Review: 'Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas: Beyond Halloween Town'

Unlike a lot of Generation X'ers with similar sensibilities to my own, I was never overly enthralled with Nightmare Before Christmas because I don't think there's much of a story there. Jack Skellington's biggest problem is he's sick of Halloween? Sorry, but I cannot relate.

However, I think that a lot of the members of the massive Nightmare Before Christmas cult are mostly enthralled by the movie's images, and that is something to which I can relate. It's a friggin' great-looking movie, with delightful character designs brought to life with marvelously organic stop-motion animation. While I tend to zone out half-way through the movie (which I rewatch more than I would if I didn't have a kid), it's impossible to be a total Nightmare Scrooge because of its style, visuals, and technique.

Baby’s First Exorcism: 10 Movies to Desensitize Your Kids to Monsters and Murder

Every new parent faces the same serious dilemma: When do I first show my child The Exorcist? Age 3? 4? 7? It’s a pickle, indeed, and the answer is a bit convoluted, because if you sit little Johnny or Suzie in front of Regan MacNeil’s pea soup vomiting and crucifix…errr… “play” too early, you might do serious damage to his or her psyche. Wait too long, and your child might spend the rest of her or his life watching the same damn Barney tape over and over, never conditioned to take in hardier fare.

No worries, Big Johnny or Suzie, because I am an experienced parent equipped to guide you down the perfect path toward ensuring your child will one day join you for marathons of horrifying, terrifying, disgustifying movies all Halloween Season long. The key is to systematically expose your child to the following 10 movies guaranteed to desensitize your kids to monsters, murders, and anything else your favorite horror flick may lob at them.

Step 1. Curse of the Cat People

We begin with a film that does not quite qualify as a horror movie despite being a sequel to Jacques Tourneur’s chilling masterwork Cat People. A sequel may seem like an odd starting point, but Robert Wise’s Curse of the Cat People really has very little to do with Tourneur’s picture about a woman with serious sexual hang ups who turns into a blood thirsty panther (or at least thinks she does) whenever she gets horny. Clearly, that movie would not be very appropriate to show to your three year old, but Curse of the Cat People has more in common with Alice in Wonderland. Oliver Reed and Alice Moore from the original film have an over-imaginative little daughter named Ann who finds a photo of her dad’s ex, the now deceased cat-woman Irena Dubrovna, and fantasizes her into existence as a ghostly playmate. Ann also makes friends with an old actress with a penchant for telling especially vivid tales of the Headless Horseman. Curse of the Cat People is ultimately a very charming, moving tale of growing up fit for any tot, but its ghost and scary stories will gives your kid the heads up that there are things more intense than Cars 3 out there.

Step 2. The Wizard of Oz

Review: 'The Comic Book History of Comics'

The history of comics told in comic format is such a simple concept that it seems deceptively obvious, yet there’s little that’s simple about that history and little that’s obvious about The Comic Book History of Comics. Perhaps the most impressive thing about this book (which collects a previously published six-issue comic series) is how much stuff writer Fred Van Lente crams into its 150 pages, tracing the history of storytelling through pictures all the way back to prehistoric cave paintings through the first political cartoons to “The Yellow Kid” to cinematic animation to the superhero era to the congressional inquiry on the effects of comics on juvenile delinquency to the pop-art sixties and finally ending with the underground comics of the seventies. Within this story is genuine drama as Max Fleischer and Walt Disney vie for the crown of animation king and Stan Lee and Steve Ditko clash.

Van Lente’s storytelling has a definite perspective, and one that may rankle comics freaks as he sneers at some of the medium’s more revered figures (Stan Lee; William Gaines) while taking an unfashionably even view of the man who may be its easiest-target villain, noting the numerous accomplishments of Fredric Wertham that have nothing to do with that guy’s dopey crusade against comic books. Most welcome is the isolated profiles of a number of women in the comics industry since women are generally shut out of this story’s primary arch for the usual patriarchal reasons.

Ryan Dunlavey’s artwork is sometimes a bit too cutesy for my tastes, but I liked his outlandish tendency to fuse creators with creations, as when he imagines Disney as a mutant man-faced Mickey Mouse, and there are some clever visual references and in jokes. The cutesiness also gets downright subversive when Dunlavey depicts beheadings, lynchings, and Adam West and Frank Gorshin yucking it up at an orgy.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 277

The Date: July 3

The Movie: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937)

What Is It?: Disney’s historic debut animated feature boasts the studio’s trademark painterly artwork, enchanting music, and darkness. The Wicked Queen and her ghostly mirror adviser are terrifying. Snow White’s escape into a dark wood is the stuff of nightmares, and the Queen’s transformation into an apple-wielding witch (in a sequence inspired by Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) would give a nightmare nightmares. If you can stomach the endless capering of those Seven Dwarves, you’ll find some rewarding stuff in this not-quite perfect Disney classic.

Why Today?: Today is Compliment Your Mirror Day.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 253

The Date: June 9

The Movie: Lonesome Ghosts (1937)

What Is It?: Today’s selection is a mere 8-minute short. Micky, Goofy, and Donald are ghostbusters facing off against a group of bowler-hatted phantoms. Beautifully animated with wonderfully spooky atmosphere. It should’ve been a feature.

Why Today?: Today is Donald Duck Day.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 155

The Date: March 3

The Movie: Pinocchio (1940)

What Is It?: Disney produced its first feature-length animated masterpiece with its adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s story of a wooden boy’s coming of age. With none of the cutesy filler of Snow White, Pinocchio moves forward with exciting momentum and dark adventures. The painterly artistry will make you long for the days before cartoons were made on laptops.

Why Today?: Today is Unique Names Day.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 135

The Date: February 12

The Movie: Fantasia (1940)

What Is It?: Forget The Buggles. Forget “The Monkees”. Forget Help! and A Hard Day’s Night. This is the true birth of music video, and image and sound have never been joined as perfectly as they are in the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, “Rites of Spring”, and “Night on Bald Mountain” sequences. It’s impossible to imagine the Disney of today having the guts or honesty to depict evolution as it does in “Rites of Spring”, and it’s no surprise that this was one of the sequences excised in the lame Fantasia 2000 version.

Why Today?: Today is Darwin Day.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 1

The Date: October 1

The Movie: The Adventures of Ichabod… (1949)

What Is It?: On this first day of 366 Days at the Drive-In, I’m easing you in with a mere short—the second half of Disney’s package film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Feel free to skip through the first half of the film, which is an adaptation of Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows. It’s not very Halloweeny at all. The second half, quite faithfully based on Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, however, delivers the seasonal goods. The songs are aces too. Bing Crosby's “Headless Horseman” should have been to Halloween what his “White Christmas” is to that other holiday.

Why Today?: On this day in 1971, Walt Disney World opened in Bay Lake, Florida.

Review: 'RKO Radio Pictures Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy Films, 1929-1956'

As the company that put out Val Lewton’s psychological horror productions, Merian Cooper and Ernest Shoedsack’s giant ape pictures, and Disney’s greatest run of animated fantasies, RKO Radio Pictures certainly has a reputation for producing major genre pictures from the 1930s through the fifties. The studio’s genre output should be enough to inspire a book’s worth of quality history and criticism, but that’s not really what we get in Michael R. Pitts’s RKO Radio Pictures Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy Films, 1929-1956. The author includes a wealth of movies he admits are neither horror, science fiction, nor fantasy. For example, he tosses in a ghost-free western called The Black Ghost because Lon Chaney, Jr., is its star, and Chaney was in a lot of other movies that actually were horror pictures (I guess if RKO produced Of Mice and Men that would be in here too). Even worse, he fills the majority of his 382 pages with really, really thorough synopses of these films. I’m not sure for whom Pitts intended this stuff. Anyone who has already seen one of these pictures does not need to read its synopsis. Anyone who hasn’t wouldn’t want to for fear of having the whole plot spoiled. Each entry also includes complete cast and crew specs, a bit of history, some blurbs from vintage movie reviews, and a smidgen of Pitts’s own cursory critique, but anyone who writes about the Amos ‘n’ Andy movie Check and Double Check without dealing at all with its treatment of race and use of blackface clearly isn’t thinking very deeply about film, culture, or history. Considering that he dismisses those who’ve kept the “Amos ‘n’ Andy” TV show off the air since the sixties as the “political correctness crowd,” he’s probably a guy who’s better off keeping his thoughts to himself anyway.

Review: 'Toons in Toyland: The Story of Cartoon Character Merchandise '

In early 1981, Reagan appointed a new FCC commissioner named Mark S. Fowler who fell in line with the president’s “deregulate everything” philosophy. Consequently, kids’ TV shows could now hawk toys with impunity, though cartoon producers didn’t get around to taking advantage of the new regime for a couple of years. However, they didn’t drag their oversized feet when it came to turning illustrated characters into toys. In fact, that kind of thing had been going on decades before TV existed, way back since the Yellow Kid became a phenomenon in the late 19^th century. Comic and cartoon characters found lives outside newspapers, funny books, and television for decades as stuffed animals, bubble bath bottles, and PEZ dispensers, as well as featured faces on lunchboxes, record sleeves, pajamas, Halloween costumes, Christmas ornaments, Valentine’s Day cards, Little Golden Books, View-Master reels, cars, motel signs,  food packaging, and even envelopes of vegetable seeds.

Colorful images of the sundry merchandise manufactured between the Yellow Kid and Fowler eras is the main draw of Tim Hollis’s new book Toons in Toyland: The Story of Cartoon Character Merchandise, but there are plenty of tidbits that make the text equally fun. Whether he’s hipping us to the paranoid economic reasons behind Disney’s reintroduction of Mickey Mouse’s Depression-era look in the seventies, relaying the mutual hatred of rival lunchbox companies, or simply mocking the often horrid representations of such characters on the merchandise in his vast personal collection, Hollis is an entertaining tour guide… and quite the cartoon character, himself. In his introduction he explains how he created a museum containing recreations of the rooms in his childhood home. And I thought I was a nostalgia freak.

Monsterology: The Headless

In this ongoing feature on Psychobabble, we’ve been looking at the history of Horror’s archetypal monsters.

Dracula. The Wolf Man. The Frankenstein Monster. If there’s one thing that all of these fellows have in common, it’s that they all have heads. Dracula and The Wolf Man use the mouths embedded in their heads to bite you. The Frankenstein Monster’s head is what houses the abby-normal brain that sends him on murderous rampages. Without their heads, these guys are much less threatening. They probably couldn’t do much of anything at all.

Review: 'The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad/Fun and Fancy Free' Blu-Ray

Despite its reputation for taking disturbing stories like “The Little Mermaid” and “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and cutesifying them for toddler consumers, Disney has produced some of the scariest sequences in children’s cinema. Millions of kids remember the wicked queen from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, the demon from Fantasia, or Dumbo’s nightmare hallucination giving them their first serious scare at the movies.

Such moments have always been my favorites in Disney films, which is why my favorite of all the studio’s cartoons is the relatively underrated The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Disney’s short adaptation of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” brings that story’s climactic chase between a cowardly schoolteacher and a headless horseman to life with punishing intensity. The horseman’s first appearance on screen with a blaze of crazed cackling, stinging music, and a zoom that forces the viewer into his saddle is as scary a shot as you’ll see in any film for young or old viewers. The subtle, windy, Halloween night atmosphere that precedes it builds to that horror magically.

Most viewers come away from The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad remembering the chase scene above all else. The film has a lot more going for it than that, particularly some surprisingly memorable songs sung by Bing Crosby (“The Headless Horseman” song is a Halloween carol that should have been), and even more surprising considering Disney’s overstated reputation for diluting the classics, an incredible degree of faithfulness to the original story. Crosby’s narration even reuses a good deal of Irving’s text. And let’s not short change the other terrific animated short that comprises The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Based on Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Mr. Toad’s wild adventure enjoys the same painterly animation and extra-relish narration (Basil Rathbone, to compliment a very British fairy tale) as “Ichabod”. The segment’s Christmas setting makes the package great to split up and savor on our two most popular national holidays.

A less beloved package film is 1947’s Fun and Fancy Free. An adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s “Little Bear Bongo”, in which a circus bear escapes to the wild where he falls in love, is less eventful and artfully illustrated than the usual Disney cartoon. But that’s why your remote control has a “next” button. The following cartoon short, “Mickey and the Beanstalk”, is a big improvement with more atmospheric animation and some of the old Disney spookiness back in the mix (in one delightfully demented passage, Donald Duck tries to axe-murder a cow!). The cross-talking narration by too-precious child actress Luana Patten, puppeteer Edger Bergen, and his wooden charges is kind of annoying, though, as are the spell-breaking live-action interludes in which they appear.

Disney’s new blu-ray edition of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad is available solo and as a package with Fun and Fancy Free. Ichabod is a startling upgrade from the previous DVD edition, which suffered from washed-out color and an almost constant invasion of white specks. The blu-ray intensifies color, wipes out the vast majority of those specks, and maintains a healthy grain. The animated segments of Fun and Fancy free are less textural but still perfectly presentable. The live-action bit, however, suffers from so much heavy-handed noise reduction it almost looks animated too.

The one big gap on the new edition is the lack of “Lonesome Ghosts”. This 1937 short in which Mickey, Donald, and Goofy play amateur ghostbusters against a quartet of spooks was the highlight bonus feature of the 2000 Ichabod and Toad DVD. It’s a shame “Lonesome Ghosts” could not have received a similar hi-def buffing for the new blu-ray (a few other minor extras aimed at very young viewers didn’t make the transition either). In its place is an admittedly substantial bonus feature film with material based in part on another Kenneth Grahame story. The Reluctant Dragon is generally more concerned with showing off Disney’s new Burbank studio than spinning cartoon yarns, but the live action backstage tour hops with cornball nostalgic fun (and looks a lot better in hi-def than Fun and Fancy Free). Because it shares DNA with “Mr. Toad”—and because the two films were released as a Grahame-centric package in 1955—The Reluctant Dragon is a most appropriate bonus feature for this blu-ray. I just wish Disney could have made room for the mere eight-minutes of “Lonesome Ghosts” too. Nevertheless, the new edition of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad is well worth checking out for its vastly superior picture quality.

Cult Club: 'Dragonslayer' (1981)

In this feature, Psychobabble looks at classic cult items beyond Horror and Rock & Roll.

Sound cinema’s first half century had no shortage of magicians, from the Kong-conjuring Willis O’Brien to his greatest protégé Ray Harryhausen, from the filmmaking team that brought L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz to the screen to the one that realized Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes. Of course, no name was so consistently responsible for dazzling fantasies as Walt Disney. Beginning with 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Disney seemed to effortlessly role out fairy tales tailored for children but with enough pure artistic craft and cinematic scope to enthrall parents too. The trend continued beyond Walt Disney’s 1966 death with such box office breakers as The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, and The Rescuers. The latter film was released in 1977, and we all know what happened that year. Suddenly, cartoons would not be good enough for young filmgoers. Adaptations of old fairy tales and talking mice wouldn’t be either. The new generation would require high-tech hardware and state-of-the art effects. The name Walt Disney would instantly seem as though it was echoing from a quainter past. The name George Lucas was roaring in from the future.

Twilight Zone A - Z

“The Twilight Zone” was often directed with great artistry, but like most fine television series, it was a writer’s show. Struggling in a medium still regarded as lowbrow, head writer Rod Serling did much to bring credibility to T.V. writing. In the brief teasers he’d film to set up the following week’s show, Serling often gave featured credit to the writer. His very appearance in these pieces and his famed introductions at the head of most episodes highlighted the starring roles writers played in “The Twilight Zone”. Serling chose some of the very best sci-fi and fantasy authors to assist him in realizing his series.

From the series’ very beginning, Richard Matheson was among the most prolific “Twilight Zone” contributors. His involvement was a true coup considering the impressive bibliography he’d been building since the start of the ‘50s: the tremendously influential apocalyptic horror novel I Am Legend, The Incredible Shrinking Man, the short stories “Death Ship”, “Little Girl Lost”, “Long Distance Call” and “Steel”, all of which he’d adapt for “The Twilight Zone”. Matheson’s “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” was a rare moment of greatness in the series’ uneven final season. Charles Beaumont would do the same for his short classics such as “The Man Who Made Himself” (adapted as “In His Image”), “Perchance to Dream”, “The Howling Man”, and “The Devil, You Say?” (adapted as “Printer’s Devil”), while also contributing such first-rate original scripts as “Long Live Walter Jameson” and “Miniature”. Having also devised the story that would become “Living Doll”, Beaumont was responsible for some of the series’ most frightening pieces. George Clayton Johnson’s scripts and stories were fewer, but the humanity of “A Penny for Your Thoughts”, “Nothing in the Dark”, “Kick the Can”, “The Prime Mover”, and “A Game of Pool” has earned him a place among the most memorable authors who’ve passed through “The Twilight Zone”.

Serling’s work with one of his favorite genre writers didn’t go quite as smoothly as his collaborations with Matheson, Beaumont, and Johnson. He admired Ray Bradbury enough to pay tribute to the author with sly references in “Walking Distance”, “A Stop at Willoughby”, and “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up”, but the men’s working relationship was troubled. Serling wanted Bradbury to contribute scripts from the show’s conception. Bradbury was excited by that prospect. Once the series went into production, Bradbury began accusing Serling of plagiarism in private, citing “Walking Distance” among those he found a bit too Bradbury-esque. Serling later rejected Bradbury’s elaborate first script, “Here There Be Tygers”, for budgetary reasons. “A Miracle of Rare Device” met a similar fate. In the end, only the author’s “I Sing the Body Electric” made it to “The Twilight Zone”, only achieving that after two years of revisions and polite criticisms from Serling. Bradbury’s tale of a robotic grandmother was sweet enough, but failed to capture the heart or awe of the series’ classics. The writer’s stay in the Zone ended there.

Serling and his gang also adapted several stories by outside writers that achieved their greatest renown as locations in “The Twilight Zone”: Lynn Venable’s “Time Enough at Last”, Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life”, Damon Knight’s “To Serve Man”. Ironically, Serling’s love of prose and talent for screenwriting never translated to success as a writer of short stories or novels outside the television universe he created.




Much of the “Twilight Zone” magic radiates from the deep sense of nostalgia in so many of Rod Serling’s scripts. Rarely was this feeling more palpable than in the series’ fifth episode. In “Walking Distance”, a harried ad man steps through a time portal and returns to his childhood hometown where band concerts are still a summertime staple and the neighborhood carousel still spins. The fictional town of Homewood in “Walking Distance” is a thinly veiled stand-in for Serling’s own hometown of Binghamton. No doubt the hectic schedule of running and writing “The Twilight Zone” left him longing for the laziness of that burg in Broome County, New York. Further inspiration struck when he noticed how similar the back lot at MGM was to his boyhood stomping ground. The carousel is a particularly telling touch as Broome County’s signature landmarks are its six antique merry-go-rounds.

October 28, 2009: The Eleven Most Memorable Musical Moments from Monster Movies!

Well, kids, Halloween season is winding down, which means I’ll soon be folding Rock & Roll posts back in among the horror nuggets. To make the transition just a little bit smoother I’ve cobbled together a post that focuses on both sides of Psychobabble’s Jekyll and Hyde persona: monster movies and music. So get on your death shrouds and boogie shoes, because I will now chronologically present The Ten Most Memorable Musical Moments from Monster Movies!

1. “Fort Collins Calypso Song” from I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

When RKO Studios told producer Val Lewton that his next project would have the goofy title I Walked With a Zombie, the cagey director started work on a film that was essentially an adaptation of the Charlotte Brontë classic Jane Eyre reset on a sugar plantation on the zombie-plagued island of Saint Sebastian. Filling in for Brontë’s Jane is Betsy Connell (Francine Dee), a nurse who learns that the Rand Family, for which she has come to care, has a dark past via a catchy ditty sung by Calypso legend Sir Lancelot. When the “Fort Collins Calypso Song” is first heard, Wesley Rand (James Ellison) flies into a fit of rage. Later, Sir Lancelot sings the song in a gloomier rendition aimed at Betsy. Calypso never sounded so creepy.


2. “The Headless Horseman” from The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949)

Disney’s telling of Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” may be the most faithful version of this oft-told tale. Well, that is if you ignore Bing Crosby’s snappy songs. But why would you? For a film that isn’t generally ranked among Disney’s greatest, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad has some truly memorable musical numbers, the best of which is this complex piece in which yellow-bellied Ichabod Crane learns of the headless Hessian haunting the woods surrounding Sleepy Hollow.


3. “Once Upon a Time There Was a Pretty Fly (Lullaby)” from The Night of the Hunter (1955)

Is there a more haunting scene in film than the riverboat escape in Charles Laughton’s masterful The Night of the Hunter? Two young children flee from Demonic Preacher/Big Bad Wolf Robert Mitchum and take to a little wooden boat. Suddenly, the manic, terrifying tone shifts toward the eerily dreamy, and the little girl begins to sing a beautiful song about an escaping fly in an incongruously mature voice (actually sung by former vaudeville singer Kitty White). The journey downriver is accompanied by various tableaux that draw equally on fairy tales and wild nature: a perfectly spun spider’s web; a croaking frog. There may have never been a more transcendentally beautiful marriage of music and film as the “Once Upon a Time There Was a Pretty Fly” sequence, but special mention should also go to Mitchum’s creepy rendition of “Hymn #59” (a.k.a. “Leaning”), which he sings whenever he’s on the hunt.


4. “Willow’s Song” from The Wicker Man (1973)

A lot of viewers stumble into The Wicker Man without knowing it’s a demented pagan musical. The soundtrack is a trove of wonderful British folk songs that comment on the action of the film in unexpected ways. We get to hear Christopher Lee’s port-rich bass as he sings the rollicking “Tinker of Rye” and multiple fine songs by Paul Giovanni & Magnet. Yet no song is as evocative as “Willow’s Song”, sung by Lesley Mackie (who plays Daisy in the film) and lip-synched by Brit Ekland as she frolics in the nude in an attempt to lure Edward Woodward to his doom. Ekland’s voice is not the only phony in this scene—as she was pregnant at the time, director Robin Hardy incorporated a stunt butt to substitute for the Bride of Rod Stewart during her rear shots.

5. “Tubular Bells” from The Exorcist (1973)

William Friedkin had a bastard of a time finding an appropriate score for his little demonic possession opus The Exorcist. After violently rejecting the music he commissioned from Lalo Schifrin, who is most famous for writing the theme to “Mission Impossible”, he resorted to the needle-in-a-haystack method of hunting through random records in Warner Bros.’s music library. That’s when he happened across the yet-to-be-released Tubular Bells, a severely pretentious new age symphony by former Soft Machine bassist Mike Oldfield. Friedkin was so enamored with the creepily tinkling music that he used the first movement of “Tubular Bells, Part 1” as a running theme throughout his film, so there isn’t necessarily one moment with which the piece is best associated. But it became so powerfully linked to the blockbuster that Oldfield’s highly uncommercial album ended up selling in the neighborhood of 16 million copies throughout the world. It’s hard to believe anyone can listen to “Tubular Bells” today without conjuring up images of green vomit and spinning heads.

6. “Puttin’ on the Ritz” from Young Frankenstein (1974)

Mel Brooks was adamantly opposed to the “Puttin’ on the Ritz” dance number Gene Wilder wrote for Young Frankenstein, feeling it strayed too far from the Universal Monster Movie parody at the heart of the film. Brooks had a point, as Wilder’s Frankenstein and Peter Boyle’s Monster high-stepping to Irving Berlin’s standard seems to come out of nowhere, yet it may be the most famous scene in this most famous horror-comedy. The spectacle of Boyle answering Wilder’s lines with a yowled “Puttin’ ona riiiiiiss!” doesn’t sound like the stuff of comedy gold, but it’s the scene’s bizarro incongruity that makes it stand out among the picture’s innumerable gags.


7. “Time Warp” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

The most popular Midnight Movie is also the greatest monster musical, so The Rocky Horror Picture Show has no shortage of revered songs. Still, I doubt that many of the film’s crazed followers would argue that its most supreme musical moment is this insanely catchy rocker that informs squares Brad and Janet that time-traveling ecstasy is just a pelvic thrust away. The three solo spots in the song—Riff Raff (Richard O’Brien) careening from Karloffian lugubriousness to Bon Scott screeching, Magenta (Patricia Quinn) sing-speaking like the Bride of Bela Lugosi, Columbia (Little Nell Campbell) chewing her lines like a Queens car hop—are exhilarating. It’s just a jump to the left…

8. “In Heaven (The Lady in the Radiator Song)” from Eraserhead (1977)

Few filmmakers integrate music as seamlessly into their films as David Lynch. Even the sound of steam escaping from a radiator takes on a musical quality in Eraserhead, although actual music is used relatively sparsely in Lynch’s debut feature. There are a couple of organ pieces by Fats Waller and this childlike ditty sung by Peter Ivers and lip-synched on screen by actress Laurel Near. Following the birth of his monstrous baby, Henry X (Jack Nance) starts seeking solace from Near’s tiny, puffy-cheeked figure residing in his radiator. At one point, she interrupts his nightmarish visions to emerge from the darkness and serenade him with a song essentially impelling him to commit suicide, because “In heaven, everything is fine.” It’s beautiful and haunting in execution, oddly disturbing in intent, and absolutely unforgettable.

9. “Blue Moon” from An American Werewolf in London (1981)

The film that basically gave birth to the ironic use of music, An American Werewolf in London sports a soundtrack loaded with moon-themed oldies. After Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising” plays out in its entirety as David Kessler (David Naughton) nervously paces around his new girlfriend’s apartment waiting to turn into a ravenous man-dog, he settles in for the evening as Sam Cook’s version of “Blue Moon” oozes from the soundtrack. Suddenly, Kessler screams in agony as he undergoes the single greatest werewolf transformation ever conceived. The sweetness of Cook’s voice matched with the violence of Rick Baker’s werewolf effects achieves weird transcendence.

10. “96 Tears” from Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye (1985)

The filmmakers responsible for Stephen King’s Cat’s Eye did not secure the rights to the original version of “96 Tears” by Question Mark & the Mysterians, but I will forever associate the classic garage rock anthem with this fairly decent anthology nevertheless. This somewhat generic remake by the Northern Orchestra is featured in the first and best segment of Cat’s Eye: “Quitters Inc.” James Woods plays a schlub struggling with a mean nicotine addiction. He tries a radical solution that involves his wife being placed in an electrified booth in the event he sneaks a ciggie. Of course, he does, and wifey winds up hopping and screaming to “96 Tears” in the “Cat Room.” It’s an ironic combo of disturbing torture and danceable Rock & Roll that makes for the most memorable scene in the picture.

11. “Partytime (Zombie Version)” from Return of the Living Dead (1985)

Goth-metalists 45 Grave did not write the horrifying “Partytime”—a truly depressing song about the rape and murder of a five-year old girl—for Return of the Living Dead, but surely that’s where the vast majority of folks heard it. At the behest of Orion Pictures, 45 Grave frontwoman Dinah Cancer agreed to dump the original bleak child-abuse lyrics in favor of dopey ones that are far more in step with the fun-loving zombie flick. In the film, the track plays as the dead first start rising from the grave en masse, but it’s equally memorable for its place of pride in the trailers that ran on late night TV constantly throughout the mid-‘80s. There are better songs on the Return of the Living Dead soundtrack than this goofy headbanger (contributions from the Cramps, the Damned, and TSOL), but none that better sum up the movie with the tagline “They’re back from the grave and ready to party.”