Alice Cooper and Aerosmith's Joe Perry once moved into a haunted house to write songs for a horror movie: it did not end well

Alice Cooper and Joe Perry — (Image credit: Kevin Mazur/WireImage)

In the mid '80s, Alice Cooper was approached by Italian film director Claudio Fragasso to play the part of musician Vincent Raven in horror movie Monster Dog.

The plot of the film would see Raven, his girlfriend Sandra (played by Spanish actress Victoria Vera), and a film crew drive to Vince's former childhood home to shoot a music video. Here they would be confronted by a pack of wild canines reputedly led by - and you might have seen this coming - a terrifying, demonic, flesh-hungry Monster Dog. And from here, things would get really messy.

In a 1986 Canadian newspaper interview, Cooper revealed that, at the time, he was keen to do a cheap, sleazy, B-movie style film: "They told me it would never get released in the movie houses," he told The Georgia Straight," and I said, Great!"

As he recalls in the new issue of Classic Rock magazine, Cooper was keen to write some original music for the film, and so he hit up his good friend Joe Perry from Aerosmith and proposed the pair get together privately to see what they might come up with. A simple plan, but one that, as Cooper recalls, did not go according to plan.

"So we went up to my manager’s house in Copiague, New York," Cooper tells Classic Rock, "and things kept going missing: my harmonica, Joe’s strings. Later, at dinner, it sounded like somebody was moving furniture in the basement."

Cooper may have a well-deserved reputation as a shock rock pioneer, but he knew better than to mess with the powers of darkness.

"It wasn’t like in the movies where people say: 'Let’s get flashlights and go down there'." he admits. "We were out of there.

"I called Shep [Gordon, Cooper's manager] and he goes: 'Oh yeah, [1977 horror novel, later film] The Amityville Horror was written about that house.' I was like, And you were going to tell me when?"

Bringing us up to the modern day, Cooper is currently working upon a new studio album called Road, a concept album about life on the road.

"It's things that happen on the road," he told UltimateClassicRock. "There's a lot of humour in it. There's a couple of heartbreakers, but it's very guitar-driven because that's what I look for in an album. I love writing the songs with Bob and the guys, and we really emphasize that the main instrument is gonna be guitar. It's not gonna drift off into any other land out there."

Cooper and Joe Perry's side-band, The Hollywood Vampires, will release their Live in Rio album next month.

Artists

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne's private jet, played Angus Young's Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.