.

ASHLEY: I find that sterile Scandinavian coffee shop look so tired. I miss when a coffee shop was velvety and comforting and everything was allowed to decay.

MULLER: Yeah, one of my favorites sets in The Runner is a quick shot of The Runner in the bathtub, and there’s blue carpeting that creeps all the way up over the edge.

ASHLEY:[Laughs] In the bathroom!

MATTHEWS: There was the best color palette in that house, with the garish drapes and the old furniture. The guy who rented it to us was this old man who was losing his vision. The house was in the middle of nowhere, so he couldn’t live there anymore. He would roll up to set every day, and Kris [Esfandiari, star of The Runner] would be running around covered in blood, and he’d say to me, “Man, they get prettier every year.”

ASHLEY:[Laughs] Could he see her?

MATTHEWS: Yes! She had blood all over her face. I was like, “You’re saying weird pervy shit about someone who looks…horrifying right now.” A lot of crazies in the Berkshires.

MULLER: Do you produce all of your own work?

ASHLEY: It’s me and my partner. We do everything in-house, and we started out making films for like 150 quid. We got started because I used to be on Tumblr a lot, and I was like, “Porn is everywhere, but it’s always approached as a product to be sold, rather than as a creative medium to be explored.” One nice thing about Tumblr is that porn could exist there as part of your aesthetic, rather than as a separate entity.

MATTHEWS: Britain has strict censorship rules, right?

ASHLEY: Oh, the British are so archaic when it comes to

sex. That’s why a lot of the porn made in the U.K. is very fetishy. There’s a lot of BDSM and latex stuff, because we’re perverts. We had corporal punishment and private schools for a really long time. But recently, online censorship is making it harder and harder for me to do the kind of work that I want to do.  I feel lucky that I started my career before all that kicked off. But the way people think of porn has changed, I think. It feels like public enemy number one, which is why I think there are so few people doing something creative with it. The porn that’s out there has to be relatively tame and marketable and disposable. I’m aware that at any moment, what I do could be deemed a criminal offense. That’s what’s great about it, but it’s also difficult to navigate.

MATTHEWS: Definitely.

ASHLEY: I went in expecting The Runner to be a straight up horror film with, like, a Boy Harsher soundtrack, but it ended up being this amazing world-building experiment.

MULLER: Thanks. The original idea was to do a live stream, so we decided that wasn’t our thing, so we inserted a narrative into the album.

MATTHEWS: The time we had in pre-production for the movie was incredibly limited. That can either harm your project, or launch it into a weird other world. We had to do some creative problem solving. How do we make a scene feel like one of our songs? How do we work backward from music to make a narrative?

MULLER: Yeah, I mean, it’s an experiment, it’s a movie album. I guess we’ll see what the legacy of this is, and if it’s worth doing again.

MATTHEWS: Vex, how do you think you’re going to feel 10 years from now, looking back on your work?

ASHLEY: I’m not one of those people who purge their old work. I think it’s too easy to pick apart everything you make. Sometimes I’ll go to a porn film festival and see a film that I made ages ago and be like, “Why was I so hard on this? This is really good.” After enough time, you get to see your work the way that other people see it. I don’t know if it’s the same when you listen to an old album.

MULLER: I think the audience plays an important role in how you think of your music. You can be endlessly fixing and mastering an album until you have no idea if it’s any good anymore. But as soon as you play it live, and people respond to it, you’re like, “Oh this is why I made that.”

MATTHEWS: We went to the L.A. premiere of The Runner and I have to admit, I almost passed out in the theater. I’m typically really good about being in front of huge amounts of people, but there we were in a tiny theater, surrounded by friends who support and love us, and I was like, “I have to get out of here.” But I saw a bunch of videos from the Portland premiere, and people were going nuts. Screaming, laughing, dancing. Insane.

ASHLEY: I have to say, one of my favorite things about The U.S. is the way that Americans act in the cinema. You get everybody’s feedback. It’s so different from the U.K., where we all sit in rapt silence, no matter how funny or scary the film is. How did it feel to see an audience react to the film?

MULLER: It was a good learning experience. Watching your film in the theater is like mastering a song—you don’t know what impact it’s going to have. We’d never watched it on a big screen, and it gave me a better sense of how to approach the editing process.

MATTHEWS: It is definitely a psychedelic experience. Working on something forever, and then sharing it? Nothing like that.

ASHLEY: Everytime I watch one of our porn films in a cinema, I’m like, “This is sooo long!” I think the problem with porn is you’re essentially creating a single scene, and when you get down to it, there’s only so long people want to listen to the sounds of fucking. It’s fine when you’re at home, but there’s something about those sounds reverberating around a big empty space that just feels like, will this ever end? It’s even worse if it’s you being fucked!

[All laugh]

ASHLEY: People often ask me when I’m going to make a feature length film, but I really love short film as a medium—you get to present this world to people, without any context, and they just take what they can from it in the short time it’s there. It’s less prescriptive, and what I love about The Runner. You’re dropped into this world and you get to investigate it as you go.

MULLER: We’d definitely like to try and make something feature length that accomplishes that same thing. Also, music is such an important part of what we do, so it’s hard to imagine us making a film that’s not rooted in that. 

ASHLEY: Sound plays such a vital role in both in porn and film. People always assume it’s all about the visuals, but imagine watching a horror film with the sound off. Way less scary. The sound is like the liquid gold that you pour over everything, that brings it to life. You guys scored some of our films, and your music became the beating heart of the entire project. 

MATTHEWS: I think horror and porn share the same ingredients. You know, the thrill. 

MULLER: Hydra was the first one we did together, and it was the first film I’d ever scored. I was just putting sounds down and seeing how they affected the story. I realized that, if I wanted, I could have immediately turned that into a comedy. I had to figure out how to make it sound…sexy. 

MATTHEWS: And how did you decide what sounds sexy?

MULLER: Well, I think it’s about keeping things from being too emotional. I avoided chord progressions, because they have so much mood, and kept things a bit more drone-y. 

ASHLEY: Totally. There was a court ruling a long time ago that produced the official definition of pornography, and the judge famously said, “I don’t know how to define it, but I know it when I see it.” That’s a lot like what you’re describing. There’s not a science to it, sometimes you’re just like, “Ah yes, that has the atmosphere of fuck.” 

MATTHEWS: People often come up to me after a show and say, “I just want to let you, know I fuck so much to your music.” And you’re like, “…Cool!” Do you get interesting attention from fans? 

ASHLEY: The kind that I like the best is when people tell me they play my films in the background at orgies or kink parties. It makes you feel like

you’re part of someone’s experience, and that’s a lot like music. It’s this visceral connection that’s bodily. Especially the music that you guys make. At a Boy Harsher gig, there’s a real sense of bodies, and the music hits you in the chest. It’s so great as an artist to have the ability to tap into somebody’s body, rather than their brain.

MATTHEWS: Oh, absolutely. I’m always the first to say, our lyrics are not, like, going anywhere intellectually. But when you’re playing live, you want to look out and see a massive, rabid wave. 

ASHLEY: Do you remember when we first met, and we were talking about doing a Possession porn parody? We were all like, “Yes!” When are we gonna see an 18+ X-rated Boy Harsher film?

MULLER: We’ve got one in the works.

ASHLEY: Well, good luck! It’s a jungle out there. But I have faith that you guys can make something real special in that regard.

MATTHEWS: Likewise! We cannot wait to see what’s next.