I am a sucker for Halloween. All of it. The crummy plastic pumpkins, the drugstore Halloween costumes, the low grade B horror movies, the carving o the 'lanterns and cheesy horror spoken word recordings.
As a child, we had a scratched up copy of Alfred Hitchcock's "Ghost Stories For Young People". We used to listen to this on long humid air conditionless (hey, it was the seventies!) summer nights. Sitting in a dark room, trying to scare each other. I also was a big fan of Disney's "The Haunted House", an album from the early seventies that actually went gold.
Even though I have been a "grown up" now for going on forty years, I still love Halloween..When the days grow short and the leaves begin to fall, I love nothing more than sitting in the dark on my front porch and listening to these old recordings. Which brings us to, "The Story Of Frankenstein, Dracula and The Wolfman".
Most of the spoken word Halloween records I have collected over the years are from from the sixties and seventies but I found this recording on CD back in the nineties. There is no copyright date on the package and what little information I can find says that it was released in 1999 or 2006. I remember listening to this with my kids when they were grade school age which would make the date closer to 1999.
The album was released by an entity called, Sellthrough Entertainment out of Tampa, Florida. The company formed in 1995 and, as far as I can tell, this is the only audio recording they ever released. In addition, there is no information on the voice actors or producers. It's a mystery.
What exactly was Sellthrough Entertaiment? A multi-national conglomerate? A shell company for a shadowy South American arms dealer? A fifteen year old kid making scary spoken word recordings in his bedroom? I like to imagine, all of the above.
This was defintiely a low budget enterprise. From the pakaging to the sound effects to the actors, you can tell this was done with a budget in mind. That being said, it is a fun listen. As the title indicates, the CD containes the tales of Frankenstein, Dracula and The Wolfman. Frankenstein is definitely the strongest and the Wolfman the weakest but all of them are enjoyable listen and probably not scary to anyone over seven years of age.
It's worth picking up a used copy on Amazon or Discogs or you can listen to it for free HERE
Happy Halloween