Getting With The Program: Q & A With The Spook Lights

Curvacia VaVoom: I get chills everytime I hear the line in Glen or Glenda when the narrator announces AND THEN ONE DAY IT WASN’T HALLOWEEN ANYMORE. It’s a hilarious line, but its also so poignant, because it drives home the point that after Halloween Ed Wood isn’t going to stop wearing ladies’ panties, fluffy sweaters, needle pointed bullet bras, and skin-tight pencil skirts, but now he has to hide in his living room with the curtains drawn and feel guilty about it. You can bet he has to don his soul-killing neutral khaki man-pants for Christmas.

Halloween encourages and embraces the freak individual inside everyone. Christmas stifles and kills it. Even Jews and other non-Christians have to conform or be alienated when it comes to Christmas. Who can escape the decorations, Santa Claus, and the horrible grating SONGS that are ever present wherever you go? You can’t get away with it if you try. Now churches are even trying to force Christmas into Halloween! The children are supposed to dress like angels. Where’s the fun in that? No one gets depressed on Halloween.

Alice Sweet Alice

Popshifter: What are your five fave horror movies?

Scary Manilow: All of my favorite movies are horror movies, in one way or another. Like I said before, it could change every day depending on my mood. I don’t even know where to start. Bride of Frankenstein will probably always be my absolute favorite horror movie of all time, though. It’s got mad science, ominous sets, great black and white moodiness, and copious amounts of The Gay.

Curvacia VaVoom: ALICE SWEET ALICE! It’s set in Patterson, New Jersey and you just feel so claustrophobic watching it. Another film where the sets are full of tacky, bright colors contrasted against grey pavement and dead -ooking skies and walls. Lots of thick, orange lipstick and women in obvious, suffocating girdles screaming their guts out over things like what daughter can take first communion. There’s Alice in her see-through plastic mask, yellow slicker, and blinding silver knife. She has a trunk in the basement of her apartment building where she keeps disturbing trinkets and a doll with a two faces, whose head turns around. She gets her revenge and the whole thing is one scene of hysteria after another. The director, Alfred Sole, studied in Italy, so he was obviously influenced by the giallos, and the European theme of child killers. Great movie that bombed at the box office, even though it was Brooke Shields’ first movie before Pretty Baby.

Also I’m a fanatic for The Birds by Hitchcock. Last year I went as Tippi Hedren’s character for Halloween. It turned out to be an omen because over the summer I had a thrilling experience where I really was attacked by THE BIRDS. Our neighbor’s cat was threatening a grackle fledgling in our yard, so I started to chase him off, but it was too late! A flock of about a dozen iridescent grackles were already swarming and dive-bombing him. . . and because I was near him, they were dive-bombing me. None of them got me but it was really great. Part of me was terrified that I would get my eyes gouged out and the other part of me was thinking, “Wow, this is wonderful! It’s just like The Birds!”

Tippi Hedren in The Birds

Popshifter: Why are remakes of good horror movies a sign of the apocalypse?

Scary Manilow: I don’t ever actually see any of these horror remakes, so I don’t know if they contain any viable, physical signs of the Biblical apocalypse. Rob Zombie’s Halloween is like a real clunker, though—how does this guy continue to get work? This whole concept of “grunge-ifying” classic horror movies to make them somehow more palatable to contemporary audiences is a total joke.

Just re-release the original film in theaters, and if audiences are too stupid to enjoy it, big deal. They don’t fucking deserve to be catered to, anyway. Let them stay home and jack-off to EXTREME CLOWN porn and stuff their drooling maws with energy-drink flavored corn-blasters. Their brains and bodies will give out soon enough that we won’t have to worry about their POOR TASTE polluting our environment, anyway. Then my inner cultural fascist will be vindicated and all will be right with the world.

Popshifter: What is next for The Spook Lights?

Scary Manilow: Our first seven-inch, LIVE FROM THE PLANET SLEAZETOPIA, is getting mastered and will hopefully be available later this fall. We’re taking the winter off to work on new material and do some more recording, as well as work with our hopeful new keyboardist/glam-meister, Zeppelina Mystery!

Curvacia VaVoom: Of course this means soon we’ll be coming to your town, peddling our wares and doing our show spreading the gospel of THE PROGRAM all over the world!

Although last weekend we did our first out of town show in Wichita, Kansas. We stayed at the hotel from the movie Planes, Trains & Automobiles. I was wearing show clothes and while I procured the room the proprietor of the hotel gave me a discount because he thought I was a prostitute. He saw the cars of the guys in the parking lot waiting for me, and asked if I was a “working girl” and I was so preoccupied with the show that it went right over my head. I said, “Who me? Yeah, I work all the time. I’m working tonight. too. I’m doing a show. And this summer I’ve been doing a movie, too. How much for a room for four?” He saw the guys in the cars waiting for me in the parking lot and said, “I think you’ll find that we’re very. . . understanding. It’s good for business.”

Additional Resources:

The Spook Lights will be playing at The Brick in Kansas City MO on October 4 and then at Davey’s Uptown on October 11. For more information, please check out their MySpace page.

Click to read more from The Spook Lights on. . .

Elderly delinquents
Low-budget movies
What’s wrong with Hollywood?
Horror movies and what’s next on The Program

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