The Night Creeper

There was a sort of magic in the pulp horror films of the 1960s and ’70s. Creators took liberties with their use of vibrant color to make blood run redder. Their dynamic camera movements gave murder scenes a psychedelic and dreamlike quality. Grimy, grainy, and trashy though they were, there still remained this pupil-dilating and immersive aspect that, sadly, has disappeared from the horror movies of the present. It seems, though, that the present day descendants of the pulp and grindhouse bloodline have shifted ways and learned to play guitar.

Here we find Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats, a psychedelic rock band out of Cambridge who still reap the seeds planted by the pulp writers and Giallo directors of nearly half a century ago. From their mysterious beginning in 2009, the band has made music that thrives on vintage sounds and evokes all that which was deemed worthy of a good and cheap scare back in the ’60s and ’70s. Imagine if Black Sabbath recorded concept albums a la Leviathan-era Mastodon, inspired by Christopher Lee’s Dracula movies or The Jonestown Massacre. That formula would result in Uncle Acid’s Blood Lust (2012) and Mind Control (2013), respectively. Their fourth LP, The Night Creeper is another concept album, again heavily steeped in its lineage and concept.

Frontman Kevin R. Starrs describes the album as having “started life as an old, cheap, grime-covered 25 cent pulp paperback,” which was then “adapted into a film noir which itself is then re-made 20 years later as an ultra-violent slasher Italian Giallo film.” It presents the story of some urban bogeyman called The Night Creeper who partakes in the more sinister vices of the era: psychedelic drugs, murder, etc. The story here, though, is not as entirely evident as it was on Blood Lust or Mind Control. With The Night Creeper, Starrs suggests that “listeners do the detective work themselves,” the way they might have had they been reading a copy of the fictional book themselves.