Dee Snider wants his own sugarcoated breakfast cereal. He wants cheap plastic Halloween masks made in his likeness. He wants a center spread in Fangoria magazine. And he wants to frighten lots of little children -- again. |

The former frontman of seminal Eighties glam rock band Twisted Sister has been reincarnated as a horror movie villain so despicable, he'd make Jason and Michael Myers join a neighborhood watch program. Portraying his pierced and plundering alter ego, Captain Howdy, in the upcoming film Strangeland, the forty-three-year-old father says he's finally achieving his lifelong demonic dream.

"Being a horror icon is something that works for me," he says. "Scaring people, that's something I always do."

The erstwhile shock rocker refuses to lighten up on right-wing fundamentalists after smothering them with a fistful of rebellious anthems ("We're Not Gonna Take It," "I Wanna Rock" and "You Can't Stop Rock & Roll") for the first half of the Eighties. Always the showman, Snider says he will not reveal the appearance of Captain Howdy before Strangeland's opening night, however early reports forecast nausea and parental uproar.

"I remembered seeing a British punk rocker in the early Eighties who had half of his face tattooed, and it was very disturbing," he says regarding the inspiration for Howdy's gruesome look. "But what do you do with the other side? I just pierced it to the tenth power.'"

Captain Howdy first got his stripes fourteen years ago, when the character was introduced on Twisted Sister's multiplatinum breakthrough, Stay Hungry. The epic song "Horror-Teria (The Beginning)" began a storyline that Snider intended to stretch out on a proverbial rack for each and every Twisted Sister album.

"Fortunately for the public, I never finished the rock horror opera," Snider says. "Captain Howdy was originally a pervert who used clown make-up to lure children in. When I shared that vision with Stephen King at a Twisted concert in 1984 back stage, he agreed with me that clowns were a weird thing in that they were both alluring and repelling. I guess he liked that idea so much that he incorporated it into the book It."

So Howdy was morphed into a pincushion with a penchant for communal mutilation. After studying up on the culture of body modification, Snider polished off a diabolical screenplay and sent a copy off to Robert Englund -- known to insomniacs as Freddy Krueger. Then, the man who's been typecast like few others accepted Snider's invitation to play Captain Howdy's most principled nemesis.

"It was a bizarre handing of the baton," Snider says of Englund's appearance in Strangeland. "He was willing to play my victim, which gives everyone a chuckle to think that Freddy is being tormented by this new guy."

Strangeland will open in major cities Nov. 2, and will gradually make its way across the U.S. The promotional "Strangeland" tour featuring Soulfly, Snot, head(pe), dayinthelife and Snider as the master of scaremonies, will hit the road this Saturday in San Francisco and continue on through October. Meanwhile, positive feedback has been mounting in the weeks before the film's release, prompting Snider to begin writing a Strangeland sequel -- and begin pumping up his Hollywood ego.

"I hope that Captain Howdy becomes played out like Jason, and Michael Myers and Freddy," he says, "so that there's little children wearing my costume years from now." One can dream -- a nightmare.

ANNI LAYNE (September 16, 1998)