My friends and I piled into the back of the truck bed, inexplicably excited to slide around the coarse, ridged, plastic frame in a way that only twelve year olds could be. The flagrant disregard for safety and seat belts aside, it was fun to be separated from the parental figures in the cab and, most importantly of all, provided a haven where we could listen to our cassette tapes without scrutiny.
While Adam Sandler’s They’re All Gonna Laugh at You! had been the tape of choice as of late, that particular day one of our friends produced a new recording. He snickered as he put it into the small, battery powered boombox and fast forwarded past several tracks, all the while promising us one of the funniest songs we’d ever heard. After a moment of configuring the tape’s position and some snippets of mismatched audio, he pressed play. Then, for the first time, I listened to “Weird Al” Yankovic issue out of the speakers as the song The Night Santa Went Crazy reverberated off of the tailgate.
That fateful trip in the spring of 1996 spawned what would become a lifelong obsession with the musical comedy savant that would go on to inform so much of my sense of humor across the genre spectrum. For, as much as the Grammy award winning, platinum record selling maestro of the wild and weird is known for silly irreverence and kid-friendly fare, his work is often seasoned with the kind of dark, disturbing and macabre thematics normally reserved for an audience that is anything but adolescent.
As my love of the horror genre grew alongside my burgeoning obsession with “Weird Al” and his life’s work, I couldn’t help but notice some commonalities. The bombastic ways in which the comedian was able to capture genre entertainment through song amazed me. It wasn’t long before I discovered UHF (1989) and the endlessly hilarious, tonally sporadic creativity that sprang forth from every frame. It was “Weird Al” in the form of a movie, and I wanted more.
From the moment I heard tell of something snapping in Santa’s brain in the back of that truck, I could picture what I was hearing. Imagine the horrors on screen. Delight in the dastardly hilarity that such dark visions suggested. “Weird Al” may be known for his parodies, songs about food and his penchant for loud colors and long hair but he has also crafted some of the best, most inspired tales of hilarious horror seen over the last three decades.
Here are just a few that genre fans and the silver screen would be lucky to have, were they miraculously brought to life.
Nature Trail to Hell
Album: “Weird Al” Yankovic in 3D
Release Date: February 28, 1984
As every horror fan well knows, the 1980s were rife with slashers. By the time “Weird Al” Yankovic’s second studio album was set to release there were already three Friday the 13th films with a fourth on the way, as many Halloween movies and countless others, saturating the horror landscape with hulking figures donning masks and their blade of choice as they made their way through hordes of unsuspecting victims.
Al decided to put his own stamp on the saturated subgenre with Nature Trail to Hell, a song that thunders with rain, lightning, screams and clanging bells from the moment it roars to life. A theme song to what Al has called in concert, his “favorite movie that hasn’t been made yet,” the song tells of a homicidal maniac who stalks a cub scout troop in glorious 3D (suggesting that this less discussed track is actually the one from which the entire album derived its name).
Releasing on Christmas, sporting hideous effects, containing hidden backwards messaging and even promising an inevitable Nature Trail to Hell Part 2, this song is as much an ode to the burgeoning slasher as it is a deconstruction of it. Despite its scant lyrics, the song goes on for just under 6 minutes, rocking a righteous ballad of bloody terror that promises a franchise that truly deserved to see itself realized alongside the likes of Michael, Jason and Freddy.
Slime Creatures From Outer Space
Album: Dare to be Stupid
Release Date: June 18, 1985
“Weird Al”s third studio album may have been primarily constructed around parody, with its title track aping Devo as well as housing the Madonna send-up Like a Surgeon, but it also contained another track that sounded destined to be one of the great monster movies: Slime Creatures From Outer Space.
In the vein of 1950’s and 1960’s sci-fi alien invasion flicks mixed with the tropes most commonly reserved for Kaiju films, Slime Creatures tells the tale of ugly, mean, gigantic headed aliens with lizard skin and bug eyes. As leveling Tokyo and New York is nothing to them, the song makes it clear that humanity is fighting a losing battle, as the aliens suck people’s brains out through a straw and feverishly reproduce in the sewers.
A “Weird Al” original, this effort further solidifies the scope and detail of the artist’s more genre oriented songs, all while maintaining the same energy and sense of humor that drives his best, most mainstream work. I mean, who else would close a song about horrific monsters decimating the world population with the flustered remark, “They’re really getting on my nerves”?
Good Old Days
Album: Even Worse
Release Date: April 12, 1988
After the commercial disappointment of “Weird Al”s fourth studio album Polka Party, Even Worse was a welcome success, returning to the Michael Jackson well with the featured track Fat. Still, amongst the hit parodies was another track and perhaps Al’s most disarmingly disturbing one to date.
Good Old Days starts with a thoughtful and pleasant guitar riff. Soft vocals kick in and a man reminisces about simpler times: his father’s fishing, his mother’s hot apple pies and his long days in the basement torturing rats with a hacksaw and pulling the wings off of flies. What unfolds is a portrait of a sociopath not all that dissimilar from The Bad Seed (1956), as shown through their own rose colored lens. We learn about good old Mr. Fender, the fiery fate of his grocery store and the old man’s bashed in head. He recalls his high school sweetheart Michelle and their trip to the homecoming dance that ended with her tied to the chair in the desert, not to mention her screams which still permeate his dreams.
As is often the case, the comedy lies in the juxtaposition of the dark and the light, the sweet, saccharine nature of the melody and recollection given the pitch black essence of the story being told. I think the 1980’s could have used a movie like Good Old Days, a serial killer flick with a comedic perspective to act as a palate cleanser to the likes of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) or Maniac (1980), courtesy of “Weird Al”.
Attack of the Radioactive Hamsters from a Planet Near Mars
Album: UHF — Original Motion Picture Soundtrack and Other Stuff
Release Date: July 18,1989
“Weird Al” Yankovic’s sixth studio album was also the soundtrack to his first motion picture, UHF. And amidst the bits of score and sketches taken from the film, there were a handful of new songs. One in particular feels as though it could belong to its own soundtrack for a movie very different from the one that UHF delivers, and with much larger rodents.
A logical extension and evolution from 1985’s Slime Creatures From Outer Space, Hamsters tell of another alien attack, this time honing in on the Atomic monster movies that were also influencing many of the late 80’s creature features at the time. Showing up on people’s doorsteps as sweet and harmless, it’s not long before the hamsters grow forty thousand times their original size, mutate and attempt to transform the world into their own, personal exercise wheel.
A story in the vein of something like Little Shop of Horrors (1986), the marines and the national guard are called in to fight these eventually blimp sized house pets that are evil and nasty and glow in the dark. Played in a bluesy style mixed with up beat rock and roll, the song paints a picture of a movie that would be a riotous good time. Plus, I’d love to see how a director might work in the fact that the things figure out how to adeptly play electric guitars.
The Night Santa Went Crazy
Album: Bad Hair Day
Release Date: March 12, 1996
Bad Hair Day was “Weird Al”s ninth studio album and went on to go Double Platinum, selling over two million copies and breaking comedy album records for the calendar year. Along with being my personal introduction to the Weird One, the album contains some of his best, most lauded work. There are several tracks that could be plucked out for the big screen treatment, but one stands belly-full-of-jelly and bearded above the rest.
Like some perverse inversion of The Night the Reindeer Died from Scrooged (1988), the song starts as a Christmas carol that devolves into Santa’s drunken cry, “Merry Christmas to all, now you’re all gonna die!” Detailing the graphic deaths of the reindeer, including Santa’s decision to eat Blitzen, the song follows the overworked holiday figurehead’s depraved rampage to a horrific conclusion. Hauled in by the FBI, Santa lands in prison as the elves file for unemployment and Mrs. Claus negotiates TV movie rights.
With references to Yes, Virginia there is a Santa Claus and Freddy Krueger alike, this song is just the right mix of gruesome and wholesome to make for a killer Christmas horror flick. And, considering there exists an “extra gory” version that was not included on the original album, the song already has the kind of lore often associated with classic horror flicks that have gotten chopped up or abridged over the years. Something snapped in Santa’s brain and it’s time the world saw what that something was, even if it is drenched in reindeer guts.
Final Thoughts
Since that fateful day in the back of that truck, “Weird Al” has been an integral part of my artistic tastes, comedy and otherwise, influencing not only what I listen to but what I read, watch and create myself. He’s an artist known for his comedy but one that dabbles in every corner of the genre spectrum, creating stand out work that lives in the darkness just as much as it does the light.
Countless songs that would make truly unforgettable movies pepper his discography and many live and breathe in the horror space. This list could easily continue on, telling of the ultimate terrors of practical jokes and their inevitable conclusions in 1996’s I Remember Larry or giving voice to a stalker’s lament in 1988’s Melanie. But that’s the magic of “Weird Al”, his chameleonic approach to musical stylings is ever present in every facet of his work and will never cease to surprise those who seek to explore it.
Horror and comedy seem sometimes at odds, but both use extremes to push their stories beyond natural, sometimes acceptable limits. Both require tension and timing to elicit their desired outcomes. A laugh or a scare, either way, many of the same creative tools are employed. And when someone figures out how to toe that line between both extremes, well, something wonderful happens. Something strange.
Something weird.
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