Glenn Danzig on His Favorite Horror Movie Monsters
Few artists have dedicated their lives to horror the way Glenn Danzig has. As the former frontman of ghoulish punks Misfits, who call their fan club a “fiend club,” he wrote songs that referenced Vincent Prince, Night of the Living Dead and the macabre British museum known as the London Dungeon. His second band, goth-punk outfit Samhain, doused itself in fake gore onstage. And with Danzig, he writes heavy, bluesy metal songs about hell, killer wolves and vengeful gods. Horror is in his blood.
When the singer, who is putting out the covers LP Skeletons next month, stopped by the Rolling Stone office for an interview earlier this year, he perked up when the conversation turned to spooky cinema. “As a little kid, watching horror movies, if you only got to see the monster for the last two minutes of the movie, I thought that movie pretty much sucked,” he said with a laugh. “You get to see Frankenstein through the whole movie. In Creature [From the Black Lagoon], you get to see the creature through the whole movie.”
Despite his affinity for scary flicks, he contends that horror movies never scared him — the more realistic ones, like the 1959 adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ psychodrama Suddenly, Last Summer, unnerved him more. Watch the video above to find out what else got under his skin.