The phone rings. It's Dee Snider's assistant: "Would you mind doing the interview in 15 minutes? Sorry, it's madness here. Dee is juggling flaming dwarves with one hand while the rest of his extremities grapple with KY-slathered hogs." Twenty minutes and two reschedulings later, she has the Man on the horn. The occasion is Van Helsing's Curse, or Oculus Infernum, an epic soundtrack for Halloween that Dee has pieced together from classical warhorses like 'Night on Bald Mountain' and 'Carmina Burana', Mike Oldfield's 'Tubular Bells' and Black Sabbath's, well, 'Black Sabbath'. Lyrics in Latin, sinister narration by Dee, and the tale of a small town beset by an evil entity comes to roaring life. Just in time for the holidays; or, should I say, the holiday.

For a quick visual refresher, I pull out a batch of 8" x 10" black and white glossies of me and Captain Howdy talking rites of passage and the state of post-human beings, back in 1999. Then, Dee was talking up his unique, witty and badly underrated movie Strangeland, adorned with a black leather cap, Spy vs. Spy bug-shades and a prominent septum piercing. The photographer was getting glare off the nose ring and kept collapsing into herbally-enhanced hysterics.

Ah, memories. In the present, Dee gives me the history of how the Curse was laid.

"I went to see the Trans-Siberian Orchestra a couple of years ago through my old Widowmaker bandmate, Al Pitrelli, and also Paul O' Neill. I was blown away. There I was with my wife, all my kids, who range from seven to 21 years old - at the time they were five to 19 - and we were all enjoying the shit out of this. I'm going, this is fucking great. I was originally a classically-trained counter tenor, so I've got a history in classical music, and it just seemed to incorporate so many of the elements of the old school rock, all that stuff. I said, what can I do like that, without doing that? Halloween! It just hit me like a ton of bricks. I'm a huge Halloween fan, my daughter was born on Halloween, I come from a makeup and costume scary kind of background, Halloween is really lacking in music, and it's a huge party time - can you have a party, a celebration, with no music? I've got a sound effects tape and 'I Put A Spell On You' by Screamin' Jay Hawkins; I mean, it's pathetic. "So I called up Al and Joe Franco, my Widowmaker buddies, and I said, 'TSO for Halloween'. And they both said they were in. And then I called up the guy who signed Twisted Sister, Phil Carson. Interestingly enough, his first signing ever was Mike Oldfield, who wrote 'Tubular Bells'. I asked if he wanted to join our Widowmaker Productions team, and we went and started working on Van Helsing's Curse."

When writing the story Oculus Infernum, Dee decided that "it played well into the story if our hero; the young boy who's trying to avenge his parents and kill the entity comes across a descendent of the Van Helsing family, who coincidentally - he said in quotation marks; obviously, there's no coincidence - happens to be in that town. He ends up being a descendent of the demon-slayers, who sort of know where the problems are going to pop up."

Dee takes a distinctly holistic approach to the nature of evil. "At the end of the album, I kind of go off on a little soliloquy that evil never goes away, it just keeps on coming back, and it's eternal. Because we're dealing with the whole issue of, for every force there's an equal opposing force. If good continues to exist, evil has to, as a counterbalance; the reverse is true as well. The problem with evil is that people who are evil don't think they're evil. It's not like (Superman villain) Lex Luthor where he's going 'Boo hoo ha ha ha!' They actually think they're pretty decent people. And that's what really makes evil people dangerous, is that they believe that they're right in what they do. So, evil is as evil does."

Yes, Forrest, sometimes life is like a box of chocolates - with razor blades inside.

Plans are already afoot to launch local productions of VHC as well as a DVD. "The DVD would incorporate not only performance footage, but also dramatic acted interpretation. Van Helsing is really like this tall, lanky, thin biker dude - who kind of looks like me - with long graying hair and a beard and tattoos.

"We view Van Helsing's Curse more as a Blue Man Group situation than even a TSO, in the sense that we not only want to have multiple touring entities but also licensed entities. We've already been talking with Six Flags, and any place people would like to expand their Halloween experience; we'd like to set up a local hire show to audition cast and put them in. Visually, the string section are Anne Rice goths, the electric section is like Marilyn Manson meets Edward Scissorhands, and the choir are Druids. From its inception, it's very much been old school goth versus new school goth. It's very theatrical and built on the tension between the old school and the new school. Probably on future performances we'll actually incorporate a multimedia presentation, where you'll have the visuals being up on the screen as well as the lights and the rest of the pyro and all that shit."

Why has Halloween never had a decent soundtrack? Dee sees it as a matter of evolution. "It didn't start out as a party-type thing; it started out as a pagan holiday of sorts, and then it evolved into this little treat kind of thing, and then the parties came after the fact. Look at Christmas: it was a birthday from day one. The Wise Men brought the gifts, we're havin' a party. It was pretty straight-ahead! So I think that nobody ever stopped to take stock and say well, you know, now we've got all these parties going on. The growth in the Halloween industry is just staggering, and that's really been over the last five to ten years. I'm the first person to really take stock in that and say, hey, there's a void here, and we're just the sick people to fill it."

In addition to Van Helsing's Curse, the peripatetic Snider still hopes to get Strangeland II off the ground this year. "We've just been waiting for this huge court battle to settle, not with me, but with the Shooting Gallery. Their CFO was indicted, like an Enron thing, and we've just been caught in the middle of it, in the maelstrom, just sitting there waiting for my property to be set free so we can start filming."

"I like reality-based horror; I think it's the most disturbing. I just thought, what would happen next, if this person (Captain Howdy) really existed... I don't want to give away how he survives, but he does and you'll believe it. What would Jackson Roth - Robert Englund's character - be like?; what would the girl's life be like? What would Captain Howdy's life be like? We sensationalize the Mansons, the Dahmers of the world, so, he would become infamous, a celebrity in his own way. And the girl who he tortured, well, victims of sexual assault and torture often become sexually promiscuous. I asked myself, how would these people live with this story? How would they be affected by it? I took Genevieve Gage, Mike Gage, Jackson Roth and Captain Howdy, those characters and asked, where do they go from here? That's how I built the story. The rest you'll just have to find out for yourself."