Strangeland, by Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider, was one of the earliest internet horror films, helped lay the groundwork for one of the 2000s’ most popular horror subgenres, and featured a rock legend transforming himself into one of the scariest human monsters of the era.
So how did a movie with all of that going for it end up getting ignored?
This is WTF Happened to Strangeland?
Technically, you could say the writing of Strangeland began in 1984 on legendary rock band Twisted Sister’s album Stay Hungry. The two-part song, titled “Horror-Teria (The Beginning),” with Part A being “Captain Howdy” (of course, the nickname for the demon Pazuzu in The Exorcist) and Part B titled “Street Justice,” was essentially the plot of the movie that would be released fourteen years later.
It featured the lyrics “Stay away from Captain Howdy” in a chorus about a killer torturing and eventually killing his victim. In the second part, the killer is brought before a judge after a “three-drink lunch,” who lets him off on a technicality before a neighborhood mob takes vengeance into their own hands, killing him.
Years later, Snider would write the script himself, at the time called Helltown. He would later call this script a “completely hack” script that ripped off every other slasher movie. When he revisited it, he was inspired by one of his bandmates, Keith Alexander, who was heavily into body modification. He layered that world into the film and character, even giving Alexander a “piercing consultant” credit on the film. Snider claims that he thought of the cyber-horror element long before the first internet crime even took place. His first thought when he jumped online for the first time was that this would be a psychotic’s dream playground.
When originally writing the script, Snider saw himself more as the father character than the killer. As he puts it, however, he wasn’t handsome enough to play the hero. He says he never had any interest in being an actor but did have ambitions of being a horror icon. And by God, he should have been. Or maybe it’s by Satan in this case. Either way…
Snider is in great shape and already a decently sized fella, standing at 6’1″. But his screen presence and aura make the character of Captain Howdy look seven feet tall. Covered head to toe in tattoos and painful-looking piercings overlaying his muscular frame, as he wears only a loincloth in his dungeon surrounded by mutilated victims in cages and torture devices, is freaky enough on sight. But add to it his unique and spine-chilling voice, spouting off the most insane yet earnest stuff you can think of about physical and painful rites of passage as he forcefully pierces his victims’ genitals—it’s a wild experience. He’s physically imposing and mentally off the reservation. This guy is scary. But maybe not as scary as producing your own movie.
While Snider says playfully that the finished script almost caused his wife to divorce him after reading it, he was getting positive feedback from those in the horror community, such as the great Tom Savini. His agent wanted to sell the script to one of the bigger movie studios, but Snider insisted on starring in and co-producing the film to ensure it didn’t stray from the screenplay.
This limited his options greatly, but Snider eventually found a financier in the now-defunct (more on that later) independent movie studio dubbed The Shooting Gallery. Snider’s vision is no doubt strongly implemented in the film, but one wouldn’t be out of bounds to assume he regrets not directing it himself as well.
Director John Pieplow would helm the film instead. Pieplow only had one other movie under his belt at the time: a 1996 TV movie called Jurassic Women, which sports a 2.7 IMDb score. To this day, the director doesn’t have another title on his résumé post-Strangeland. It’s not exactly known what issues the two had on set—only that in Dee’s introduction to the Strangeland novelization, he says that the production ran into terrible problems with Pieplow, whom he would only refer to as “he who shall not be named.” Snider says that afterward it was a struggle just to get a decent cut of Strangeland made out of his footage, alongside the help of editor Jeff Kushner.
Strangeland remains mostly well cast. Actor Kevin Gage (who you may remember as the scary guy getting his head pummeled by Robert De Niro in Heat) plays a detective whose daughter is missing and in the hands of Captain Howdy. He remains stoic and determined throughout most of the process, trying to maintain a level head so that he can solve the case without letting his emotions get in his way. But when he finally breaks… you can feel it.
The way the actor translates to the audience that tidal wave of emotion brewing just underneath his attempt at a composed appearance is something that goes underappreciated by critics. It’s a good performance.
You may know his daughter, Genevieve, in the film—she’s just been cast as Pamela Voorhees in the Crystal Lake series—the one and only Linda Cardellini. Genevieve is a rebellious teenager at the dawn of the chatroom internet age and finds herself in Captain Howdy’s web when she’s invited to a party by what seems like a cool snowboarder dude with a profile that says, “Hey bud… where’s the kegger?”
Part of the genius of Strangeland is the way it uses desktop horror, an extremely underused element at this point in horror. Brainscan comes to mind, but it was more gaming-focused. Though this is obviously a faux setup, it feels very much like the original America Online back in the day, and it’s haunting how much damage could have been inflicted at such an early stage in its conception. Hell, the lead detective on the case doesn’t even know how to turn off a computer!
Genevieve’s mother is played by the late Elizabeth Pena in a role that mostly leaves her pacing through the house in emotional anguish, waiting for a resolution. The novelization gives the character more room to breathe and covers in depth the problems the couple was already having before Captain Howdy entered their lives. Amy Smart makes an appearance as Mike’s niece and Genevieve’s friend, who is able to walk the detectives through the difficult new world of online chat, and essentially the only reason they were able to find her. The first time, at least.
One of the most interesting parts of Snider’s Strangeland script is that we have to live through all this anguish twice. In the first act, we move at breakneck speed, are introduced to a new horror villain who stitches his victims’ mouths shut, a police investigation, and the climax in which the detective saves his daughter and beats the monster.
The second act introduces us to a “reformed” Captain Howdy, now known as Carleton Hendricks. He’s been let off on insanity and now spends his days properly medicated. He covers his tattoos with makeup, leaving him with a ghastly white Marilyn Manson-meets-The Golden Girls aesthetic. He even wears a cardigan. But all this does is make him even creepier.
This leads us to the casting of horror legend Robert Englund as a drunk, tighty-whitey-wearing redneck who leads a mob to take justice into their own hands. This mistake takes us to Act Three, where Captain Howdy re-emerges from the cardigan and starts his reign of terror all over again.
Snider had originally planned on making Strangeland NC-17, much more graphic than it already was, before being talked out of it by producers. Just another way the man was ahead of his time, considering what the Terrifier franchise has accomplished recently by leaning into its unrated nature. He spent time researching and getting to know the extreme body modification community while making the film, and even had his septum pierced and stretched.
Regardless, upon its release, some in the community became extremely angry with him, feeling that he painted them in an inhumane way. They were allegedly mortified that he would portray someone from their community as a villain, especially given the fact that they were already misunderstood and unfairly judged as a community. Snider made a statement clearing up that Captain Howdy was not, in fact, meant to be a part of that community. But some of the vitriol remained. Still, he says a larger part of the community loves the film, with one tattoo shop even naming themselves after it.
The good news for those who remained upset is that the film wasn’t going to be seen by very many people—at least not initially.
Strangeland was released unceremoniously in not nearly enough theaters in October of 1998. Even with a low budget of just over a million dollars, the film returned less than $750,000 by the end of its run. It was dead on arrival. But that didn’t stop critics from torturing its corpse. Strangeland currently has only 15 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and still sits at a ghastly 7% “Rotten.” According to Snider, one critic at the time said after watching the film that he “should be forced to get a lobotomy.” Damn! I thought Howdy was supposed to be the sadist?
There was a silver lining, however. The movie was doing gangbusters on home video—which is where I, and so many like me, experienced it for the first time. We were shocked by not only how scary and entertaining it was, but how impressive the soundtrack was for a movie that, for all we knew, went straight to home video.
The Strangeland soundtrack featured a Kid Rock/Eminem team-up, Megadeth, Pantera, Dee Snider, and Twisted Sister tracks, and more. Snider claims that the Strangeland VHS was the most rented and “unreturned” video of all time—and I believe him.
This was one of the many factors that pushed Strangeland into beloved cult classic status among horror fans despite the critical and financial beatdown. But unfortunately, this would never lead to a sequel.
While The Shooting Gallery had greenlit a sequel before the film was even finished, despite the production issues, the company—once responsible for Sling Blade—was indicted for financial issues and collapsed.
As years passed, the “torture porn” subgenre exploded, proving that Snider had simply been ahead of his time—and he knows it. He says that movies like Hostel and Saw are the children of Strangeland, and that neither James Wan nor Eli Roth would ever disagree.
For years, he promised to “take his crown back” after the subgenre exploded with his sequel titled Strangeland: Disciple, for which a script had already been written. Hopefully, someday we will at least get to read it.
The film was set to explore the early years of Captain Howdy and his relationship with his father—how he learned, through years of abuse, to connect pain with love. Ever the innovator, Snider also planned to release the film with an NC-17 rating in a limited run, followed by a wider R-rated release, and eventually an unrated cut on DVD.
If you’re wondering how Captain Howdy survived the end of the first film, Snider says it would have been reality-based and involved a gruesome surgical procedure to save him from his severe burns.
There has been word at times of a possible remake of the original film as well, and Snider even considered crowdfunding his own sequel, but unfortunately, as of 2026, neither has panned out. There was at least a comic book prequel series titled Seven Sins released in 2007, as well as a recently released novelization.
Snider once said that he hoped Strangeland’s sequel would “lower the bar and create something that would say ‘Captain Howdy is the father of all you fuckers and he’s taking you to school,’” and we’ll forever be bummed that we never had the opportunity to see that come to fruition.
But at least he can ride the character off into the sunset, knowing he helped kickstart not one but two horror subgenres—which is insane to think about.
And it’s exactly WTF happened to Strangeland.