Bobby "Boris" Pickett has died at the age of 69.
I'm not going to make any extravagant claims for Pickett's one hit, The Monster Mash. It is what it is, a novelty song recorded solely to exploit his ability to do a decent but unremarkable impression of Boris Karloff. It gets trotted out every year at Halloween, not just by oldies stations, and I would guess more people today are familiar with Pickett's impression than they are with Karloff himself.
It's no great shakes as a song, but The Monster Mash easily evokes the heyday of Monster Kid culture, an era when children--boys, mostly--discovered the heady joys of classic Universal monster movies through TV syndication packages. The pleasure they derived from these felt forbidden but was mostly innocent, good clean fun with a mildly subversive edge.
I came along much later than that. The horror film had entered its punk phase by the time I came along, with crazy, wildmen filmmakers like George Romero and David Cronenberg taking a DIY approach to the genre, ignoring the familiar tropes of the past in search of something more meaningful, more personal, while still deploying spilled entrails and exploding heads.
Which was great, but part of me wishes my childhood memories included visions of Karloff's haunted eyes in The Mummy or Lon Chaney, Jr.'s helpless, uncomprehending transformations into The Wolfman or even Bela Lugosi's hambone turn as Dracula. I've seen these movies subsequently, of course, but I'll never know what they would have meant to me had I seen them at the right time, when they could have scarred me for life, or become old friends to which I could turn time and again.
I don't have those memories, but The Monster Mash gives me some sense of what that culture must have been like: It's a whole lot of fun.
