At 30 years old, this terrifying piece of media has cast a long shadow over my life
Cleaning the house is an unavoidable part of death. Earlier this year I found myself rifling through a basement full of my dad’s physical media: 244 vinyl records, 714 CDs, 148 singles, 395 DVDs and Blu-rays and TV box sets, two sun-kissed LaserDiscs, and dozens of custom mixtapes of music and comedy recorded on cassettes. Essays from film school. Letters to the editor. Half-finished poem drafts dating back decades. Poems for my mom. Poems for ex-girlfriends. A poem he wrote when he was cleaning out my grandfather’s house:
deciphering
the detrita
of the dead father
looking for the man
among the tax receipts
searching for the redundant
pin number
to unlock the atm
of the storehold
of meaning
that was his life
— from “dust” by Eric Malone, September 1, 2000
I came home with a stalwart commitment to decluttering my own stuff, donating and selling all the superfluous items I own. Immediately undermining that were three CDs I brought back, despite me not owning a car or a CD player, which I couldn’t bear to donate since they were the soundtrack to my youth:
Over Under Sideways Down: A Comprehensive Collection 1963-1968 by The Yardbirds
Blueberry Boat by The Fiery Furnaces
Dr. Demento Presents: Spooky Tunes & Scary Melodies
Rhino Records released Dr. Demento Presents: Spooky Tunes & Scary Melodies in 1994, which means it’s about to celebrate its 30th Halloween. And here’s where I stand bravely on the edge of a 30-year-old release and announce: This was way too scary. And in the last three decades, no horror movie, no creepypasta, no Momo fan art, no Marble Hornets video, has ever rattled me the way this one novelty CD has.
Then the masthead of Split Tooth came to me, hat in hand, and asked me to contribute to this year’s October Horror series. I couldn’t think of a horror film in recent memory that I could responsibly or originally write about, but I did remember this cursed Halloween compilation CD I brought into my home. Here’s something nobody will ever tell you: One day you are graduating with a BA in journalism, the next you are mining your darkest childhood memories for content.
Nothing will prepare you for the day you have to re-acquaint yourself with what scared you the most as a child. When this CD came into my life, I was not old enough to read, which is why I was largely fixated on the album illustrations while listening, entranced and repelled in equal measure gazing upon the art design.
The cover made an indelible impact on me. The only way I can put it: My eyes beheld an eerie sight. The hand-drawn art depicts a handful of creatures partying in the woods: a mummy with green skin and bandaged limbs, whose gauze is unraveling as they wave their hands in the air; a slightly greener witch standing behind a bubbling cauldron sitting on an open fire; an even greener Creature from the Black Lagoon (I’m guessing) playing the didgeridoo (I said I’m guessing); a purple cat and werewolf dancing before them; a child with a jack-o-lantern head sitting on the ground and playing the bongos; a ragamuffin with blue skin and fangs playing the guitar. This scene is taking place under a purple night sky and a yellow full moon. It’s a miasma of terror. Everybody is cackling. This is fun for them.
On the back cover, pairs of shifty, squinty, furrow-browed eyes are peering at you from beneath the track listing. It’s harrowing!
I was also pre-media literate. I did not understand camp, or irony, or pop culture. I did not know what a “novelty compilation” meant, and I wasn’t able to appreciate it from a safe distance. Instead, I took Dr. Demento’s work at face value and thought these songs were about reality. I listened to this album as a Pictures at an Exhibition-style documentary about the world around me and my place in it. And what I learned was that monsters are real and they live with us on this Earth: claw-handed janitors. Vampires. A perfectly coifed werewolf at Trader Vic’s. A disproportionately tall woman. 3D graphics of severed heads that fall right in your lap. Three harmonizing ghouls named Dave Lambert, Jon Hendricks, and Annie Ross.
I was touring a haunted house, and behind each door was a new horror. Early on in this mix is the 1988 horrorcore pop rap single “A Nightmare on My Street” by DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince, who tell a story about going to see A Nightmare on Elm Street and then being stalked (and carved up) by Freddy Krueger. I was not familiar with neither Will Smith nor the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, but this was how I learned Freddy is a real guy, and he might be on my street. I know this because the Fresh Prince told me so.
I was too young to understand these were made-up stories, or why minor chords have that uneasy effect on my impressionable pre-K brain. Born too late to explore the Earth, born too early to explore the universe, born just in time to incur psychic damage from Dr. Demento.
The CD’s liner notes, in full, credit: Dr. Demento for the compilation, Coco Shinomiya for art direction, Lana Sprout for the design, and Jaime Hernandez for the illustration. I’m listing their names here because there are so few of them, and because they need to be held accountable.
Spooky Tunes & Scary Melodies leads with “Werewolves of London” by Warren Zevon (1978), the opening piano chords of which are enough to make the hairs on my arm stand up, not to mention the lyrical imagery of “a little old lady got mutilated late last night” and werewolves with Chinese restaurant menus.
This is followed by two hip-hop tracks, “A Nightmare on My Street” and “The Haunted House of Rock” by Whodini (1983). Then comes “Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman,” by Tubes (1981), a nod to the 1958 sci-fi horror flick. I don’t know what scared me more as a kid, a 50-foot woman in a 5-foot dress stepping on all the men, or the band name “Tubes.”
Then there is a midcentury throwback run of “Castin’ My Spell” by The Johnny Otis Show (1959), a tight jam where Otis and Marci Lee describe the step-by-step recipe instructions and ingredients (including a black cat, a cave bat, and also a hog jaw, a dog’s paw) going into a monogamy hex so “you’ll never, never be untrue”; “Halloween Spooks” by Lambert, Hendricks & Ross (1961) in which the jazz trio describes the startling sights outside (probably just trick-or-treaters); “Bo Meets the Monster” by Bo Diddley (1958) in which the blues legend faces off with “a one-eyed purple people-eater;” and then “My Son, the Vampire” by Allan Sherman (1964), about his offspring’s insatiable craving for bl-UUUUHHH-d.
These tracks employ some original SFX: the ghouls in “Halloween Spooks” are cackling, howling and warbling out some melted vocal harmonies, Bo’s monster is, uh, motorboating, and Sherman’s track rhythmically uses the ratcheting sound of a socket wrench, which to me always embodied a vampire’s jaw clamping down on someone’s neck. I don’t know! How else should I interpret it?!
But then Dr. Demento puts his foot on the gas for its closer, “Nature Trail to Hell” by “Weird Al” Yankovic (1984). This is quite simply the scariest song I have ever heard. An original composition by Weird Al with notably zero accordion, this is a send-up of a featurette for a fictional 3-D slasher movie — and the moment when Dr. Demento’s compilation breaks the fourth wall and grabs the listener by the throat. In this movie, a “homicidal maniac” encounters a Cub Scout troop “and he hacks up two or three in every scene.” Al also slips in a subliminal backmasked message: “Satan eats Cheez Whiz.”
Taunting and beckoning the listener to see this gory spectacle before the inevitable sequel, Al sings: “So bring the kids along, it’s good clean family fun / What have you got to lose? / If you like the 6 o’clock news / Then you’ll love ‘Nature Trail to Hell.’” Al was clear: This isn’t a game; this is real. There’s worse stuff on the local news. You best start believing in horror stories; you’re living in one. This was my introduction to Weird Al, and for years I associated him with raw terror before I ever heard “Albuquerque.”
Earlier this year, the distributor Neon put out an animated movie called Robot Dreams. Since it’s a dialogue-less narrative, the score and needle drops are integral to the story. During a Halloween-set sequence, the protagonist (a dog named Dog) is handing out candy to trick-or-treaters at his door; he keeps trying to startle his visitors with his vampire costume, but keeps failing to impress the blasé kids, and even smears ketchup on his bloody fangs to really scare them. This sequence is soundtracked by “(It’s a) Monster’s Holiday” by Buck Owens (1974). Buck sings about waking up in the middle of the night to find “gremlins, goblins, dragons and zombies” in addition to Frankenstein, the Wolfman, and Dracula.
Why doesn’t the Buck Owens song scare me like every track on the Dr. Demento mix? Why is it that I am an adult with a 401(k), and a Weird Al song still sends a shiver down my spine, but this Buck track is just a playful earworm? Buck’s collar-tugging oh-gosh characterization of the monsters is only in passing, whereas those of the Dr. Demento songs luxuriate in the horrific details. The message of Buck’s song (I’m running away from these monsters) and the perceived threat (“screaming and moaning, waving and groaning”) is much more tame from those of Johnny Otis and Marci Lee, who are openly admitting to practicing witchcraft and dismembering housepets. There’s a vast difference, and the tracks on Dr. Demento’s CD are more stark, and evocative and serious business.
On a whim I shot an email about Spooky Tunes & Scary Melodies to Dr. Demento, ethnomusicologist, veteran radio DJ, and architect of my nightmares. To my surprise he responded within minutes.
“So glad you were terrified and engrossed – that’s exactly what we were aiming for!” he wrote. He said the cover art came from Rhino’s art department. “I had no input in that, but I thought it was cool.” This was a budget CD, he mentioned parenthetically, and it was paired with another CD of spoken-word tracks, Scary Stories: Frightening Tales for Halloween.
Interestingly, he mentioned that he had considered this Buck Owens track for the mix, “but in the final stages of programming this show, I somehow forgot it. It’s been featured on my Halloween show in past years.”
“There certainly were more tracks I could have included,” he added.
My dad was a prolific curator of mixtapes and sequencer of playlists. I re-created around 120 of his original cassette mixes as Spotify and Apple Music playlists. Ninety-eight of these were his series called “Music for Baby Boomers,” which were programmed for road trips and other special occasions, and each entry has a tacit unifying theme.
Earlier this week I was on a run at night at a nearby park, where the haunted hayride was set up: houses where intestines dangle from the ceiling, rusty farm tools mounted on walls, busted old cars whose hoods are billowing fog, a hay-covered trail lined with blood-splattered and clown-wigged mannequins. Though the attraction was closed and nobody was around yet, you could hear theremin music playing on the amps placed around the park, and the looping narration for those on the hayride about what a sight they were passing.
I was revisiting Baby Boomers playlist #26 while running by the hayride attraction. This playlist was tiptoeing around a Halloween theme: “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder. “I Ain’t Superstitious” by Jeff Beck. And suddenly, to my surprise, “Castin’ My Spell” by Johnny Otis and Marci Lee started playing with that hypnotic refrain: You’ll never never be untrue. You’ll never never be untrue. You’ll never never be untrue. According to my dad’s original playlist, which listed the albums he pilfered each track from, he ripped it from the Dr. Demento CD, of course. And when playlist #26 was finished, the Spotify algorithm immediately queued up “Werewolves of London” by Warren Zevon.
And again I was parked back at track one of Dr. Demento Presents: Spooky Tunes & Scary Melodies, suspended here in eternal return and repeat. Look, I understand that likely no one else is going to claim that this is the worst or scariest thing out there, but it is for me. Just as every millennial you know can cite a VHS cover they saw in Blockbuster that haunted them, this specific sequence of tracks is the ultimate in terror. We’re talking about formative damage that’s been wrought by one CD. I will be cowering every time I hear Zevon’s hook of descending piano chords. I’ll be here forever, dancing and playing the bongos with these monsters around the bubbling cauldron. I’ll never never be untrue.
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