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"Steeeeeven ... Steeeeeeven ...."
Brrrrrr, scary, kids, as Count Floyd might say.
But somehow it just doesn't seem so shocking 25 years later. It's more funny than frightening. Are we just older and wiser? More jaded? Numbed by all the punk, rap and death metal that followed? Hard to say.
Alice Cooper may still be a threat on the golf course, but he's certainly not the "shock rocker" he once was. During a phone interview to promote his long-awaited box set, The Life and Crimes of Alice Cooper, the 51-year-old rocker defends his work as "classic horror."
The four-CD set is an interesting chronology - from his work in the late '60s to his last studio album, The Last Temptation. One of the first tunes on the set, Don't Blow Your Mind, was actually thought to be too "heavy" for radio when it first came out.
Cooper laughs, "And now it's so thin! It sounds like an enraged mosquito. But at the time that was just bombastic. It was like, 'Wow, what a sound!'
"If you listen to the progression of the writing, it's really gone through a lot of changes. And listen to the production. You really can see a whole history of rock 'n' roll happening through the whole album."
But scary? Don't be silly.
"If you watch Frankenstein or Dracula, they're not really scary either," he says. "But they were classic pieces. I don't know. Things like Steven are still pretty creepy."
While he admits he's dismayed at what passes for a lot of "heavy" rock these days, he found a kindred spirit in a more recent shock rocker named Rob Zombie. They did a lovely duet together on the X-Files soundtrack album. There will undoubtedly be more.
"Living Dead Girl is one of my favourite songs," Cooper says. "Rob and I are very close when it comes to our senses of humour. We can sit and talk about movies for hours. More people compare Marilyn Manson to me and I've never even met Marilyn. I don't know if we would have that much in common. But Rob and I certainly have a ton of stuff in common."
Having that sense of humour is the key. That, and the fact that both artists recognize that what they do is fiction. To Cooper, "real horror" is reality.
"What we do is Edgar Allan Poe," he says. "People always ask what scares me. CNN."
As for the future, Cooper insists he doesn't have a nostalgic bone in his body. Maybe when he's 70, he'll look back and "get a lump in my throat," but he's too busy to wallow in the past.
His next projects include a new rock album he'll be recording in July, and Alice's Deadly Seven, a collaboration with Disney songwriter Alan Menken, of all people. It's not such a big stretch when you consider that one of the many testimonials contained in the booklet for The Life and Crimes of Alice Cooper is from Burt Bacharach.
"I was always a Burt Bacharach fan," Cooper says. "When I talked to some of the metal bands for the first time, we'd always talk about cars. We'd always talk about sports. Then we'd get around to the point where somebody would say, 'What's your favourite Carpenters song?' And almost every one of these guys had to admit, 'You know what? I've got the Carpenters' Greatest Hits.'
"Anybody who's a songwriter cannot deny that Burt Bacharach wrote as many hits as the Beatles. I guarantee I could sit down with a Burt Bacharach and write a killer rock song."
Now that's shocking.