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Alice Cooper and Vincent Price create a fiendish fantasy

It is the continuing dream — or delicious nightmare — of those who find fiendish fantasy fascinating and horror tales titillating to awake to the discovery of a chilling successor Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney and Vincent Price.

Could it be that Alice Cooper, the rock music superstar? Is he to be the new master of menace? It could happen. Vincent Price, himself, calls Cooper "The new young hope for horror."

Vincent made this comment after two weeks of rehearsal for "Alice Cooper — The Nightmare," a theatrical rock spectacular to be presented on ABC's "Wild World: In Concert," Friday, April 25.

The special is based on the music of Alice's new hit album, "Welcome to My Nightmare," and patterned somewhat on the theatricality of Alice's current tour which will take him across North America, Europe, Japan and Australia. The special turns a new page in rock musical entertainment on television.

Alice says of "Welcome to My Nightmare:" "It is my most carefully planned project. I first conceived the idea over two years ago when I became fascinated with the demonic visions that appeared in my dreams. I realized that my nightmares were just a drop in the bucket of the billions dreamed around the world, so I decided to present a set for everyone to share both visually and musically."

The special is atypical of the usual format of rock concerts. "The Nightmare" is a musical narrative of events illuminated by bizarre costumes and scenery and punctuated by hypnotically weird actions of visualized nightmares and Alice's thunder cap music.

Vincent Price, as a devilish character, lures Alice through a maze of forbidden places where he encounters horrifying creatures.

As far as Alice is concerned, the theater-of-horror milieu in which he operates serves simply as the launch pad for providing his fans "with the best night of television they will have all year." The purpose of the show, he says, bizarre though it may be, is to create an event of sight and sound which is "far different and more exciting than anything they've ever seen before, one which they'll remember long after the show is over."

(Originally published in the TV Time supplement of The Sentinel, April 19, 1975. Kindly provided by Hunter Goatley)