Halloween means…cheepnis!

“I ate a hot dog, it tasted real good/Then I watched a movie from Hollywood”

Frank Zappa & The Mothers, “Cheepnis”

It’s widely known that World War Z (dir. Marc Forster, 2013) is the most expensive horror film ever made. At $190 million, it holds a $30 million lead over Van Helsing (dir. Stephen Sommers, 2004) and a $40 million lead over The Wolfman (dir. Joe Johnston, 2010).

Of course, just as you can make a bad horror movie with a big budget, you can make a good horror movie on a low budget, as Alfred Hitchcock did with Psycho (1960). The film cost $800,000 and grossed $50 million. George Romero’s zombie classic Night of the Living Dead (1967) cost a mere $114,000 and grossed $30 million. And then there’s the legendary Blair Witch Project (dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999), whose budget is estimated to have been somewhere between $200,000 and $500,000. The film ended up grossing nearly $250 million.

But what about that sweet spot, the low-budget horror or sci-fi movie that is bad–and I mean really, really bad? This is what we call “cheepnis.” Or rather, this is what Frank Zappa calls cheepnis, in his song by the same name (which you can find on the classic 1974 live, double LP, “Roxy & Elsewhere”). Take, for example, the classic cheepnis movie It Conquered the World directed by the auteur of cheepnis, Roger Corman. This 1956 film starring towering Hollywood figures like, um, Lee Van Cleef and Peter Graves, is about a creature from Venus that tries to take over the Earth by implanting innocent people with weird bat-like mind-controlling devices. The creature (the “It”) is…well I’ll let Zappa himself describe it:

“The monster looks sort of like an inverted ice-cream cone with teeth around the bottom. It looks like a, like a teepee or a rounded off pup-tent affair. And ah, it’s got fangs on the base of it, I don’t know why but it’s a very threatening sight.”

Then there’s the 1964 film The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies. Yes, that’s the title. And it was made for $38,000. This monster musical (yes, monster musical–filmed in Terrorama no less), “directed” by Ray Dennis Steckler, tells the story of three friends who visit a carnival and stumble upon some incredibly strange creatures who stopped living and became mixed-up zombies. It’s no surprise that both It Conquered the World and The Incredibly Strange Creatures were both featured in episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

This Halloween, as you seek out monster movies to send shivers down your spine, don’t forget to seek out those movies that send you to the floor in hysterics because of the cheepnis of it all. And for those of you who would like a primer on Hollywood cheepnis, check out on YouTube the 1982 documentary It Came from Hollywood (directed by Andrew Solt and Malcom Leo) starring Cheech & Chong and Saturday Night Live and SCTV veterans Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, and John Candy. And for those of you who are curious about Zappa’s homage to cheap monster movies, check out this performance of “Cheepnis.”

“Baby I’m sorry ‘cuz it’s all I wanna know, I need a little more cheepnis please”