Curtis Rx and Erik X are two seriously obsessed fans of classic horror (especially the George Romero variety). When these twisted kindred souls met up last year (at a Halloween party, appropriately enough) they knew they had to collaborate. Since then, they've begun work on a horror movie project and started the horror band Creature Feature.

G&C: What's up?

Curtis: (channeling 'The Colonel') Hello, everybody. I'm the Colonel.

Erik: That's the Colonel, everyone.

Curtis: Yeah, he's our personal assistant. You'll talk to him online sometimes. He deals with the unruly people and the ones who think we should change our style because it's not radio-friendly and it's a little morbid. But we've learned those people have no sense of humor. So they deal with the Colonel.

G&C: He fries them up?

Curtis: Exactly. Seven herbs and spices. He's got an eighth one but he only busts it out on special nights.

G&C: You should make a song out of that.

Curtis: That's gonna be on the next album.

G&C: Are you serious?

Curtis: No! But it should be. Maybe it will be just for you. The album's gonna be called With Gravy and it'll be out in 2007, late 2007. A concept album.

G&C: So how are you guys doing?

Curtis: Doing good. Just had some coffee so I'm doing good. We're working on our upcoming album. We want to show all the different styles we do. Drum N bass and stuff, carnival music, a little bit of everything.

Erik:: A little bit of everything.

G&C: Can you start by telling us how you guys got started and what are some of your inspirations?

Erik: We met through a mutual friend.

Curtis: Yeah, mutual friend at a Halloween party in 2005. Literally, that night, we started writing songs because we had the same interests. We'd both been in bands that had gone nowhere. At that Halloween party we were both in costume and that night we started writing. And one of the songs on our EP Aim For The Head came from that night. Ever since then, it's been constant working on horror music based on all our influences.

Erik: Every day, all the time, that's all we do.

Curtis: You can tell a lot of the different influences. A lot of it is George Romero, of course. I was lucky enough to grow up in a household where my dad had one of the first video rental store chains in the Ventura area so my nightly movie was getting to watch every movie before he put it on the shelf to test it. So I got to grow up on Creepshow, all the Hammer horror and anything with Vincent Price.

Erik: And then he forces me to watch every low budget movie...

Curtis: I force him to watch everything. I love it and he hates it.

G&C: Those are the best ones.

Erik: It's great. No, I get it now. I really do.

Curtis: And no matter how bad the movie is, I'll watch it once and I'll probably buy it on DVD just to see the behind-the-scenes footage. And then we'll find some inspiration from it.

Erik: Yeah, it's great.

G&C: So this is the inspiration for the upcoming album that you're working on now?

Curtis: Yeah, we're working on it now, we're working on the last few tracks. We have about two left and every single one of them is loosely based either on film or some kind of literature. Like The Greatest Show On Earth is loosely based on Ray Bradbury's Dark Carnival, his first novel of short stories, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. But our own spin on it, a little more horrific and each song will have its own kind of background like that. Yeah, The Greatest Show On Earth is a really fun song for us. Erik had made a lot of the music on his own. He had been working on that song for a while. He can actually tell you a little bit about that.

Erik: Every time I start composing a song it's always gotta have a theme, of course. So I just started making a song and it just worked itself out to be a carnival-sounding evil kind of a thing. Then, Curtis listened to it and he was all like... he had a grin on his face.

Curtis: Then, I took it over. We decided that we wanted to make it larger than life and that included building a cast of characters to sing along with us. Because there's just two of us in the band and there's literally 10 voices...

Erik: I said, "Curtis, can you do 10 voices?

Curtis: And I said, "No, I can do 20. But I'll do 10 for you. So we did 10 voices and they actually all have names.

Erik: He literally gave every voice like a background character to it.

Curtis: A whole background story and then there's an 11th voice, which is actually a friend of ours, Marie, who does soprano.

Erik: She's actually the one that introduced us to each other.

Curtis: Yeah, she's the one that introduced us at the Halloween party and she does the highs that I can't do. That's it, it's just loosely based on Ray Bradbury stuff.

G&C: You're also working on a movie project, right?

Curtis: Yeah, long long long term project, long in the making. Our whole goal with Creature Feature is to let it be known as music and film to, which means all of our videos will be filmed on film and they'll be mini movies and they'll maybe be on 16mm. They'll look like a horror film. But our real goal is to make a full-length Creature Feature horror film and start doing that. I have a couple of scripts that I've been writing off and on for about eight years so it's pretty long in the making.

Erik: Curtis is always writing all the time, even when we're not... he's still writing.

Curtis: Even in our downtime, I'm still writing. But our whole goal is when our album comes out, the proceeds from the album will pay for the movie itself. So everybody who buys an album will take part in funding our film so actually they'll be a producer.

Erik: Everybody can be a part of it.

Curtis: Yeah, if you buy our album you'll be a producer.

G&C: You're gonna have a very long producer list.

Curtis: It's gonna be very long. It's gonna be a four hour movie and the credits will be two and a half hours but it'll be cool. It's gonna be very gory and it's gonna be slapstick comedy. It's gonna be the Three Stooges in a horror movie, basically. And it'll be something that hasn't been seen since the '80s. No computer graphics whatsoever.

G&C: Are they still manufacturing16mm film?

Curtis: They still are. It's better quality than it used to be. But we're gonna use old cameras to give it that effect. It's gonna look like Evil Dead and the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It won't be all glossy because we want it to look gritty and dirty and the blood will drip from the screen.

G&C: Black and white or color?

Curtis: We went back and forth, thinking about black and white but we are gonna do color.

G&C: Blood looks good.

Curtis: Yeah, and there's so many different colors of blood too. Everything in our film will bleed a different color. It'll be like the Fourth of July of blood. Firework show but with blood instead. So it will be glorious.

G&C: You're gonna be doing some music videos as well right?

Curtis: Yeah, the first video we're gonna be doing is for Aim For The Head. It's gonna be zombie-themed.

Erik: Or we'll do the other one first.

Curtis: Aim For The Head is gonna be first because it's the cheapest. We want to do one for The Greatest Show On Earth but that's gonna involve stop-motion claymation and will takes months in the making to do. But it will be very cool. If you liked the old school Mad Monster Party, you'll like The Greatest Show On Earth. And Aim For The Head will be us in the '60s as a recreation of Night Of The Living Dead. It'll have nice dry dusty zombies and some gooey ones and it'll be awesome. It'll be zombie goodness.

G&C: Your music is begging for videos. It's very visual.

Curtis: Yes, it screams for it. So we're gonna do it and we're gonna stay true to the horror fans. It's gonna be horrific and it's gonna be to the point where it won't be able to play on most TV. It'll be on our website and it'll be on a DVD that'll be out later with some movies and behind-the-scenes stuff and some stupid skits we do and get in trouble. It'll be fun.

G&C: Tell us a bit about your song Bound And Gagged.

Erik:: Clothes soaked in gasoline. Curtis was like, "Well, I'm not sure if I should write all this stuff" and I was like, "It's horror-themed. Who cares. Just write it."

Curtis: Yeah, this is the most realistic horror-type song we've ever done, about kidnapping and there was one line specifically in it that we were going back and forth and we didn't know if we wanted to put it in. It's about doing the right thing so you don't have to check and find your daughter's head in the mailbox in the morning. So when you hear it, you'll hear that line. It stayed. And it turned out to be peoples' favorite line so what do we know?

G&C: I know you wanted to discuss your Myspace presence.

Curtis: Yes, good ole Myspace. Myspace is a great tool for us.

Erik: For networking and talking to the friends.

Curtis: We literally go out of our way to talk to every single person on there and we will respond to every message we get.

Erik: Every message, every comment.

Curtis: And we consider everybody who listens to our music a friend. Not a fan but a friend.

Erik: And we respond to so many things that we have to be careful.

Curtis: Most days we get blocked out because we respond too much. Sometimes as many as 400 a day. And we have a regular account, a Gmail account at creaturefeaturemusic@gmail.com. And we get countless stuff through our PO box too, letters and random horror stuff to sign that we didn't have any involvement in.

Erik: We're celebrating today too, by the way.

Curtis: Because we have 20,000 friends. 20,000 friends that actually like our music.

Erik: And last night we searched under top bands and guess who's one of the top bands? Creature Feature. If you click on... we have rock as one of our genres.

Curtis: We've been called rock electro-gothic.

Erik: I don't know if that makes sense but it doesn't matter, it's fine. But if you click on gothic under top bands, we're number 4.

Curtis: Number 4 out of all of Myspace.

Erik: And under electro we're number four. And then, I was like, let me look under rock, but there's no way we're gonna be on here. There's thousands out there. But yeah, we are 54, unsigned.

Curtis: It's just because we can communicate with all of our fans and they're helping us out. That's really the only way you can do it. You can be a good band and play in your garage but the only thing you're gonna do is piss off your neighbors.

G&C: It sounds like you're a fan's best friend.

Curtis: Exactly. And we have an open forum where we talk about horror movies and our disgust of recent horror remakes so we rant. So it's really become something where people go to us to ask horror movie questions and it's fun. We talk about favorite movies and what people want to see in horror.

G&C: Is that on your website?

Curtis: It's on our Myspace page and also, we have our regular website, www.creaturefeaturemusic.com coming out. It's taken a while because we want to design something really really cool. A friend of ours, Urban Panda. It's gonna be done like old B-movie lobby cards. There's gonna be no scrolling. You click on everything and a new themed lobby card pops up with information on it. So it's gonna look and feel just like a movie. And it'll sound like one too.

www.myspace.com/creaturefeaturemusic

www.creaturefeaturemusic.com