Monsters and heavy music are a winning combination.
The annals of rock are filled with homages to some of horror’s most villainous and beastly figures. Take, for instance, the infamous hard-rock Zombies serenading their living dead girls, or the Grammy-winning metalmakers naming themselves after an irradiated 400-foot menace.
While the options are endless, we asked Revolver readers to pick the greatest song starring a creature or ghoul. They ranked the monsters of rock accordingly.
Alice Cooper – “Feed My Frankenstein”
Alice Cooper is a horror-rock legend — a corpse-loving, grave-desecrating freak with a penchant for singing about dead progeny, or the glee of catching you under his screechin’ wheels.
Though he’s welcomed us to many nightmares, and once crooned about Friday the 13th killer Jason Voorhees, Cooper’s Wayne’s World-supporting cover of “Feed My Frankenstein” — a track originally cut by UK ghouls Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction — is a notably monstrous hair metal-era chiller about a hungry man with a psycho libido.
This “Frankenstein” is more hornily food-focused and cannibalistic than Mary Shelley’s promethean source material — depending on your tastes, the horror may well come from its stomach-turning allusions to drinking out of a “fur tea cup.”
Bauhaus – “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”
Though driven by cavernous drum production, eerie rock-steady beats and dub-informed tape manipulations, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” ultimately became the bedrock for goth rock as we know it. Credit this, perhaps, to the vampiric whispers and cries Bauhaus vocalist Peter Murphy puts into the nine-minute jam — or, maybe, the converted hearse the UK quartet drove around in near the turn of the Eighties.
Either way, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” shivers through its extended run-time with macabre allusions to the on-screen bloodlettings of the Universal horror icon and his undead coterie of virginal brides.
An instant classic the second it flew out of the belltower.
Metallica – “The Thing That Should Not Be”
While Ride the Lightning’s closing instrumental juggernaut “The Call of Ktulu” was an early loveletter to H.P. Lovecraft, the band upped the stakes of their supernatural salute to the fantasy writer with Master of Puppet’s “The Thing That Should Not Be.”
James Hetfield sets a creepy scene while yowling of the “Great Old One” that lurks beneath the ocean. A seasick, slow-trudging “twisted sound” lumbers through with extreme menace. The total package of this creepy-crawling Cthulhu anthem is enough to bring anyone to the brink of madness — and in that madness we’ll gladly dwell.
Blue Öyster Cult – “Godzilla”
Blue Öyster Cult bookended 1977’s Spectres with songs about a pair of big-screen baddies: Godzilla and Nosferatu. When adjusted for scale, it may be no surprise that the tune that stands out the most between the two is their tribute to Japan’s world-famous Kaiju.
The Cult’s “Godzilla” is a radioactive choogle of atomic-breathed vocal harmonies and reckless string slides that conjure the laser-focused fury of ‘Zilla’s street-stompin’, power-line-yankin’, bus-tossin’ trip through Tokyo.
History shows again and again that it’s one of the band’s finest singles.
Slayer – “Dead Skin Mask”
“Mr. Gein, this isn’t fun anymore.”
We might’ve got more than we bargained for, here, but Revolver readers (including Mastodon’s Brann Dailor) came out in droves to note that Slayer’s “Dead Skin Mask” sports one of the most iconic real-life monster of them all: infamous 20th-century murderer Ed Gein.
Even for Slayer, this Seasons of the Abyss standout is a real chiller in their catalog. Slow-plodding guitar melodies vibrate beneath Tom Araya’s lyrical look at “the depths of a mind insane,” his lyrics alluding to Gein’s heinous crimes — from grave-robbing to mutilation to the titular perversity of wearing someone else’s skin like a mask.
On the one hand, Gein’s grotesque story has inspired a lot of on-screen horror — including Hitchcock’s Psycho, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies, The Silence of the Lambs and the latest season of Netflix’s Monster anthology series. But unlike a campy vampire or a graveyard ghoul, Gein’s reign of mid-west terror proves that sometimes truth is sicker than fiction.