Kid Cudi Talks About Introducing Daughter to Horror Movies When She Was 8

Ahead of the release of X on Friday, Kid Cudi stopped by Late Night with Seth Meyers to talk about why he loves watching horror with his daughter.

The rapper and actor—who appears in the new Ti West-directed slasher film—reflected on his relationship with the genre, saying he watched his first scary movie when he was just seven. “I had older siblings, they were always playing stuff and I would be curious to see what they were watching,” Cudi said. “I think the first horror movie I ever watched was Night of the Living Dead, and then Evil Dead and Freddy Krueger.”

Cudder was asked if he made horror off-limits to his daughter, who turns 12 in a couple weeks. “You see, Seth, when I had my child…I thought about all the things I could mold her to be,” he said, pointing to his desire for her to be a gamer because he wanted “Call of Duty:Zombies to play with someone.”

He wound up introducing her to horror when she was eight, after she expressed a lot of curiosity in the genre. “I said, ‘Okay, I think you’re old enough to watch something.’ I think It came out at that time,” he said, to which the audience appeared shocked. He carefully monitored his daughter’s reactions, but she seemed unfazed. “She’s just like, ‘Why they following that clown?’ … She has these commentaries during the movies, and she says the realest stuff. It’s like, ‘I feel you, kid.’”

Elsewhere in the interview, Cudi spoke about becoming friends with Cincinnati Bengals player Joe Burrow, whom he said he “wrote a love song” for. “They won the game because of my song,” he said with a laugh; Meyers added he “forgot” to sing a song for the Super Bowl since the Bengals lost. Cudder told the host that he’d love to appear on ABC’s sitcom Abbot Elementary in the future.