It is 26 October. There are 5 days until Halloween.

Every year when the MTV Video Music Awards roll around, I usually ask, “Who won Second Best Video of the Year?” After a beat or two, I explain (even though no one ever asks for an explanation) that since Michael Jackson’s Thriller is the greatest video of all-time – and always will be – logic dictates that today’s artists are vying only for second place.

No offense to Beyoncé, Childish Gambino, or Lady Gaga, but until you folks turn into a were-cat and dance with zombies then you will always be also-rans in my eyes.

Michael Jackson was the last artist you would have expected to release a horror-themed song and video in 1983. Certainly, you would have been forgiven if KISS or Alice Cooper were the first artists to spring to mind. Yet, it was Jackson who tapped into the burgeoning popularity of horror movies in the early 1980s. After seeing An American Werewolf in London, Jackson approached director John Landis with the idea of making a music video. Intrigued, Landis took up the challenge (established, feature-length filmmakers did not direct music videos in those days). With the help of special effects maestro, Rick Baker, Jackson and Landis made a video that changed the industry.

Jackson’s record company, Epic, was unsure of the 13-minute long music video that Jackson and Landis had conceived. In order to help finance the video, which would be shot on 35mm and cost almost $1 million (far and away more expensive than any other music video at the time), a making-of documentary was shot and sold to TV stations.

That doc is what really piqued my interests. I was a young, impressionable, wanna-be monster kid. Like Michael Jackson, I’d also seen American Werewolf (on HBO, not in the theaters, mind you) and was completely blown away by what I saw. I think my real love of horror began with the scene of David Naughton turning into a werewolf. As I watched the making-of film for Thriller, I thought: “John Landis is making a video for Michael Jackson?! And Rick Baker is involved, too?! I’m there!”

And so were a lot of other people. Thriller (the video) returned Thriller (the album) to the top of the charts. It also made a whole bunch of new monster kids. Aside from Jackson’s supreme talent and the inherent catchiness of the song, it’s the spookiness of the visuals that cemented masterpiece status for the video. The movie within the movie, the cutting-edge special effects used during Jackson’s were-cat transformation, the zombies crawling out of their graves, the grainy quality that only shooting on film can give you – everything about Thriller was exciting and new.

As a bonus, Thriller is also famous – at least to me – for being the basis of one of the greatest parodies of all-time – and it isn’t by “Weird” Al Yankovic.

In his HBO special from 1984, Joe Piscopo terrorizes Jan Hooks in a pitch-perfect version of Thriller. Instead of turning into a were-cat, however, Piscopo transforms into Jerry Lewis. Classic!

Even scarier is Piscopo’s Halloween special on HBO a few years later…

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.

It is 5 October. There are 26 days until Halloween.

Those of us who happened to have grown up during the 1980s are usually referred to as the “MTV Generation.” You’ll get no argument from me about that appellation. God knows I spent more than my fair share of time before the television set demanding my MTV.

Decades before the ‘M’ in the name fell silent and it became the “All Ridiculousness, All the Time” network, MTV was where you went to find the newest and hippest music. Granted, MTV was less than diligent in playing music by black artists in its early years (as David Bowie pointed out in his interview with Marc Goodman), but the network learned over time how to pull in music from a (fairly) wide range of genres – alternative music featured on 120 Minutes, Yo! MTV Raps played the latest hip/hop videos, and even the kooky, twenty-year-old schtick of someone like Arthur Brown found room in the rotation.

There was also a time when the ‘M’ in MTV stood not only for music but for monsters, as well. Monster kids had plenty of spooky fare to choose from. Artists from across the musical spectrum used the stars of the creature features for their videos, even if the songs didn’t really have much to do with horror.

Frankenstein’s Monster and his Bride appeared in “Doing It All for My Baby” by Huey Lewis and the News – an 8-minute video with a nearly 4-minute, non-musical lead-in.

For his video “Think I’m in Love,” Eddie Money played a Dracula-like lead character who has his toothsome tables turned on him.

Men at Work delivered a Jekyll and Hyde video (natch) for “Dr. Heckyll & Mr. Jive” that owed more to Jerry Lewis’s The Nutty Professor than the Robert Louis Stevenson story.

Ozzy Osbourne went the Hammer Film Studios route for his video “Bark at the Moon.”

Sheena Easton threw all of the monsters into a blender (including King Kong, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Thing from The Addams Family) for her black-and-white, Gothic-flavored video “Telefone (Long Distance Love Affair).”

While these (white) musicians looked to the monsters of the past for their imagery and inspiration, hip/hop artists DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince used a monster of a more recent vintage for “A Nightmare on my Street.”

To be continued next Monday…