It is 12 October. There are 19 days until Halloween.

Let us continue our discussion from last Monday, shall we?

In that post, we looked at a few music videos from the 1980s that featured variations on the classic movie monsters of the 1930s – Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, The Wolf-Man, Jekyll & Hyde, etc.

That these monsters were considered to be still recognizable and prominent in the cultural memory that they could be used in a music video with little or no explanation of who or what they were is a topic for another time. (How many fifty-year-old cinematic characters and tropes are still active in today’s pop culture hive mind?) Let’s just say that the music video directors of the 1980s were part of the Monster Kid generation of the 1950s and 1960s, and so, the Universal Studio’s monster pantheon was like a second language to them. Younger viewers in the 1980s were also plugged into the monster zeitgeist thanks to Saturday and Sunday morning re-runs of Abbott & Costello Meet [enter name of monster here], late-night horror hosts, and comic books. It was a given that a shot of a man in evening clothes and a cape would be read as “Dracula.” I am not so sure that’s the case today.

Monsters, however, are not just what Carl Laemmle, Jr., saw fit to stick on the silver screen. They aren’t limited to what Jack Pierce was able to shape on Boris Karloff’s face with cotton and mortician’s wax. Let’s looks at those music videos that included monsters of different stripe…

…no, not that “Stripe.”

The video for Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” is a hodgepodge of slasher-era POV camerawork, weird sets, and unsettling creatures. At times, with the sudden appearance of a grisly face lit from below, it looks like outtakes from Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond. As with some of the other videos below, the limitations in quality of the video image really helps sell the creepiness. And the tune is pretty catchy. It must be pretty nice being the nephew of Barry Gordy, thus having access to Michael Jackson to do the back-up vocals on your song.

Before Billy Gibbons and co. jumped into their fire-engine red 1933 Ford coupe and drove around fixing the fashion sense of America’s young men like a bearded, Texan version of Queer Eye, ZZ Top donned MST3K-esque jumpsuits and sang about “TV Dinners.” Again, the poor quality of video adds to the weirdness factor in the video. It’s always nice to have stop-motion animated creatures a la Ray Harryhausen, too. I mean, what else could be under that foil before you toss it into the oven? Bonus points for keeping a Ouija board next to the refrigerator.

I’ll be honest, I never heard of Landscape, let alone saw this video on MTV, but a song called “Norman Bates” from an album entitled From the Tea-Rooms of Mars…to the Hell-holes of Uranus has got to be included here. The video has the mash-up feel of Psycho meets Carnival of Souls meets The Old Dark House. And it’s in lovely black-and-white.

Even The Rolling Stones jumped on the 80s horror bandwagon with their video for “Too Much Blood.” Any video that features shots from Basket Case and Female Trouble, Mick Jagger rapping about The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Keith Richards wielding said chainsaw is gonna be an interesting watch/listen. I’ve never been much of a Stones fan, so I can’t judge the song, but the video is lots of fun.

Greg Kihn is one of us: he’s a monster kid. He’s got quite a few spooky novels under his belt. Horror Show was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for "Best First Novel." In 1982, he made one of the great horror music videos for his song “Jeopardy.” It’s filled with loads of weird imagery – the husband and wife connected by the fleshy appendage is just the tip of the marriage paranoia-fueled iceberg. Plus, at the end of the video, he hightails it from his wedding and picks up a woman sporting Shelly Duvall’s hairstyle from The Shining. Now that’s scary!

Here’s another video that I’d never seen before. Shame on me for not paying closer attention to Kate Bush during the 1980s. Or better yet, shame on MTV for not sticking this tune on heavy rotation. I probably wouldn’t have appreciated the references to Nigel Kneale’s sci-fi/horror scientist, Quatermass, seeing as I never saw Quatermass and the Pit until the late-90s, but the teenage me would have loved the “secret government sound experiments” storyline. The video for “Experiment IV” (a reference to the Saul Bass film Phase IV?) is incredibly British. So British that it serves tea during it’s running time. There are great cameos by Dawn French, Hugh Laurie, Richard Vernon, and Peter Vaughan. The Raiders of the Lost Ark-like reveal of the horrific monster behind the lovely, ethereal visage of Kate Bush is fantastic.