
Since the entirety of October is officially Halloween this year (shut up, you!), we at Psycho Drive-In have decided to attempt to fill the month with thirty-one recommendations for horror-related movies, comics, books, TV shows, toys, games, and everything in-between. It’s gonna be a grab-bag of goodies we feel you should be exposed to, whether you like it or not! But don’t expect your standard suggestions for Halloween fun, we’re digging into some stuff that we love in the hopes that you might make this October a little bit weirder than usual.
Weirder in a good way. Not like what’s going on outside in the hellscape of 2020.
In the 1990s, I used to run to a song that sampled the “Hello Lover” dialogue from Evil Dead 2 (1987), but I didn’t realize the line was from the movie until sometime later. The song is the 1991 Top 40 hit “People Are Still Having Sex” by LaTour.
Nineteen minutes into Evil Dead 2 Bruce Campbell’s Ash wakes from an apparent nightmare in which his girlfriend Linda’s (Denise Bixler) headless corpse dances and torments him. So he’s sitting in the rocking chair recovering from this nightmare in that Bruce Campbell style that defines him to this day, and out of nowhere Linda’s head drops in his lap. It cuts back and forth between the two, and she says, “Hello, lover”. That’s it right there.
The lyrics from the LaTour song are somewhat spoken-word from a pro-government narrator in a dystopian future lamenting the titular problem of “People Are Still Having Sex”.
Have you noticed
That people are still having sex?
All the denouncement
Had absolutely no effect
Parents and counselors
Constantly scorn them
But people are still having sex
And nothing seems to stop them
The song throws away the classic 80s structure of verse/chorus/verse/chorus/break/verse/chorus. The sampled “Hello Lover” from the movie plays like a mini chorus after these two verses at about :50. Two more verses like above follow, and then we get two verses that seem like they should be the chorus, the first one of which is–
People are still having sex
Lust keeps on lurking
Nothing makes them stop
This safe thing’s not working
And then after a similar verse/chorus/whatever it is “Hello Lover” follows at about 1:50 in two sets of three.
The song’s mantra between the lines, however, really encourages not just sex, but just having fun regardless of what people or the government tell us to do as in the final verse. Remember this was during the AIDS epidemic.
At this very moment
People are still having sex
In a downtown condo
Or street in the projects
Although you can’t see them
Or hear their breathing sounds
Someone in this world
Is having sex right now
I love the song. It’s a good running song and got me around the track a couple of dozen times, and I probably fastforwarded my cassette Walkman or skipped to it on my Discman with stabilizer.
A more mismatched sampling, however, does not exist. The context of “Hello Lover” in the movie is far from sexy. One can only assume LaTour discovered the soundbite without really thinking about its origin or just not caring that some English grad burnout would be worrying about it nearly thirty years later. Regardless he does seem to like horror. There’s a little keyboard riff of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor in there too around 2:50.
Incidentally, they masked a line. The lyrics used to be “This AIDS thing’s not working” but they changed it to “This safe thing’s not working.” Let’s leave this on a more positive note. Check out the original video online which includes some great early cgi. Here it is, LaTour’s “People Are Still Having Sex”.