WFMU’s Beware of the Blog has an mp3 of Night of the Laughing Dead from Power Records from liiiike 1974. I had this when I was around six or seven years old, and I have literally never been so terrified of anything in my entire life before or since.
Night of the Laughing Dead was a 45 (!) narrated by Stan Lee (!!) in second person (!!??!) -- you are the Man-Thing (as opposed to DC’s slightly later but more popular Swamp Thing, and both as opposed to Hillman/Eclipse’s original Heap); you secrete a chemical corrosive when you sense fear; you witness a clown shooting himself in the head because your girlfriend, the tightrope walker, had an affair! (This always happens to clowns.)
Then the clown’s ghost appears and tries to make people laugh in a Roger Rabbit voice, while creepy circus music plays in the background. Then some other stuff happens. Then you get completely afraid-to-open-the-closet-caliber wigged out but can’t stop playing it over and over again until finally your mother gets worried that you’re not sleeping and tells you, “Why don’t we put this away until you’re older?” at which point she throws it away along with some flexidiscs you got off the back of a Honeycombs box about UFOs that also rattled me so much I wasn’t able to function.
I mean, you.
(Maybe this won’t be that scary to you; maybe I’m just remembering how scared it made me as a kid, but I just listened to this in my office on my iPod, with the lights out, and if anyone is reading this right now, will you please come to my office? And check the men’s room for dead clowns? Because I have to pee?)
N.B. In case you were wondering what the best blog in the history of all blogs ever, as of right now, is, it’s Scar Stuff, which has a lot of other recordings like this and has the added benefit of being named after the Halloween makeup from Imagineering, a company I kept in the black for much of the late 70s.
Mira:
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