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HOW THE HORROR DRUNX HAVE CHANGED THE FACE OF HORROR
or THE THREE DIRTIEST WORDS WE CAN THINK OF...
A Horror Drunx Exclusive
by Montgomery Brando
May 23, 2008
"NO more Horror movie REMAKES ever, not never baby
Even if you have the rights, you don’t have the right
NO more rip-offs or horror SEQUELS either, forever baby
There’s a Horror Drunx party a the Haunted House tonight"
- - -(The Horror Drunx Anthem by Sid Terror’s UNDEAD)
Not to long ago remakes, sequels and numerous other rip-offs of the Horror genre were begrudgingly accepted with very little protest. But it took The Horror Drunx to make "REMAKE", "SEQUEL" (and other unoriginal thievery) dirty words in the Horror community.
Horror Fans have never gotten a fair break. This is mostly because Horror itself has never truly been taken seriously by the main stream. Perhaps because of its more lurid aspects, or is it the fact that so many people don’t want to admit that they can be scared because they see that as a sign of their own weaknesses? Or maybe, just maybe, it is the same old concept that most people are so afraid of death and are in such denial of admitting their own eventual and inescapable deaths that they prefer to look away from and ignore a genre that is filled with it.
Any way you look at it though, the horror community has always been looked down on as less than sophisticated by many of the elitist snobs of this world that consider themselves above it all. As a result, we’ve always been stuck with the shitty end of the stick. A large percentage of those who were only out to make a quick buck from what they consider us "unsophisticated rubes" by exploiting the horror genre have always been drawn to us and we’ve all had to suffer their manufactured by-products.
For decades, horror fans pretty much had to quietly accept, for better but mostly for worse, whatever scraps and bones they were thrown. We suffered in silence through a never ending list
of remakes and sequels and ideas ripped-off and recycled from better movies. We’d have no choice to just shrug and say "that movie could’ve been better" thankful that something, ANYTHING calling its self horror was given to us at all. Then we would quickly move on and put the forgettable films behind us, hoping something hew and better and original would be coming soon. In turn, the producers and makers of those films got off scot free, made their money, became rich off of us, and paid off their mortgages. That is until very recently.
A few years ago, horror fans had no choice but to accept remakes, sequels and the like. Not really too much bad was said about them. In fact, the norm for the mainstream horror film media like Fangoria, Rue Morgue and others was (and in a large way still) that they are more likely to pander and rave about any upcoming remake or sequel, giving them cover stories and hype, basically helping the hacks publicize their crap by shoving it down our throats. At the same time, those mainstream Horror media mags were making money via payola for advertising, afraid to make enemies with a bad review because that film company might not give them an exclusive and buy some advertising space next time. Frankly, it is more about running a business and making money rather than any real love of the Horror genre and Horror community. Why warn us that a movie sucks, when it might lose them advertising dollars? That my friends is in a nutshell why the Horror movie scene sucks... Both in the movies released and the magazines that are printed... And is why things got so bad for you and me in the Horror community.
Then came THE HORROR DRUNX and the climate of horror began to shift. We began changing the face of horror!
Sure we were also out for a good time, celebrating the horror film and the horror genre in general, but a horror fan organization that was based on the simple concepts of being VERY vocally anti-remake, anti-sequel and anti-ripoff had been unheard of up to that time. Even to Horror Drunx originator Mortimer A. London and a lot of the other big wheels and chapter leaders in The Horror Drunx, this wasn’t apparent at first. Mortimer A. London (along with the others) were often heard saying in conversations... "People ask me what exactly The Horror Drunx are about and I’m often at a loss what to tell them or how to explain it.". That is how alien the concept was. The answers were right in front of them though, it only was a matter of someone coming out and actually recognizing it. Just looking around and seeing what sucked, then being very vocal about not putting up with it anymore. As soon as that happened, things came into sharp focus.
MORTIMER A. LONDON: "There was a very defined hatred of all the horror remakes and sequels and rip-offs from the very beginning of The Horror Drunx, and face it, the trendy new horror coming out of the major movie studios sucks pretty much across the board. People were really surprised, almost shocked, when we first came out about all the remake, sequels and all the people that were blatantly ripping off the horror genre. They shouldn’t have been. Wasn’t it blatantly right in front of their noses all the time? We saw it like a 900 pound gorilla in the living room... no one wanted to mention it because they might upset the gorilla and then have to deal with the fallout. We said fuck that. The Horror Drunx, first and foremost, honor the history of horror, the classics. So when we went ahead and outed Elvira for being such a thief and all the shit she had caused Vampira over the years, people went apeshit. No one had ever done anything like that before. I don’t know why, but they didn’t. To us, it was an injustice that people were just ignoring. But we were able to cause such a backlash of hatred against her, urging people to boycott her thievery, that Elvira’s new show went right down the crapper in the ratings. Ha-ha-ha. No one had ever accomplished anything like that before. It also, I am proud to say, got us our first cease and desist letter from her so-called legal consul. We just laughed at it, she had no case, because we only told the truth."
The first shot in the no remakes, no ripoffs war had been fired, and soon after the battle cry went out loud and strong from The Horror Drunx. And it came from a very unexpected place...
Sid Terror, and his band Sid Terror’s UNDEAD had been Horror Drunx supporters since early on. Terror himself explains, "I saw in The Horror Drunx, the same thing I had seen happening in the early days of punk rock. Punk rock had sprung from a large but very spread out group of people who deeply loved rock and roll, but were really pissed off at what the genre had become. Rock music was on its last dying legs in the mid-1970's, bled almost dry by people who had lost sight of all the originality and rebellious attitudes that had made rock and roll music so strong and huge that it had changed the world in the 1950's. But it had by the middle 70's been absorbed by a music industry that had lost sight of what real rock and roll was. It became a business. A commodity. They didn’t respect it or understand it any longer, they only wanted to tame it and profit by it. Just like the industry has now done to horror movies. Subsequently, rock music sucked by that time. What they were calling rock and roll, wasn’t even rock and roll. It was a industry populated and run by people who maybe rocked once, but they weren’t hungry anymore or striving to do their best, they had long since become millionaires. They weren’t rebellious anymore, what was once fun had become a business full of lawyers and accountants, and the music suffered. It is surprising now to think back to a time when the music industry and many people who called themselves rock and roll fans, really hated punk rock. They saw it as a threat. Most people seem to be afraid of change for some reason."
Terror continued, "I saw The Horror Drunx very much the same way as I saw punk rock in the beginning... A large number of very spread out horror fans that were fed up with what the genre had become. They just needed to find each other, organize, and create a united front against what they hated, then change could start to happen. If it could happen with rock and roll music, why couldn’t it happen with the horror genre?!! Just like punk rock, The Horror Drunx were ignored as a movement at first, and really hated by a lot of people in the mainstream media, as well as people who supposedly called themselves horror fans. But then we snuck up on them, suddenly the Horror Drunx are a world-wide movement with tens of thousands of active pissed-off members that aren’t going to accept shitty ripoff movies any longer".
MORTIMER A. LONDON: "Most of The Horror Drunx also happen to be big music fans, so one of our early ideas was that each chapter should each have their own favorite horror band... Y’know, a band that was in their area. We’d had the idea that each chapter should have a default art that reflected a movie made in their geographic area too... Y’know, Pittsburgh/Night Of The Living Dead, New York/King Kong, Florida/Creature From The Black Lagoon, Texas/Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Connecticut/Horror Of Party Beach, Las Vegas/The Amazing Colossal Man, etc. like that. All the chapters were to have a look based on a classic horror movie made in their area, and have a horror band from their area that would be their official band. None of that seemed to work out though. So I started thinking of bands that we could maybe work with who were fans of ours, y’know someone maybe accessible that we could work with who believed in what we did. The vote was taken, and almost overwhelmingly everybody was saying Sid Terror’s UNDEAD. I already knew Sid, we had been corresponding for quite awhile. You couldn’t find anyone who is a bigger fan of real horror films, plus he’s a real down-to-earth person. Luckily he was open to the idea of his band being made the official band of The Horror Drunx...We could have done a lot worse than one of the bands that actually STARTED horror punk...And you sure couldn’t imagine us asking some hacks like The Misfits, I mean, not only do they suck now, but it is all about money with them. Sid understood us and it is all about the cause as his main motivation....He lives and breathes in an alternate universe that is nothing BUT horror. And the rest is history. When he recorded The Horror Drunx Anthem, our word again spread like wildfire. It really raised us up to a new level and became our battle cry. It also put us out there to a lot of people we wanted to reach."
MORTIMER A. LONDON: "Yeah, so many of the people in the horror community are these doughy complacent fanboys that have a real snobby attitude. They are more than happy to pay almost a hundred bucks to go to a horror convention put on by one of the same magazines that has been publicizing and shoving the worst crap possible down their throats, then spend over $20 bucks for the autographed photo of some 4th rate horror "celebrity" that maybe made one movie once 20 or 30 years ago. It’s pathetic. The rates for those photos are all set by the convention and the celebs end up giving them a percentage. So they get you paying coming in the door, then they get you again paying for the stuff you buy inside. They try to fool you into thinking these autographed photos are some valuable collectable, but really, can you imagine an autographed photo of most of these goofs being worth $25 anyplace else on the planet outside of these conventions? NO. You can't resell it for that much. If you plan on being around 75+ years after they are dead and gone, maybe. Isn't it interesting they are called "CONS" for short? Appropriate, huh? If you are one of these washed up horror celebs, the FANNYS and the Convention want to be their best buddy, especially if the celeb has some cleavage to show. It is the bunch of freaks, geeks, and the severely nerded like this...who all remind me of the comic-book guy on The Simpsons...that kind of look down on the real horror fans like us who want to make change for the better. Now due to The Horror Drunx we are seeing that change, at least among the more enlightened and open-minded people in the horror community. There is still a long way to go though".
The war has begun. Which side are YOU on?
"My name is Montgomery Brando and I am a Horror Drunx".
Montgomery Brando
Hollywood, California.
or THE THREE DIRTIEST WORDS WE CAN THINK OF...
A Horror Drunx Exclusive
by Montgomery Brando
May 23, 2008
"NO more Horror movie REMAKES ever, not never baby
Even if you have the rights, you don’t have the right
NO more rip-offs or horror SEQUELS either, forever baby
There’s a Horror Drunx party a the Haunted House tonight"
- - -(The Horror Drunx Anthem by Sid Terror’s UNDEAD)
Not to long ago remakes, sequels and numerous other rip-offs of the Horror genre were begrudgingly accepted with very little protest. But it took The Horror Drunx to make "REMAKE", "SEQUEL" (and other unoriginal thievery) dirty words in the Horror community.
Horror Fans have never gotten a fair break. This is mostly because Horror itself has never truly been taken seriously by the main stream. Perhaps because of its more lurid aspects, or is it the fact that so many people don’t want to admit that they can be scared because they see that as a sign of their own weaknesses? Or maybe, just maybe, it is the same old concept that most people are so afraid of death and are in such denial of admitting their own eventual and inescapable deaths that they prefer to look away from and ignore a genre that is filled with it.
Any way you look at it though, the horror community has always been looked down on as less than sophisticated by many of the elitist snobs of this world that consider themselves above it all. As a result, we’ve always been stuck with the shitty end of the stick. A large percentage of those who were only out to make a quick buck from what they consider us "unsophisticated rubes" by exploiting the horror genre have always been drawn to us and we’ve all had to suffer their manufactured by-products.
For decades, horror fans pretty much had to quietly accept, for better but mostly for worse, whatever scraps and bones they were thrown. We suffered in silence through a never ending list
of remakes and sequels and ideas ripped-off and recycled from better movies. We’d have no choice to just shrug and say "that movie could’ve been better" thankful that something, ANYTHING calling its self horror was given to us at all. Then we would quickly move on and put the forgettable films behind us, hoping something hew and better and original would be coming soon. In turn, the producers and makers of those films got off scot free, made their money, became rich off of us, and paid off their mortgages. That is until very recently.
A few years ago, horror fans had no choice but to accept remakes, sequels and the like. Not really too much bad was said about them. In fact, the norm for the mainstream horror film media like Fangoria, Rue Morgue and others was (and in a large way still) that they are more likely to pander and rave about any upcoming remake or sequel, giving them cover stories and hype, basically helping the hacks publicize their crap by shoving it down our throats. At the same time, those mainstream Horror media mags were making money via payola for advertising, afraid to make enemies with a bad review because that film company might not give them an exclusive and buy some advertising space next time. Frankly, it is more about running a business and making money rather than any real love of the Horror genre and Horror community. Why warn us that a movie sucks, when it might lose them advertising dollars? That my friends is in a nutshell why the Horror movie scene sucks... Both in the movies released and the magazines that are printed... And is why things got so bad for you and me in the Horror community.
Then came THE HORROR DRUNX and the climate of horror began to shift. We began changing the face of horror!
Sure we were also out for a good time, celebrating the horror film and the horror genre in general, but a horror fan organization that was based on the simple concepts of being VERY vocally anti-remake, anti-sequel and anti-ripoff had been unheard of up to that time. Even to Horror Drunx originator Mortimer A. London and a lot of the other big wheels and chapter leaders in The Horror Drunx, this wasn’t apparent at first. Mortimer A. London (along with the others) were often heard saying in conversations... "People ask me what exactly The Horror Drunx are about and I’m often at a loss what to tell them or how to explain it.". That is how alien the concept was. The answers were right in front of them though, it only was a matter of someone coming out and actually recognizing it. Just looking around and seeing what sucked, then being very vocal about not putting up with it anymore. As soon as that happened, things came into sharp focus.
MORTIMER A. LONDON: "There was a very defined hatred of all the horror remakes and sequels and rip-offs from the very beginning of The Horror Drunx, and face it, the trendy new horror coming out of the major movie studios sucks pretty much across the board. People were really surprised, almost shocked, when we first came out about all the remake, sequels and all the people that were blatantly ripping off the horror genre. They shouldn’t have been. Wasn’t it blatantly right in front of their noses all the time? We saw it like a 900 pound gorilla in the living room... no one wanted to mention it because they might upset the gorilla and then have to deal with the fallout. We said fuck that. The Horror Drunx, first and foremost, honor the history of horror, the classics. So when we went ahead and outed Elvira for being such a thief and all the shit she had caused Vampira over the years, people went apeshit. No one had ever done anything like that before. I don’t know why, but they didn’t. To us, it was an injustice that people were just ignoring. But we were able to cause such a backlash of hatred against her, urging people to boycott her thievery, that Elvira’s new show went right down the crapper in the ratings. Ha-ha-ha. No one had ever accomplished anything like that before. It also, I am proud to say, got us our first cease and desist letter from her so-called legal consul. We just laughed at it, she had no case, because we only told the truth."
The first shot in the no remakes, no ripoffs war had been fired, and soon after the battle cry went out loud and strong from The Horror Drunx. And it came from a very unexpected place...
Sid Terror, and his band Sid Terror’s UNDEAD had been Horror Drunx supporters since early on. Terror himself explains, "I saw in The Horror Drunx, the same thing I had seen happening in the early days of punk rock. Punk rock had sprung from a large but very spread out group of people who deeply loved rock and roll, but were really pissed off at what the genre had become. Rock music was on its last dying legs in the mid-1970's, bled almost dry by people who had lost sight of all the originality and rebellious attitudes that had made rock and roll music so strong and huge that it had changed the world in the 1950's. But it had by the middle 70's been absorbed by a music industry that had lost sight of what real rock and roll was. It became a business. A commodity. They didn’t respect it or understand it any longer, they only wanted to tame it and profit by it. Just like the industry has now done to horror movies. Subsequently, rock music sucked by that time. What they were calling rock and roll, wasn’t even rock and roll. It was a industry populated and run by people who maybe rocked once, but they weren’t hungry anymore or striving to do their best, they had long since become millionaires. They weren’t rebellious anymore, what was once fun had become a business full of lawyers and accountants, and the music suffered. It is surprising now to think back to a time when the music industry and many people who called themselves rock and roll fans, really hated punk rock. They saw it as a threat. Most people seem to be afraid of change for some reason."
Terror continued, "I saw The Horror Drunx very much the same way as I saw punk rock in the beginning... A large number of very spread out horror fans that were fed up with what the genre had become. They just needed to find each other, organize, and create a united front against what they hated, then change could start to happen. If it could happen with rock and roll music, why couldn’t it happen with the horror genre?!! Just like punk rock, The Horror Drunx were ignored as a movement at first, and really hated by a lot of people in the mainstream media, as well as people who supposedly called themselves horror fans. But then we snuck up on them, suddenly the Horror Drunx are a world-wide movement with tens of thousands of active pissed-off members that aren’t going to accept shitty ripoff movies any longer".
MORTIMER A. LONDON: "Most of The Horror Drunx also happen to be big music fans, so one of our early ideas was that each chapter should each have their own favorite horror band... Y’know, a band that was in their area. We’d had the idea that each chapter should have a default art that reflected a movie made in their geographic area too... Y’know, Pittsburgh/Night Of The Living Dead, New York/King Kong, Florida/Creature From The Black Lagoon, Texas/Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Connecticut/Horror Of Party Beach, Las Vegas/The Amazing Colossal Man, etc. like that. All the chapters were to have a look based on a classic horror movie made in their area, and have a horror band from their area that would be their official band. None of that seemed to work out though. So I started thinking of bands that we could maybe work with who were fans of ours, y’know someone maybe accessible that we could work with who believed in what we did. The vote was taken, and almost overwhelmingly everybody was saying Sid Terror’s UNDEAD. I already knew Sid, we had been corresponding for quite awhile. You couldn’t find anyone who is a bigger fan of real horror films, plus he’s a real down-to-earth person. Luckily he was open to the idea of his band being made the official band of The Horror Drunx...We could have done a lot worse than one of the bands that actually STARTED horror punk...And you sure couldn’t imagine us asking some hacks like The Misfits, I mean, not only do they suck now, but it is all about money with them. Sid understood us and it is all about the cause as his main motivation....He lives and breathes in an alternate universe that is nothing BUT horror. And the rest is history. When he recorded The Horror Drunx Anthem, our word again spread like wildfire. It really raised us up to a new level and became our battle cry. It also put us out there to a lot of people we wanted to reach."
MORTIMER A. LONDON: "Yeah, so many of the people in the horror community are these doughy complacent fanboys that have a real snobby attitude. They are more than happy to pay almost a hundred bucks to go to a horror convention put on by one of the same magazines that has been publicizing and shoving the worst crap possible down their throats, then spend over $20 bucks for the autographed photo of some 4th rate horror "celebrity" that maybe made one movie once 20 or 30 years ago. It’s pathetic. The rates for those photos are all set by the convention and the celebs end up giving them a percentage. So they get you paying coming in the door, then they get you again paying for the stuff you buy inside. They try to fool you into thinking these autographed photos are some valuable collectable, but really, can you imagine an autographed photo of most of these goofs being worth $25 anyplace else on the planet outside of these conventions? NO. You can't resell it for that much. If you plan on being around 75+ years after they are dead and gone, maybe. Isn't it interesting they are called "CONS" for short? Appropriate, huh? If you are one of these washed up horror celebs, the FANNYS and the Convention want to be their best buddy, especially if the celeb has some cleavage to show. It is the bunch of freaks, geeks, and the severely nerded like this...who all remind me of the comic-book guy on The Simpsons...that kind of look down on the real horror fans like us who want to make change for the better. Now due to The Horror Drunx we are seeing that change, at least among the more enlightened and open-minded people in the horror community. There is still a long way to go though".
The war has begun. Which side are YOU on?
"My name is Montgomery Brando and I am a Horror Drunx".
Montgomery Brando
Hollywood, California.