Long before the champion drag performer, television personality, singer-songwriter, DJ, and makeup mogul became known worldwide as Trixie Mattel, she was a kid from Wisconsin, raised on horror movies her mother (probably) let her watch far too young. With a home loaded with the tomes of Clive Barker and Stephen King looking more like bibles in her small hands, Halloween was a time for handmade costumes and the tradition of scaring the hell out of each other.
Her grandparents had their own contribution: a story about a farmer who had cut off his hand, leaving behind a disembodied appendage that supposedly crawled around the family property.
“I remember we'd be in the house and my uncle or someone would have a glove and reach and scratch on one of the windows,” Mattel recalls. “It's like, I don't know, poor people just having fun scaring the shit out of each other, and something about scaring kids is really fun. I stand by that. Scaring kids is fucking fun.”
The scares left their mark, and Mattel has been enamored with the season of screams ever since. This year marks the debut of her Halloween-themed EP Till Death Do Us Part, ushering in the album with a Halloween performance special now streaming on her YouTube channel. The album is “a heartfelt marriage of spooky synths and acoustic love-strumming,” with a few songs pulled directly from her Midwest holiday roots.
“I will never create distance between myself and Wisconsin,” she tells me. “I love Wisconsin. I love being from a small town. The song on the record, ‘Polish Moon,’ is about Milwaukee, and that song is really about me wondering if I would be as happy or happier if I would've just stayed in Wisconsin because I love Wisconsin.”
I grew up on the Illinois-Wisconsin state line, and I even saw Trixie Mattel perform drag [undisclosed number of] years ago as part of the Sensual Daydreams Rocky Horror Picture Show shadowcast, and I can attest to how awesome Wisconsin truly is. “Wisconsin's creepy. We got serial killers. We got fall weather. We have alcoholism.”
Mattel’s new Halloween project embraces the imagery that has long occupied her imagination while letting her fold those ideas into her ever-expanding musical vocabulary, which has never been particularly interested in staying inside genre boundaries. “I would say this Halloween project gave me, let's say, a nudge to explore more horror movie synths or the metaphors,” she says. “The lyrics are going to be more about vampires and ghosts and wolves.”
But Mattel quickly resists the idea that she has suddenly reinvented herself as a horror artist. The festive aesthetic extends something that was already there. “Music is music,” she says. “Once I decided that I was going to do this EP, I had a few songs that were already written that already had these metaphors. I wasn't trying to make them like this. So then I just was like, ‘Well, these other songs we're working on, let's really round them out and make them all kind of moon, spooky, witchy, nighttimey.’”
That genre-fluidity comes naturally to Mattel. Although she is now primarily a DJ and dance-music artist, she learned to play guitar on the sounds of classic country and Americana — Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton. Those influences remain embedded in her musical instincts. “If I feel like sitting down and writing a song, I'm probably going to use my guitar, and I'm probably going to write it in that vibe, folk-ey,” she says. “Because again, no one owns anything. It's like music is music.”
Not willing to simply release Till Death Do Us Part, Mattel turned the album into an event. At its center is Trixie's Halloween Mattelathon, a celebrity telethon in which Trixie attepts to put on a polished live television event while something much less controllable begins happening around her. The concept was inspired in part by “Late Night With the Devil,” which Mattel particularly loved because of the collision between television professionalism and genuine supernatural chaos.
“I love ‘Late Night With the Devil’ because you're trying to put on a show, but something authentically unexpected and spooky is happening, and you're having to try to still play the cameras,” she says.
Rocky Horror and its criminally underrated pseudo-sequel Shock Treatment were also major influences, particularly the latter’s television-within-a-movie construction. “Because in Shock Treatment they are making a TV show so there's a live audience with cameras,” she says. “They're often talking directly to the camera. For my telethon, I wanted to do something where Trixie is live. And if she's having a scary final girl experience and the cameras are rolling, what would that be like? How would a drag queen try to smooth it over in real-time when something really scary is really happening?”
The celebrity telethon element also gives Mattel an excuse to bring in a roster of friends and fellow celebrities. “The fun thing about doing a celebrity telethon was that it was really easy to get great call-ins from celebrities,” she says. Mattel is deliberately coy about who appears, and I’m not here to spoil the goods either, when you can just tune in for yourself. “People who love Trixie love Halloween,” she says. “And one of them has an obsession with me.”
For all the horror references, Mattel's appeal on Halloween is not necessarily that she looks frightening. In fact, the opposite may be true. She recounts a conversation with The Boulet Brothers of Dragula fame, who helped her understand why Halloween events have consistently embraced her. “They always book me, and I'm always like, ‘Why do you book me on Halloween? I'm not scary. I wear a pink witch hat and say, “Boo,” It's not good,’ and they're like, ‘Well, we like you because you're Marilyn Munster. You're like our unfortunate cousin who's not spooky.’”
Trixie's Halloween Mattelathon is now available to watch on YouTube.
