The first time I saw Scare the Children was at a free Halloween concert at Temple Bar in Beijing around 2015. Temple was one of the city’s essential underground venues, hosting free rock and metal shows throughout the week, and this particular advertisement immediately caught my attention: a horror-themed, masked and costumed band. Halloween or not, that alone was enough to get me through the door.
What I found was a band unlike anything else in the local scene. The drummer doubled as the vocalist, driving synth-aided metal songs that rarely eased their grip. Their music carried hints of nu metal and horror metal, but with an almost relentless philosophy of attack, recalling Mushroomhead pushed to its most aggressive extremes. There were no obvious ballads or moments in Scare the Children’s music designed to let the audience breathe.
Their costumes were equally memorable, including crude but strangely charming creations like a dead baby dressed in a sailor outfit. It was theatrical, unsettling and, above all, entertaining.
Only later did I discover that Scare the Children were formed largely by expatriate musicians living in Beijing. That revelation made the band even more interesting. Over the following decade I interviewed the band several times, watching both the musicians and their mythology evolve. Those conversations now span three distinct eras: Odyssey (2018), Tales (2023) and Forsaken (2026). These albums tell the story of a band whose greatest strength has never simply been horror imagery, but the construction of an evolving world.
Of course, being an expatriate band in China is not without its problems, so the first time I interviewed Scare the Children was about this topic. When I asked drummer/vocalist Psy Sadako whether performing behind masks offered any advantages as a foreign band in China, his answer went beyond anonymity: “We are not seen on stage as a foreign or Chinese act but just an immersive experience.”
Rather than presenting themselves as a Chinese band, a French band or an expatriate band, Scare the Children presented a horror universe that could exist wherever a stage was built, being completely at home within China’s underground music scene while simultaneously existing outside of any national identity. The band avoided becoming isolated within the expat bubble.
For Sadako, the key to existing as a foreign musician in China was becoming part of the local scene itself. “Don’t try to please foreigners,” he explained. “Be part of the Chinese scene. Create relations with the ones who work hard to make metal alive here.”
In 2021, Scare the Children were still largely defined by Odyssey, their debut concept album built around the haunted doll Betsy. Guitarist Vlads explained that every song was designed to advance one continuous narrative. The story followed Betsy across decades as she lost and searched for her original owner.
On stage, the band’s visual identity was connected to the haunted doll concept, with the members portraying figures from that world. Sadako admitted the concept emerged less from elaborate planning than conversations over drinks: “Hey, let’s make songs about horror stories… why not dress like it too?”
Even then, however, the band’s ambitions extended beyond costumes. Each member had begun developing an individual character with its own history, while Vlads described an ultimate goal that went well beyond a conventional metal concert: transforming the performance into a complete theatrical production with actors, props, and scene changes.
The prophecy was quickly starting to become fulfilled as Scare the Children in 2021 became a bigger, beefier version of the band I had first seen at Temple Bar, with masks hanging off of their instruments and Sadako taking vocal duties. The band now had a towering, monstrous, stringy-haired front person to focus on.
By 2023, though, Sadako relocated from Beijing to Bangkok, where he took over the long-running Immortal Bar, later becoming Afterlife Bar, while other members scattered across different countries. On paper, this could have marked the end of the project. Instead, Scare the Children’s next album, Tales, broadened the band’s mythology.
Rather than one continuous narrative, each song became its own horror story inspired by the stage characters themselves, drawing influence from Tales from the Crypt and classic EC Comics. The music also grew heavier as new members brought different influences into the writing, while Sadako, no longer responsible for drumming, focused entirely on vocals.
Scare the Children performed one show at Afterlife in Bangkok in 2024 before the band’s home base shifted once again. By 2026, the monsters had returned to Beijing, while also beginning to appear on international festival stages.
Through the changes, one constant remained: the characters. Once the musicians disappeared under the grotesque and frightening costumes in Scare the Children, nationality ceased to matter. Whether the members lived in Beijing, Bangkok, Los Angeles or elsewhere, audiences encountered the same monsters. The characters travelled more easily than passports ever could.
Speaking with Sadako again in 2026, the band’s mythology had expanded beyond haunted dolls and urban legends into something more philosophical with the album Forsaken. “What happens when you die?” became the album’s central question. Death was no longer the ending of horror stories but the beginning of them. The characters transformed: Lady Sadako evolved into the Raven Witch. VLAD became multiple personalities trapped inside one body. Yuriko returned as a vengeful spirit. MORt transformed into an ancient shapeshifting ghoul.
These were no longer costumes attached to musicians. They had become beings continuing their existence after death. The album even hides its own narrative puzzle, with the capital letters in the track listing spelling “FOR A LIAR TO GRIEVE”, another reminder that nothing inside the Scare the Children universe exists accidentally.
The band’s visual identity has always developed alongside the music. From Odyssey onward, Scare the Children have been producing music videos that serve as an introduction to the band’s strange universe. The video for “The Seduction of Little Timmy” captured the early aesthetic, while later videos such as “At the End of the Rope” expanded it, showing the band moving further into their own mythology as the individual characters became more defined. By the time of Forsaken and the video for “InfesTer”, the horror moved into the album’s themes of death, memory, guilt and transformation.
Today, the band is expanding beyond its original underground roots. Sponsorship partnerships have been springing up, such as with ear technology company NFACOUS. Their 2026 schedule includes appearances at Xyyp Music Festival in Mongolia and Rock the Lakes in Switzerland, appearing alongside international acts including Powerwolf, Arch Enemy and Mushroomhead.
For Sadako, these appearances are another opportunity to prove the band’s place on larger stages. It is a fitting attitude for a project that has spent years building its own mythology. Much of that mythology is documented in my book The Underground in China: Metal, Punk, Hardcore and Noise, 2013-2021. Scare the Children appear throughout, with bassist Marco also providing insight into the experience of being an expatriate musician in Beijing and his years performing in different projects.
Looking back, what strikes me most is how little geography mattered. I first encountered Scare the Children as an unusual masked band playing a free bar show in Beijing. Years later, after lineup changes, international moves and three rounds of interviews, the impression still holds: monsters belong everywhere.