JACKSON CULP AND THE COMPANY DRAG YOU INTO THE DARK WITH THE “DOWN HONEY” VIDEO

There is a moment early in the new “Down Honey” video where Jackson Culp walks into a Louisiana forest at night and the trees simply swallow him whole. No dramatic music sting. No horror movie flourish. Just a man disappearing into the dark as if the woods had been waiting for him all along, patient as moss, unhurried as fog on still water. It is one of the most quietly unsettling images in recent music video memory, and it sets the tone for everything that follows.

Monroe, LA-based indie-rock band Jackson Culp and the Company have spent the better part of four years building one of the most self-contained and singular sonic worlds in independent rock. Their debut album “WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SKULL BOY?” released earlier this year, earned genuine praise from both regional and national media for a sound that draws comparisons to Nick Cave, Queens of the Stone Age, and the Arctic Monkeys, filtered through the swampy heat and mystery of a murky bayou. Every note on the record was written, recorded, produced, and performed by Culp alone at his studio in West Monroe. The result is an album that feels genuinely evocative, a seven-track gothic narrative following a decaying, once-powerful character who enters an arrangement he does not fully understand, the kind of deal made at a crossroads where no one checks the fine print.

The video for “Down Honey,” the album’s opening single and most searing track, expands that world outward and does it on real Louisiana ground. Culp and cinematographer Kylie Cichocki spent two nights on a friend’s property and a nearby wooded trail filming what they actually encountered: plants, insects, animals, water, fog, and whatever else the forest decided to put in front of them. The video was not planned so much as discovered. The locations directed him to what to include. That instinct to trust the real over the constructed gives the footage a texture that no studio setup could manufacture. You feel the humidity. You hear the night breathing.

Watch “Down Honey”.

The visual influences Culp cites reveal a filmmaker’s mind working at full capacity and with genuine strangeness: John Carpenter’s The Fog and Vampires, Dario Argento’s Inferno, Pumpkinhead, the 1951 Alice in Wonderland, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Cheshire Cat grinning from a branch in the dark. These are not arbitrary references. They are the building blocks of a visual language that holds color and whimsy right up against genuine menace, the exact tension that makes the best vampire rock tick, the feeling that the beautiful thing in front of you also has teeth.

What makes “Down Honey” remarkable as a video is how cleanly it serves the song without explaining it. The track is built around desire, consequence, and the moment a person makes a decision they cannot take back. The video places that psychology inside a forest that beckons and consumes in equal measure, something out of a fever dream fairy tale where the path through the woods is also the trap. Culp describes the album’s protagonist as being lured deeper into a mysterious world, and the video captures that pull in its most literal, most atmospheric form. You watch him walk in. You do not entirely believe he will walk back out.

Jackson Culp and the Company are not chasing trends with their vampire-rock. They are doing something stranger and more patient, building a world from the Louisiana ground up, one haunted chapter at a time, with the unhurried confidence of something that has already decided it will outlast you. “Down Honey” is the door in. The forest is already waiting on the other side.

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