"Dragula" is a debut solo single co-written and recorded by American rock musician Rob Zombie. It was released in August 1998 as the lead single from his solo debut Hellbilly Deluxe. Since its release, it has become Zombie's most recognizable song as a solo artist. It is also his best-selling song, and had sold over 717,000 copies in the U.S. by 2010.[3] The song is based on the drag racer "DRAG-U-LA" from the sitcom The Munsters.
The audio clip "superstition, fear and jealousy" heard at the beginning of the song is a sample of dialogue from the 1960 horror filmThe City of the Dead (also known as Horror Hotel), and is spoken by Christopher Lee.[4]
Zombie told Billboard magazine that the title came from the name of Grandpa Munster's eponymous dragster DRAG-U-LA on The Munsters. He goes on to say that it "was a classic show with great comic characters. Strangely enough, 'Dragula' was one of the last songs finished for the record. It fell together really fast and worked, but it could just as easily not [have] been on the record."[5]
Music video
The music video shows Rob Zombie driving the Munster Koach (not the actual Dragula racing car) with various shots of the band members and different scenes from classic horror films, e.g. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) at the beginning of the video and the killer robot from chapter film series The Phantom Creeps (1939) along with home video footage of 1950s-1960s families being entertained by a clown with clips of nuclear testing mushroom clouds sardonically overlapping of when the clown and a girl are laughing, with the multi color backdrops referencing Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971), also with footage of 1920s-1930s children being entertained and shocked. It achieved heavy rotation on MTV following the huge success of the album. The video also appears in the 1999 film Idle Hands.
In the comic book The Green Hornet by Kevin Smith, there is a sequence where the son of the Green Hornet and the daughter of Kato defeat several gangsters who are singing the song in unison.