Bobby Pickett’s “Monster Mash” spent the last two weeks of October 1962 at number one on the Billboard chart. It came back in 1973 and reached the Top 10 again, this time in early August.
more
Two fads in one song
Billboard’s Steve Greenberg says the record was made to cash in on two fads at once. One was the monster-movie craze, and the other was the run of dance records that followed the Twist.
Universal sent its 1930s and 1940s monster films to television in 1957 under the title Shock Theatre. A magazine called Famous Monsters of Filmland followed in 1958. It was meant as a single issue, but it sold out and ran for years. By 1961 the Aurora Plastics Corporation had released its first movie monster model kit.
On the dance side, the song borrowed the melody of Dee Dee Sharp’s “Mashed Potato Time”.
A Karloff impression on stage
Pickett was an aspiring actor who sang in clubs with a group called the Cordials. One night he performed the Diamonds’ song “Little Darlin’” with a Boris Karloff impression, and the audience reaction led him to write a monster song in that voice.
NME quotes Pickett telling the radio broadcaster Dr Demento in 2006 that “the audience cracked up”. His bandmate Lenny Capizzi suggested a full novelty song. Pickett resisted at first because he wanted to act seriously.
They wrote it in around an hour on a Wollensak tape recorder. In the studio, bubbles blown in glasses of water became the bubbling cauldrons, and a scraped rusty nail became the creaking coffin lid.
A song the BBC would not play
NME says Karloff liked the impression enough to perform the song himself on the ABC show Shindig!. The BBC thought the record too “morbid” for radio. It did not chart in the UK until 1973, nine years after its first release, which NME suggests may be the reason.
Both fads Pickett drew on faded. Greenberg notes that the song still stood on its own as a classic, and he calls the 1973 return an inexplicable fact.
Where it turns up now
The Simpsons used the song in a 1993 episode, where a radio presenter mistakes it for a Valentine’s Day love song. The New Jersey punk band Misfits covered it in 1997.
Greenberg compares its place in the Halloween calendar to that of “Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer” at Christmas.
