When Rob Zombie was a very young boy, he already knew he wasn’t like other kids — “on a different wavelength than 99 percent of [his] peers” and just plain “weird,” as he puts it. But he had a dream of growing up to be “Alice Cooper, Steven Spielberg, Bela Lugosi, and Stan Lee.” And he pretty much did just that.

Not only did the legendary shock-rocker go on to sell millions of albums — both solo and with his Beavis and Butt-head-championed metal band White Zombie — but he became an acclaimed horror movie director, creating cult classics like House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects, The Lords of Salem, and a remake of 1978’s Halloween.

“My mom used to keep this book where they put your school picture from first grade, and then you fill out what you want to be when you grow up. And sometimes I’ll go back and look at ‘em, and I’m like, ‘Well, I guess I stuck to the plan!’” Zombie tells Yahoo Entertainment while sitting at L.A.’s monster-filled prop studio Dapper Cadaver, where he is shooting segments for the “Rob Zombie’s 13 Nights of Halloween” movie marathon, airing on HDNet Movies through Oct. 31. “I’d say, ‘I wanna be a comic-book maker,’ or ‘I wanna make movies.’ And yeah, I sort of just stuck with the first-grade plan.”

Things didn’t go exactly according to plan when he was little, however; Zombie’s first attempt at a DIY Halloween costume went hilariously awry.

“It was ridiculous,” he laughs. “I ordered, through the back of a comic book, a caveman mask that was like, 99 cents. … And then I took a sweatshirt, because I was really into monsters and hockey. It was like, 1972 or something. And I wrote all this weird stuff all over this sweatshirt, and put on the caveman mask, and I thought, ‘This is badass!’ I looked like a mental patient. So, I go to school, where they’re having the Halloween party, and all the kids were all wearing perfect costumes. Like, ‘Can everybody’s mom sew perfectly?’ Like, perfect Superman outfits and stuff. And I look like a complete nut that wandered in. I was like, ‘My costume sucks!’ But I still remember it.”

Zombie says he was “totally a misfit kid,” which is what made him gravitate toward horror at such an early age; his earliest memories of being terrified by movies include watching The Shining, the Spielberg-directed Jaws, and the “super-duper scary” flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz. And he always related to the monsters and villains, not the supposed heroes, in the frightening flicks of his youth.

“In all the movies that I grew up [with] as a kid — Frankenstein, or King Kong, or Godzilla, whatever — it was that the monster was never bad. They were just always being crucified because they were misunderstood,” Zombie explains. “Like, King Kong wasn’t bad. He was like, ‘I was minding my own business until you came to Skull Island, and now you’re running me around New York City!’ And Frankenstein was like, ‘Hey, anybody wanna hang out?’ And I think subconsciously, you just relate to that as a little kid. And so you don’t latch onto the hero. I didn’t care about the hero. You latch onto the monster. … You focus on the weird guys, and they become cool.”

And that attraction to weirdness, to otherness, to outsider-ness, eventually influenced Zombie’s musical tastes. “When you have the Alice Coopers and the bands like Kiss that come around, you go, ‘Oh, Gene Simmons!’” says Zombie. “I wasn’t attracted to the good-looking singers. It was always the freaks. I was like, ‘Yes! That’s what it’s all about.’”

That being said, when asked to suggest his own freaky Fright night party playlist, Zombie has some surprising, sentimental Halloween choices. “I like older, classic stuff,” he says. “I mean, it’s really lame but I really like ‘The Monster Mash,’ because I think I had that on a 7-inch when I was a little kid in the late ’60s. So that, instantly, is Halloween … and anytime you hear the Peanuts music from The Great Pumpkin, that’s like — it’s Halloween. Instantly.”

So, why does It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown score have a place on Zombie’s party playlist alongside more obvious rock ‘n’ roll tracks by Alice Cooper, the Cramps, and the Misfits?

“Because whatever you first experienced as Halloween as a little kid — like when you’re a little kid and your parents go, ‘This is this thing called Halloween, and we’re gonna put you in a weird costume, we’re gonna walk you around the neighborhood, and you’re gonna get candy from strangers, and then I’m just gonna let you eat it,’ and you go, ‘OK, that sounds like really bad parenting, Mom and Dad, but we’ll go with that, I guess!’ — that’s the soundtrack to that [time]. And so it’s always stuck in my mind.”

This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

Twenty-five years ago, Rob Zombie’s early group White Zombie, which he describes as being inspired by Van Halen, the Ramones, the Birthday Party, and Black Sabbath, had sold only about 75,000 copies of their third album, La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol. 1. But then, MTV’s early-’90s tastemakers, Beavis and Butt-Head, gave three White Zombie videos (“Welcome to Planet Motherf***er,” “Thunder Kiss ’65,” and “Black Sunshine”) the thumbs-up — or, more specifically, the devil-horns metal salute. And it changed everything, as Zombie once told Larry King.

By early October 1993, La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol. 1 — which had already been out for a year and half — had sold 300,000 copies (it eventually sold 2 million). It hit No. 26 on the overall Billboard album chart, and “Thunder Kiss ’65″ even earned White Zombie a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance. The Beavis and Butt-Head connection also marked the beginning of a long friendship between Zombie and the show’s creator, Mike Judge, and helped launch an illustrious film career for Zombie.

“Our record was already pretty old. We had been touring quite a bit for it, because I always figured it was always gonna be a touring band. That that’s how it was gonna be done; I didn’t expect hit records or anything from the radio,” Zombie tells Yahoo Entertainment while sitting at L.A.’s monster-filled prop studio Dapper Cadaver, where he is shooting segments for the “Rob Zombie’s 13 Nights of Halloween” movie marathon airing on HDNet Movies from Oct. 19 to 31. “MTV was playing the video; it’d been on Headbangers Ball, late at night, maybe once or twice. Beavis and Butt-Head, that was our first prime-time exposure. I mean, I didn’t even know what it was. … It was so new, I hadn’t even seen it yet. And that started it all.”

White Zombie later contributed a new original song, “I Am Hell,” to the compilation album The Beavis and Butt-Head Experience, a true ’90s alt-rock artifact that also featured Nirvana, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Megadeth, Primus … and Cher. Judge then recruited Zombie to work on the 1996 feature film Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, a surreal experience that Zombie remembers fondly.

“The best time I ever had was I was driving around Austin with Mike Judge, and he was trying to explain something to me, and he was doing it in [Beavis and Butt-Head’s] voices. He’d do one, then do the other, just back and forth. Really bizarre to watch the two different voices come out of him,” Zombie chuckles. “It’s like Billy Bob Thornton doing the Sling Blade voice. You just can’t believe that’s the same person, that this is happening.”

Zombie was tasked with animating the famous Beavis and Butt-Head Do America desert hallucination scene, but he didn’t get much direction from Judge. “I had the script, and it just said, ‘Beavis hallucinates the greatest music video of all time.’ That was all it said. And then he let me just come up with whatever crazy stuff I came up with. I was on tour, and I was drawing all these designs, and I kept faxing them to Mike Judge at that time. And that was the sequence. … It was just crazy stuff, like monsters playing guitars, TVs morphing into creatures; I don’t know, it was just supposed to be some trippy LSD thing. … Seemed to work out OK!”

White Zombie broke up in 1998, and Rob Zombie went on to a hugely successful solo career. He also established himself as a respected horror movie director with House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects, The Lords of Salem, and his remake of John Carpenter’s Halloween. But the shock-rocker, who just completed a tour with Marilyn Manson, admits that he misses the glory days of ’90s MTV, when hard rock bands as diverse as White Zombie, Primus, Metallica, Jane’s Addiction, and Slayer had a chance of reaching a mainstream audience.

“The great thing about MTV was, they just threw it on there, and boom, the person sitting there waiting for the new Madonna video had to sit through the White Zombie video, or the Danzig video, or whatever video. So, you’d just get such a big audience so fast. Now everything’s so compartmentalized. … I don’t know how bands break through, because to me it seemed that somewhere around 1999-ish, the door slammed shut for getting through. And I got through, and Korn got through, and Limp Bizkit, or Slipknot, or whoever. Every once in a while, a new band will squeeze through, but not like it used to be. Maybe Ghost is the newest band that kinda got on people’s radar, but it’s because they have a very interesting look, so you immediately go, ‘Oh, I wonder what these guys are about?’ It seems like you get one band every 10 years that you get on anyone’s radar. Which is sad.”

Surely even Beavis and Butt-Head would say that “sucks.”

This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.