Five MORE Creepy Music Videos Better Than "Thriller!"

Looking for something to get you in the mood for Halloween? Here are a couple of old-school vids that will have you feeling the All Hallows Eve spirit in no time flat...

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

Around this time last year, I did a post highlighting five somewhat-forgotten music videos that, in my humblest of opinions, were superior horror-themed offerings to Michael Jackson's "Thriller." With the Halloween season in full swing, I reckon now is a pretty good time to do an update for 2015; and frankly, I think this one beats the pants off the already awesome set-list from last year. 

Alice Cooper - "He's Back (The Man Behind the Mask)" (1986)

We're just hitting total 1980s horror cheese shock rock awesomeness critical mass with this one. As quite possibly the only musician in history who could release a full album containing nothing but great songs from shitty movies (lest we forget Mr. Cooper's contributions to such iconic works as "Monster Dog" and "The Class of 1984"), this track chiseled off the "Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives" soundtrack has it all. There's a very Twisted Sister-like, anti-dad farcical comedy intro, which immediately segues to horrible matte painting backgrounds, goofy stereotypes rocking out in a neon-hued movie theater, plenty of live concert shots of Alice and -- of course -- tons of clips of Jason Voorhees doing what he does best. Throw in a really half-assed, super anti-climactic post-video joke, and you have yourselves one of the greatest masterpieces of crap ever shown on Music Television. And hey, speaking of hair metal converging with slasher movie icons...

Dokken - "Dream Warriors" (1987)

Dokken is definitely one of the more underappreciated hair-metal titans of the Reagan and crack cocaine years. I mean, just listen to "All Alone" -- how can that not get your hands curling up into devil horns (voluntarily or involuntarily?) "Dream Warriors," no doubt, is Dokken's zenith, not only because it's a great, atmospheric little song, but also because it -- as the name implies -- ties directly into the best "Elm Street" movie of 'em all. Oh, you get plenty of Freddy in this one, along with quite a bit of Patricia Arquette (damn, I love how the band members themselves are oh-so-carelessly wedged into the film scenes.) With an outstanding post-video Easter egg, this one just SCREAMS "required Halloween viewing" like a deranged mental patient dancing underneath a full moon.

Geto Boys - "Mind Playing Tricks on Me" (1991)

Forget the Halloween qualifiers, this is unquestionably one of my 10 all-time favorite music videos ever -- even now, on the offhand chance the song comes on the radio, I just have to bump the hell out of it. For the uninitiated, the Geto Boys were a pioneering Houston rap group that, at the time of "Mind Playing Tricks on Me," consisted of Scarface, Willie D., DJ Ready Red and, of course, the greatest suicidal rapping midget of all time, the incomparable Bushwick Bill. Eschewing the goofy movie-tie-in horror of the early '80s, this ultra-low-budget video instead focuses on the dual real world terrors of mental illness and having to live in the ghetto, complete with exposed boobies, a spooky proto-Candyman and a scene where Bushwick Bill, dressed like a pirate, runs around stealing Halloween candy from little kids. If there's a more perfect recipe for Samhain viewing than that, I'm not quite sure human eyes are ready for it. 

Ozzy Osbourne - "Back on Earth" (1997)

Ozzy has made a ton of videos that could qualify as essential Halloween viewing -- who could forget him turning into the world's crappiest looking werewolf in "Bark at the Moon," or demonic possession cheese-fest that was "Shot in the Dark?" -- but I ended up selecting this one for its uniqueness. Released in that weird dead zone between "Mama I'm Coming Home" and The Osbournes reality TV show, the video for "Back on Earth" is a throwback to the old expressionistic German horror works, like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu. The sepia-tone imagery definitely made it stand out for its time, and you have to give the Ozz-Man credit for repping F.W. goddamn Murnau at a time when Hanson and the Spice Girls were still considered en vogue. That it's arguably the last truly great song the former Black Sabbath frontman ever performed probably doesn't hurt it, either. 

Reggie and the Full Effect - "J Train" (2008)

By the time this knee-deep-in-the-Recession offering was released, YouTube had already eclipsed MTV as the premier source for music videos. Tis' a pity this one never made the national rounds, as it's a great homage to a litany of texts, ranging from the old school Universal monster movies to The Monster Squad. The premise is simple; Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Mummy and the Bride of Frankenstein all amble into a strip club ... and yeah, that's about it. Featuring a cameo by MySpace wash-up Tila Tequila, this thing is so emblematic of its time; it's corny and unsure of itself and just kind of thrown together without rhyme or reason, but at the same time? It's fun as hell and you can't help but smile at the goofiness therein. So, yeah, it's essentially the spirit of Halloween epitomized. 

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Five Creepy Music Videos Better Than "Thriller!"

A slate of horror-themed videos you DEFINITELY need to check out this All Hallow's season...

In 1983, Michael Jackson's "Thriller" -- probably the first true long-form music video -- was played on MTV. Depending upon the ebb and flow of teen suicide rates, it usually bests "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in the periodic best music videos of all-time countdowns. It was even added to the National Film Registry, meaning the U.S. government considers it a worthwhile work of art on par with D.W. Griffith's and Stan Brakhage's finest.

Now, I've never been a huge Michael Jackson fan, but even on an objective level, I've never really understood what all the big fuss was about. Yeah, it's got zombies and werewolves and Vincent Price and all, but it all seems so cartoonish and full-of-itself, as if director (and remorseless child killer) John Landis just wanted to spend money for the sake of spending money. That, and it entails what is quite possibly the single most intelligence-insulting premise in the history of modern cinema: it asks viewers to actually believe that Jackson ported about something that even remotely resembled heterosexual longings.

With Halloween right around the corner, you're definitely going to be hearing, and seeing, quite a bit of "Thriller" for the next 30 or 40 days. While the video and Jackson will undoubtedly continue to receive postmortem praise (and largely, from the same people who were making chi-mo jokes up until the Gloved One's final hours) I figured it was worth our collective whiles to celebrate a few music videos with a decisive horror bent that don't get the same kind of recognition that "Thriller" does -- although, as you will soon see for yourselves, they most certainly deserve it.

The Greg Kihn Band 

"Jeopardy" (1983)

Never heard of the Greg Kihn Band? Well, they're the band that does the "The Breakup Song," itself one of their spookier-sounding pop hits from the early '80s. While "Jeopardy" is a slightly cheerier sounding tune (complete with a bass line more or less stolen from Stevie Wonder's "Superstition"), the music video for the song is pure, Reagan-era horror cheese at its finest.

For one thing, its one of those old school music videos that actually looks like it was filmed on somebody's home camera. Secondly, the atmosphere is just goddamn terrific, providing us with the absolute best kind of horror music video: the kind that starts off fairly non-horror-ish, that you can just sense is going to spiral into genre madness at any moment.

So, the premise here is simple: a dude with a mullet is having apprehensive thoughts at his wedding. He imagines his arguing parents' having their hands welded together like some kind of "Elm Street" special effect, he pulls back his wife's veil for a wedding smooch and BAM! The entire reception turns into a zombie apocalypse, complete with the groom having to use a piece of wood to fend off an aluminum foil hell monster. And then, he proceeds to play the makeshift stake like an air guitar, because that makes way more sense than trying to escape from a cathedral crawling with the living dead and shit. And oh man, how about that pseudo-misogynistic happy ending where he drives off with the wedding bubbly without his bride?  This is just all of the archaic, stupid stuff that made Pre-AIDS America awesome -- for my money, THIS is the spooky music video from 1983 we should've been celebrating for all these years.

Twisted Sister and Alice Cooper

"Be Chrool to Your Scuel" (1985)

My musical tastes have changed a lot over the years, but no matter what aural phase I've gone through, Twisted Sister's "Stay Hungry" has remained one of my all-time favorite albums. Likewise, Alice Cooper is one of my favorite musicians ever, and a man whose ouevre is so rich, he's probably the only person in history that could be able to release an entire album filled with nothing but songs he's contributed to shitty B-horror movies.

So what happens when you combine the two? Well, you get pure awesomeness, that's what, and that pure awesomeness is called "Be Chrool to Your Scuel."

In this eight-minute(!) opus, Bobcat Goldthwait plays a jaded high school teacher, who mumbles stuff about SAT scores and number two pencils with an intonation that sounds like John Travolta trying to gargle marbles. After rambling about tacos and squirrels not picking him up at the airport for three and a half minutes, he runs to the teacher's lounge , plugs in a Twisted Sister tape, and as expected, the proverbial shit hits the metaphorical fan. Not only are the zombies in this one way more grotesque than the living dead in "Thriller," I think they look better than any of the zombies you'd have seen in "Day of the Dead" -- and since Twisted Sister and Alice Cooper ain't pussies, you actually get some pretty good gore in this one, too, including two zombies literally sucking face, a couple of arms hacked off and even a sequence where a zombie student has his larynx carved out by a zombified nurse!

Death In Vegas

"Dirt" (1997)

1997 was an important year for the music video format, for two reasons. For one, that was the year MTV decided to drastically cut back the number of programming hours dedicated to actual music videos, representing what would eventually be the network's slow descent into becoming a channel that shows "Teen Mom" 23 and a half hours a day.

Secondly, it was the year "electronica" was supposed to kill rock and roll for good, as highly-touted groups like The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers were given all the hype and corporate backing in the world to supplant all of the crappy, post-Nirvana grunge-pop acts. As part of the not at all engineered techno-rock ploy, Death in Vegas was one of the soundalike groups that got momentary MTV stardom in the late 1990s -- although, as with Aphex Twin, just about everybody remembers them for their freaky-ass videos and have no recollections whatsoever of what the band actually sounded like.

All-in-all, I'd say "Dirt" is pretty much the exemplary pseudo-Dadaist, semi-intellectual, stream-of-conscious-pretentious-corporate-rock-techno-surrealist-shit that the timeframe gave us. With its self-indulgent black and white imagery, cryptic Holocaust visuals and blunt anti-religious imagery (complete with a funk-rock bassline tailor made for late '90s sneakers commercials), this music video is just about the finest tribute to the "Titanic" era zeitgeist you'll probably ever encounter.

Robbie Williams

"Rock DJ" (2000)

Forget Weird Al and all of that shit Spike Jonze directed -- this is far and away the greatest satire in the history of music videos.

With a face that residing somewhere between Jackass's Johnny Knoxville and Mr. Bean, Robbie Williams epitomized the era's flash-in-the pan Brit-pop manufactured stars, whose promotion was clearly designed to ride in on the coattails of pretty boy (and painfully closeted homosexual) Ricky Martin. Perhaps catching a whiff of its own syntheticness, this brilliantly subversive video posits Williams as a golden idol the masses just can't wait to consume ... literally.

As with "Jeopardy," the video really excels at making you feel that something weird is going to happen, no matter the generic trappings presented upfront. If you ever wondered what would happen if Clive Barker was selected to direct a George Michael video ... well, I'm pretty sure "Rock DJ" is what we would've ended up with.

Strapping Young Lad

"Love?" (2005)

Devin Townsend -- the Canadian death metal guy who looks suspiciously like Brad Douriff, pre-Voodoo soul transfer in "Child's Play" -- is an absolute musical genius, as evident by albums like "Terria," "The Human Equation" and "Ziltoid the Omniscient." Best known for his work in Strapping Young Lad, 2005's "Alien" is probably the band's best overall offering, and as far as SYL songs go, I can't think of one I like more than "Love?," a really weirdo ballad about a dude off his meds talking about how interpersonal intimacy is just a neurological coping mechanism.

So, imagine my surprise a few years back, when I did a Google search for the song, and not only did a legitimate music video pop up, but the entire fucking thing had an "Evil Dead" motif!

Needless to say, this thing is just amazing, from start-to-finish. From the laughing moose heads from "Dead by Dawn" to the infamous Deadite hand infection to the zooming camera shots so spot-on they feel like Sam Raimi was filming it himself, "Love?" is far and away the best homage to "The Evil Dead" in modern media. Sigh ... why didn't they let Devin Townsend make a musical reboot instead of that god-awful remake we got last year?

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