Apocalypse Mixtape Part V: A New Beginning

In Apocalypse Mixtape we search out songs with themes that fit into the horror genre.

On today's very special episode of Apocalypse Mixtape, instead of single songs, we're going to look at some album-length horror based music.

Album: Fantomas - The Director's Cut
Song: Rosemary's Baby

Fantomas is a perfect storm of cult movie fandom, avant-metal weirdness and highly skilled musicians. A supergroup Frankenstein monster of cult bands featuring Buzz Osbourne of the Melvins, Dave Lombardo of Slayer, Trevor Dunn of Mr. Bungle and Mike Patton of, well, lots of projects, most notably Faith No More, Fantomas has written albums based around Diabolik comic books, surgery without anesthesia, and cartoon music, but it was their 2001 album The Director's Cut that is of most interest to the movie fan. The album consists of reinterpretations of music from a number of films, some well-known (the Godfather, Cape Fear) and some more obscure (silent film Der Golem, Spider Baby). The end result is often very different from the original but still recognizable even in it's vastly transformed state. The video here is the creepy lullaby from Rosemary's Baby reworked into pure twisted brilliance.

Album: The Alan Parsons Project - Tales of Mystery and Imagination
Song: The Raven

Prog-rock band The Alan Parsons Project is today probably best known for that classic rock staple "Eye in the Sky", but their first album, recorded shortly after Alan Parsons engineered Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, was entirely composed of retellings of Edgar Allen Poe songs and poems like "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Tale-Tell Heart" and "The Cask of Amontillado". The track below is their version of "The Raven", featuring actor Leonard Whiting (AKA Romeo from that version of Romeo and Juliet with the boobs in it you probably watched in high school) on lead vocals with Parson handling backup duties in what liner notes claimed was the "first rock song ever to feature a digital vocoder". The album was remastered and rereleased on CD last year in its original form with narration by Orson Welles that was left off the original LP.

Album: Misfits - Walk Among Us/Collection
Song: Astro-Zombies

So it's come to this. I've tried to avoid the Misfits from the beginning of this project because they're so damned obvious for a compilation of horror-themed music. Even so, it would be a glaring omission to make no mention of them and writing about entire albums gives me the perfect opportunity to cross them off the list. You and every Hot Topic shopper in malls across the world probably know already the story of the Misfits' journey from scruffy, devilocked, horror movie-loving punk band to one of the first punk-era shadow-of-their-former-selves nostalgia acts so I'll just get to the music. Here's "Astro-Zombies". Aww, come on, look at that cute little guy. All he wants is to exterminate the whole human race. Can we keep him?

Special Super Bonus Song
Shakira ft. Danzig - Hips Don't Lie

When I was looking for a video of Danzig-era Misfits (are the modern-day Misfits really that popular?), I came across this bit of brilliance that I had to share. I don't know where this came from but if they put out a whole album of Danzig duets, I'm so there dude.