ABSTRACT
Throughout his career, Frank Zappa reveals a recurrent interest in popular horror culture which is manifest in his achievements as a creative force of performance, composition and production. The academic and Zappa fan Dave Kenyon recalls how in 1970s UK concerts Zappa could be an ebullient performer engaging in repartee with the audience in one gig and, on another occasion, personify indifference by performing with his back to the audience throughout the concert. For Kevin Courrier, however, when the lyrics mention napalm we are taken away from the B-movie into the contemporaneous world of the modern horror of the Vietnam War, a conflict that continued to rage under Richard Nixon. The B-movie world of cheap horror and science fiction is never far away in Zappa's other attempts at more sustained narratives, most notably the completed epics Joe's Garage Acts I, II and III and Thing-Fish. Hunchentoot reveals that Zappa's passion for monster movies extended to him aspiring to make his own.
