The mind behind the former Fake Theme Park account on Twitter has now dreamed up a song about Universal’s classic monsters. More specifically, Jason Ginsburg’s “Children of the Night” is about dating Dracula, Wolfman, Frankenstein’s monster and others in the horror genre.
The idea dates back to seeing a trailer for Universal Pictures’ Dark Universe series of classic movies, Ginsburg said. Its soundtrack was generic, but he realized there was no obvious alternative.
“They’re, like, all these iconic characters, but there’s no music for them,” he said.
“So, like an idiot, I thought I should do it. I’m a fan of the monsters. I like film music. I’ve co-written two songs for Fake Theme Park. Let’s see if I can put together a team and make this happen,” Ginsburg said.
He did. The singing narrator (vocalist Brette Alana) runs through a series of romantic encounters with well-known characters such as the Mummy.
Lyrics include:
“Down in Cairo on a date
Rendezvous 3,000 years late
He called me princess, said he’s a priest
I didn’t mind that he was deceased.
Reincarnation’s way too complex
I won’t get back together with an ex.”
Ginsburg hired composer Eduardo Garcia Rascon, who has worked with film and video game projects.
“He gave me the right kind of vibe of being kind between a Broadway show tune — with all the jokes that I’m playing a character — but also have sort of like a goth, symphonic metal vibe to it, which the monsters certainly give off,” Ginsburg said.
Many of the monsters are driven by love, although sometimes misguided, Ginsburg says, citing the Phantom of the Opera and Christine as well as Frankenstein and his bride.
“I thought maybe that’s the way to do it, to have a woman thinking about loving all the monsters, and she had to leave them for some reason,” he says. “There’s some flaw that drove her away. But she still was attracted to them, as we all are attracted at first … and then kind of repulsed.”
For instance, in the character’s courting of Dracula, the party was short “because he never drinks wine. He liked the nightlife, I missed the sun. I always found his daughter to be more fun,” the song goes. (The song’s title is from a line in the 1931 “Dracula” film.)
Later, Frankenstein has a moment: “He stood out from all the rest, flat-top head and 60-inch chest,” the song says.
“That took a while to come to that conclusion, that that’s the story to tell and not just like ‘the monsters are cool.’ You can’t do four minutes of that,” Ginsburg said.
“It was so satisfying to give a voice to the electrifying feminine point-of-view, in the world of classic monsters, in such a fun and relatable way,” Alana said in a news release.
Ginsburg, a former tour guide at Universal Studios Hollywood, is currently the manager of factual content for Discovery+ streaming service. He lives in Manhattan. He retired the Fake Theme Park account, for which he had co-written two songs, in early 2023.
Making money off the song would be good, he said, but he has a specific, spooky objective.
“The dream of it being somehow tied to Universal and Halloween Horror Nights would be the absolute goal … somehow in the park, somewhere in an attraction, something like that,” he said. “If it played somewhere in some park, somewhere around the world, I would be thrilled.”
dbevil@orlandosentinel.com
