Zacherle Busts Some Rhymes

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.

The late, great John Zacherle, sometimes spelled Zacherley, also known as Roland or the Cool Ghoul, remains in a dead heat with a number of others as the best television horror movie host of all time with his show Shock Theater. Where he really sets himself apart is his horror music, best heard all year around but great to break up the traditional monotony of the basic Halloween songs that we hear every year. There is nothing I like more, however, than his lyrics.

There is nothing more monotonous and boring than predicting the rhyme of the next line to a song, and there is nothing more exciting — granted, for some of us weird people — than a completely original rhyme. On one hand, love seems to always fit like a glove, and on the other hand — disembodied and crawling around — is Zacherle singing the lyrics to “Dinner with Drac”:

“The waitress, a vampire named Perkins
Was so very fond of small gherkins
While serving tea
She ate forty-three
Which pickled her internal workin’s”

And

“For dessert there was batwing confetti
And the veins of a mummy named Betty
I first frowned upon it
But with ketchup on it
It tasted very much like spaghetti”

But his coup de grace and original ryhme overload is “The Coolest Little Monster” with the first verse as follows:

“I’ll send a small box
Of small pox
A large tub
Of hub bub

Your own noose
For home use
A crate full
Of hateful

’Cause you’re the coolest little monster
That ever put the spook on me”

And the second verse, 

“I’ll send a lipstick
Of arsenic
One urn
Of sunburn

Six cups
Of hiccups
A bin full
Of sinful

’Cause you’re the coolest little monster
That ever put the spook on me”

and the third,

“Eight pails
Of hangnails
Some pass cards
For graveyards

A werewolf
That’s your wolf
Some batwings
For earrings”

Jon Sheldon and Harry Land are the credited songwriters for “My Dinner with Drac” and Lee Pockriss and Stanley Rhodes for “Coolest Little Monster.” It’s unclear if they or Zacherle actually wrote the lyrics, but regardless, he chose them, and it seems like fun rhymes like these were a catchy schtick he enjoyed along with the rest of his masterful routine.