Back in 1998, Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider was entering a new phase in his career. His famed band had broken up 11 years earlier. A couple of subsequent metal projects had failed to catch on, and he had fallen into a financial abyss. But his fortunes started turning around when he began hosting a nationally syndicated radio show called House of Hair in 1997. It featured ’80s hard rock and metal bands, and the tagline was, “If it ain’t metal, it’s crap!” He also penned a Christmas song, “The Magic of Christmas Day (God Bless Us Everyone)” for Celine Dion’s massively successful 1998 holiday album, These Are Special Times. That same year he wrote and starred in his own horror movie, the gruesome Strangeland.
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Snider had always been a horror movie fan and wrote some dark songs for his former band, so it was no surprise that he found inspiration for his screenplay in one of his own tracks. The “Horror-Teria” epic from Twisted’s multi-Platinum album Stay Hungry from 1984 provided the creative fodder for Strangeland. The two-part epic (“Captain Howdy” and “Street Justice”) focused on a serial child killer named Captain Howdy who was arrested, tried, and let go on a technicality by a drunk judge. An angry mob from the town went after the freed criminal to get their own justice.
In the song, the villain was more clear-cut. He was an evil character akin to someone like the creepy dream killer Freddy Krueger, who would debut onscreen in A Nightmare On Elm Street six months after Stay Hungry arrived. Unlike Krueger, the musical and cinematic Captain Howdy was rooted in the real world, but in the movie he was a different type of evil. The heavily tattooed predator loved ritualistic body modification and lured teens through internet chat rooms to his basement dungeon. There he imprisoned and tortured them. (“So much flesh, so little time.”) Howdy was arrested, institutionalized, and allegedly reformed. But he became the victim of street justice at the hands of angry citizens who thought he was back to his old ways, and they conducted an ultimately failed lynching. The event awakened his inner evil again, and the same detective who caught him before had to track him to try to stop him again.
Snider relished playing Captain Howdy with menace and malice which fit the misanthropic character.
This journalist interviewed the singer back in 1998 during a Strangeland mixing session in New York City. He discussed how the film was coming out in the midst of the ironic slasher movie revival kicked off by Wes Craven’s mega-hit Scream.
“Which works really well for me,” Snider said. “I didn’t time it for this. When I wrote this, they were not en vogue. But I was a horror fan, and I felt it was time for something new. I was watching Child’s Play 3 with my wife and kids, and I’m yelling at the TV, ‘It’s a doll! Kick it! It’s a doll!’ I’m a grown man, and I’m watching a man in perfect condition running from a doll. And a Leprechaun. Or even Scream—it was good, but some pimply-faced teenager with a ghost mask on? That’s not scary to me. As I sat there years ago … Freddy’s dead, Jason’s dead, Michael Myers is dead, and I’m watching a doll, and hopefully he’ll be dead soon, too. We needed another creature. Then I thought of old Captain Howdy and decided to revive him but in a very contemporary fashion. He uses the internet as his way to lure victims in, which works really well. If you can order your books online, why not order your victims?”
Strangeland opened to very mixed reviews and a $713,000 box office gross against a $1.1 million budget, but the film turned into a cult item on home video. The unsettling film starred Snider, Kevin Gage, Elizabeth Peña, and Brett Harrelson. Something of note for horror fans: Robert Englund, who portrayed Freddy Krueger in eight movies, played the leader of the angry mob that sought to kill Captain Howdy in this movie. That was a nice bit of role reversal.
Music was integral to the Strangeland soundtrack, which included the moody Snider song “Inconclusion” (which was more Tool than Twisted Sister). There were also contributions from, among many others, System of a Down, Pantera, Coal Chamber, and Bile, who performed during a club scene in the film. Snider was very involved in curating the soundtrack. He also reunited Twisted Sister for the rousing anthem “Heroes Are Hard to Find,” their first new song in over a decade. That was a treat in itself.
Despite the low-key reception to Strangeland, Snider spoke to FlickDirect in 2009 about a possible sequel called Strangeland: Disciple. “Hostel and SAW are children of Strangeland,” stated Snider. “Before that, there was no torture [porn] genre. Everyone was still beating the dead horse being chased and dying of Halloween. The idea of being torn into had not been developed yet. I did a Fangoria radio show dedicated to the world of horror, and the makers of Hostel and SAW would talk about how they loved Strangeland. With Strangeland: Disciple, I’m going to take my crown back. That calls for a really intense effort on the part of the script.”
Snider wanted the original film to be more graphic and go for an NC-17 rating, but nervous executives killed the idea because they feared it would hurt its box office chances. Next time, the singer wants to go that route and offer a no-holds barred version of Captain Howdy.
While the sequel still has not happened, in a 2021 interview with Bloody Disgusting, Snider expressed hope that it would come out someday. “I don’t know if I’ll be wearing a loincloth, or somebody else will be replacing me, but he will rise,” asserted Snider. “He will rise. We will hear from him one more time.”
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Photo by Phillip Faraone/WireImage
