Your Friends in HelI bring on the spook-tacle

Not every band could appreciate the brilliance of a movie called “Clay Zombies 3D,” much less perform at a showing. But the local “spooky acoustic” trio Your Friends in HelI is clearly the band for the job.

The Somerville-based group, who go by the colorful names Shotgun Botsch (vocals/guitar), Mia Culpa (accordion) and Crab Calloway (bass), has a thing for horror — serious, campy and in between. “We have always really loved ghost stories and the macabre in general,” Botsch said. “All our songs are in some way a metaphor for ghosts and monsters. I started off as an illustrator doing band posters (including the one for this event), and wanted to align music with that aspect of storytelling that I love.”

The band will appear at the Capitol Theatre in Arlington Saturday night alongside a showing of the movie (from 2021 but retro in spirit) and a live chat with director Jake Jolley. “I don’t think there’s anything better than this kind of schlocky horror movie experience where people have seen the movie and like to cheer for the best parts.” Such events are right up the band’s alley; they also do an annual “Halfloween” show at the Rockwell, midway through the year from Halloween; look for that in April. “It’s a sit-down venue so we lean into that — We have drag and burlesque, and invite people up from the audience to do songs. It’s our privilege to bring Halloween to people when they least expect it.”

So far Your Friends in Hell have released a pair of digital singles, representing different sides of the band: “Misfits Cover Band” salutes those horror-punk godfathers, while the more recent “When We Were Alive” (appropriately backed by a Cure cover) is a more downcast kind of ghost story. “That song is very much about life and death, and instead of making it a sad thing we made it about living your life with awareness of what’s to come, and cherishing the beauty. We do like to have songs that are meant to be serious and artistic, maybe even a tearjerker. But then we also have songs about Bigfoot.”

To some extent Botsch gets Halloween everyday; he works as one of the scary characters in Barrett’s Haunted Mansion in Abington. “A lot of the other haunts are in warehouses, this one’s in a real house so it’s more legit. I’m normally an introverted person so it’s very freeing when you can put on the makeup and fake blood and get in peoples’ faces.

“We don’t want to be the kind of concept band where novelty is the point,” he says. “It’s more like a guiding point for our songwriting. A song like ‘Monster Mash’ is fine, but we try to incorporate those elements without being cheeseball. We try to live in a fictional universe, since I could never be onstage grabbing peoples’ attention. But a fictional version of me is happy to do it.”