31 Days of "Spooky" Music Day 29: The Cockroach That Ate Cincinatti

      Today's choice is a silly love letter to horror movies that blends a lot of the stereotypical sounds from old horror and science fiction film soundtracks with lyrics paying homage to those very films. 

     The song itself is not actually about a giant cockroach eating a city, but about the singer watching a film about said creature, and their general love of those films, "If the subject is horror, I've got to see more or I won't be contented all night". As someone who used to really love horror films (I am not as into horror as I once was, perhaps a side effect of the inevitability of death coming ever nearer, or maybe just a reaction to all the real horrors in the world), I can completely relate to the singer's sentiments.

     I grew up watching some of the films that likely inspired this song, like "The Fly", "The Food of the Gods", "The War of the Worlds", "Ben" (actually specifically mentioned in the song), "King Kong", Godzilla", and so on. 

     Now the song is from 1973, and there are a couple... shall we say culturally inappropriate references in it that have not aged well over the last half a century, and those may be hard turn-offs for some people, but, and this may just be my privilege showing, I accept those as part of what you are going to run into whenever you are exposing yourself to creations from the past.

     You know what I just found out while writing this? There was a film released in 1996 called "The Cockroach That Ate Cincinatti". Sadly, it does not appear to be about a city-devouring insect, but I thought that it was an interesting discovery. 

     Also interesting (to me anyway) is that the song's performers seem to have released it under two different names. I  have it as being by "Rose & The Arrangement", but it seems the same recording is also released as being performed by "Possum".

There does not seem to be an official video (and given the age, I would not expect there to be), but this one has accompanying visuals that I find very appropriate (although "The Exorcist" is a bit too recent to fit in with the films the song is about):