Penis Flytrap: The Smol Bear Interview
Alex S Johnson goes toe to toe with Deathrock Royalty...and survives...or does he?
Penis Flytrap emerged from one of the most volatile and creatively fertile ecosystems in American underground culture: the Los Angeles deathrock and horror‑punk scene of the late 20th century, a world shaped by the cross‑pollination of punk, goth, exploitation cinema, and theatrical shock performance. To understand the band’s significance, one has to look backward—toward the original deathrock explosion of the early 1980s—and forward, toward the early‑2000s resurgence of DIY horror filmmaking and the renewed interest in analog gore aesthetics. The band did not appear in a vacuum; they were the product of decades of subcultural evolution, personal histories, and artistic collisions.
Dinah Cancer, the most historically visible member of Penis Flytrap, had already become a foundational figure long before the band formed. As the vocalist of 45 Grave, she helped define the deathrock sound that grew out of the L.A. punk scene’s darker corners. Her work in the early 1980s placed her alongside bands like Christian Death, Super Heroines, and Kommunity FK, all of whom fused punk aggression with macabre theatricality. Cancer’s presence in the band carried the weight of that lineage; she was one of the few artists from the original deathrock era who continued performing through the 1990s and into the 2000s, maintaining continuity between generations of horror‑themed music. Her earlier involvement with Castration Squad—a feminist, confrontational punk collective—also shaped her approach to performance, grounding her later theatrical personas in a tradition of subversive stagecraft rather than mere shock value.
Lucifer Fulci entered the band from a different historical trajectory, one rooted not in punk but in the cult of Italian horror cinema. The 1990s saw a major revival of interest in directors like Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava, and Dario Argento, driven by VHS collectors, horror zines, and boutique video labels. Fulci was part of that collector culture, the generation who traded bootleg tapes, memorized Goblin soundtracks, and treated Italian splatter films as sacred texts. His musical identity was shaped by this cinematic obsession, and his contributions to Penis Flytrap reflected the broader trend of horror‑soundtrack influence that would later explode into full genres—dark synth, dungeon synth, and retro‑giallo electronic music. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, however, this influence was still niche, still underground, still the domain of obsessive fans rather than mainstream musicians. Fulci’s presence in the band placed PFT at the forefront of a movement that had not yet fully emerged.
Elvorian Von Spivey and Hal Satan came from Mi Diablo, a band that represented another important thread in L.A.’s underground: the hybridization of punk, metal, and horror imagery that proliferated in the 1990s. This was the era of crossover bands, DIY venues, and small‑press zines that documented scenes too obscure for mainstream coverage. Von Spivey’s guitar style, shaped by both punk rawness and metal heaviness, reflected the broader trend of women in heavy music reclaiming space in genres traditionally dominated by men. Her fascination with vampire cinema and Hammer horror placed her within the lineage of goth and horror fandom that had grown steadily since the 1970s, fueled by late‑night TV broadcasts, Fangoria magazine, and the cult status of films like The Hunger and The Lost Boys. Hal Satan’s influences—Hong Kong action cinema, Tarantino, and ultraviolent crime films—connected the band to yet another cultural current: the 1990s explosion of stylized violence in film, which shaped the aesthetics of countless underground musicians who saw in those movies a new vocabulary for aggression and spectacle.
Dave Parker, director of The Dead Hate the Living!, represents the cinematic counterpart to everything Penis Flytrap embodied. The late 1990s and early 2000s were a transitional period in horror filmmaking, marked by the rise of indie directors who embraced practical effects, meta‑horror, and DIY production. Parker was part of that wave, influenced by the same films that shaped the band’s aesthetic. His presence in the interview reflects the symbiotic relationship between underground horror cinema and horror‑themed music during this era. Bands like Penis Flytrap provided soundtracks, inspiration, and cultural context for filmmakers who were reviving the spirit of 1980s splatter films in a new digital age.
Taken together, these histories reveal why Penis Flytrap occupies a unique place in the cultural landscape. They were not simply a band; they were a convergence point for multiple underground traditions—deathrock, Italian horror fandom, punk‑metal crossover, exploitation cinema, and DIY filmmaking. Their formation coincided with a moment when Los Angeles was undergoing significant cultural shifts: the decline of many historic venues, the rise of new goth and industrial clubs, the emergence of horror conventions, and the growing influence of internet‑based fan communities. Penis Flytrap stood at the intersection of these changes, carrying forward the analog, blood‑and‑latex sensibility of earlier eras while anticipating the multimedia, cross‑genre horror culture that would dominate the 2010s and beyond.
In 2026, revisiting this interview means recognizing the band as part of a larger historical continuum. They were inheritors of deathrock’s original theatricality, participants in the VHS‑era horror revival, collaborators with rising indie filmmakers, and precursors to the modern horror‑soundtrack renaissance. Their story is not just the story of a band; it is the story of Los Angeles horror culture itself, mutating, recombining, and refusing to die.
THE INTERVIEW
Something tells me this isn’t the best neighborhood to get lost in, especially in search of a guy who calls himself Lucifer. Women in baggy sweatshirts and curlers cross themselves when I ask for directions, muttering swiftly in Spanish (something like “Madre de Dios -- El Diablo!”); it doesn’t help that the exact street number I seek can be found in the Book of Revelation and several silly movies starring Sam Neill.
Fortunately, before long Lucifer finds me.
You can almost feel the road rage building on this midsummer afternoon in Angelino Heights. Yet the foot traffic tells a different story. Whole families safely traverse Bellevue en route to Echo Park, or (Echo Parque as some locals have it); come to celebrate the Lotus Festival, they stroll with flamboyant leisure compared to the stop-and-go panic assailing the intersection.
Dark Caddies slouch southward down the hill, bearing mean-looking dudes with shades, scarves and rippling tats. This is a neighborhood white people drive through with the windows rolled up whatever the heat, eyes locked straight ahead, grimaces plastered on their faces and feet doing quick heel-toe action -- the kind of place Michael Douglas’s character in Falling Down would approach only with a grenade launcher.
From a blind alley beside the building -- a slate gray stucco rabbit warren -- I’ve picked as the most likely candidate for the interview site, a friendly voice reaches me (you expected sepulchral tones and brimstone?). Soon Lucifer Fulci and I have traversed a maze of steps and fenced-off courtyards that would unnerve Alice, arriving at the sanctum sanctgorum of Penis Flytrap.
The décor befits a band best described as the sonic double of an Italian splatter film. Lurid horror movie posters cover the walls; a black Naugahyde sofa fronts a TV set running nonstop gore flick montage, and a disarmingly cute white kitten named Lamberto Pawva (dubbed after a prominent Italian genre director) frolics about. Gathered for the interview are the aforementioned Lucifer (bass); Elvorina Von Spivey (guitar); Hal Satan (drums) and Deathrock legend, ex-Castration Squad/45 Grave vocalist Dinah Cancer, along with up-and-coming horror auteur Dave Parker, director of The Dead Hate The Living, which features PFT’s music.
True to form, Cancer’s metastasizing nightly, popping new nodes -- onstage personalities with discrete traits — from the mass of protean tissue known as Penis Flytrap. “PFT is like a living organism,” Cancer bursts out with typical enthusiasm. “It’s kind of like John Carpenter’s The Thing: You don’t know what you’re going to get next week, but damn, it’s fun and scary!”
Speaking of herself in the third person like a distaff, gore-flecked Bob Dole, the still-striking singer draws out the analogy: “The band has been like developing, and we’ve been moving forward musically; at the same time, Dinah has been going through her own changes. I think it comes with being more seasoned. Every show is a different form of Dinah, based on whatever type of mood I’m in: She can be like a total dead zombie to maybe a manic serial killer who loves to stab women on stage!
“For awhile I had one character called ‘Zombie Doll.’ She had this short, cropped, fluorescent pink wig and she was covered in bandages. If you looked at her arms, every time she moved you would see blood oozing out of her wounds and stuff. That survived for about a year. Then I have a blue haired vixen who’s more like the Deathrock [persona], from the old Hammer horror that we all grew up with. It just depends on what we’re doing for that evening. We’ll sit down and plan out a show and we might pick out a particular movie. Like one of our funnest times was a tribute to The Exorcist. Elvorian donned a Regan type outfit complete with like IV drip coming out of her nose. She was just totally evil with the contacts and everything, and dripping blood…she looked like she was decomposing. We all just kind of like surrounded ourselves with The Exorcist for the evening -- we played some music, the title track, and I did my Regan scene where she was in bed f**king herself with the cross. That was my contribution to the whole thing.”
Von Spivey adds: “That was at the Key Club (a West Hollywood rock venue). I know the owner’s son there, and he said that the entire downstairs staff was freaked out by us because of what we did onstage.”
Composed of veteran hands in the horror-rock subgenre, Penis Flytrap grafts its parts together much like the title character in Frankenhooker. But by the same token it would be inaccurate to call the group’s makeup piecemeal; they are, in literal fact, an extended family. Von Spivey and Satan previously performed with a band called Mi Diablo, which broke up when the lead singer left for India.
Recalls Von Spivey, “Our CD had just come out, and we were all pretty disappointed. We had boxes and boxes of CDs and no singer.”
With Mi Diablo’s demise, the remaining members, with Fulci on board as bassist, decided to continue playing together for kicks. Says Satan, “They [Mi Diablo] were so organized, and we wanted to do something to do something fun.”
Von Spivey met Cancer through an occult shop the singer owned called Ragnarok. “I was going in and buying books and things from her, and I didn’t realize that was really who she was. Then we kind of ended up meeting kind of through mutual friends.
“I told her we wanted to have her sing ‘Party Time’ with us at a benefit (the 45 Grave classic featured in the soundtrack to Return of the Living Dead) and would she do that. She came down to rehearse with us, and then that was it.”
Cancer picks up the thread: “That rehearsal’s when I met the infamous Lucifer, and it just seemed that we all just kinda like really clicked together, and everyone was just out having like a really good time. It just seemed like we were just like made to play together.”
Perhaps because of Cancer’s H-wood Gothick pedigree, PFT’s rep among the uninitiated stuffs them in the same narrow box as vintage LA bands like Christian Death. “People say we’re a gothic band, and they’ll play some of our songs at a Goth club too,” Fulci says. “But we’re not aimed at them exactly; a song like ‘Burn Witch Burn’ is what we remember from watching something like Black Sabbath, by Mario Bava, riding through those dark woods…if somebody said, ‘Look in the dictionary under “horror,” and read the definition, do you see that in Halloween IX or Jason X or any of this? Usually, no.’”
It comes as small shock that PFT draw inspiration from Italian horror film composers, the art-rock combo Goblin. “We use some of their music for intros for when we play, if the venue is appropriate…they are such an influence,” Fulci says. “There are a couple of pieces on our new album, Dismemberment, that William Faith [Faith and the Muse, Christian Death] produced. His wife came out and said that some of these on here just sound exactly like Goblin. But don’t tell that to them!”
Dave Parker weighs in: “One of the first things I noticed about them is that with their music and their songs and their stage show and everything else, that they encompassed everything from classical horror to modern horror. I mean, they do everything from songs having a more Universal type feel to even William Castle sort of spooky ghost type stuff to the Italian stuff to modern horror, to things that are like Jim VanBebber films.”
Fulci agrees: “Even if we didn’t play music, I think that we would all hang out based on our movie collections alone. I’ve said before that the one thing I realized is that she [Von Spivey] had the unending collection of vampire movies and she’s been very much into that, as well as the true crime kind of stuff. I could borrow for ages from her collection, as well as the Hammer stuff that she (Cancer) has -- all the stuff I didn’t have; I was kind of more Italian gore crap, and Hal, on the completely other violent end of the spectrum was like ‘you have to watch Killing Zoe. You should watch these gangster type films from John Woo to Tarentino and all that kind of stuff in-between…I hadn’t even watched Scarface until I met him. Based on that kind of stuff alone, I think we all kind of equally gave.”
Parker, who bears a slight resemblance to Stephen King, stows his cigarette in a traveling soda can. He observes, “Another thing I liked about the band is that every one of them is an individual and each one of them has, besides movie influences, different musical influences as well. They all come from different walks and they manage to combine them.”
Fulci nods enthusiastically. “Dinah’s like, she’s got connections to The Germs, a seminal Los Angeles band; Don Bolles is a great drummer, 45 Grave was a great band, very influential. I really respect everybody’s roots.”
The sonic DNA that Penis Flytrap mingle in their songs makes the band, as an entity, a healthy and versatile creature. Says Fulci of his bandmates’ taste: “I had a very hermit-like, close-minded point of view on music -- these bands, that music, is easy to play. You have to go from the other spectrum of heavy, fast metal kind of stuff, and Lesli (Von Spivey) was like ‘Yeah but, this is fun too, if you listen to some punk sh*t, there’s like a fine balance between the two.’ I think that’s kind of musically what we give to each other, I don’t mean to talk about her in front of her, but she’s got this raw sound that comes out of this Marshall that is not like other bands …and I’ll be like, she’s a lady, and she plays guitar like that?
“That’s one of the interesting things about this band, is that you don’t really have one spectrum of music. For instance, if I hear anything by Slayer, I know it’s Slayer; but there’s a lot of things that people hear. We have a song, ‘Say You Love Satan,’ but at the other end we have a song like ‘I Wait,’ which is kind of like a spooky ballad, and those are two completely different things.”
The venues PFT perform at impact their exact spectral shade, however. A sketchy blueprint gets hammered out for each show -- just enough structure to allow weird improv stuff to erupt where it may. Fulci says, “We have a skeletal plan for what we’re going to do onstage, and then it just kinda all goes loose, so sometimes Laurie the Gory -- if she’s out there and she’s dancing to a song -- might just decide to turn around, fall to her knees and let Dinah shove the crucifix down her throat. That’s not planned. That’s just kind of what we do. If people are offended by that, well, that’s kind of success, in a way.
“With a band like The Misfits, they’re like George Romero; they have the ideology of horror that’s maybe kind of more family-oriented. Their songs are very celebratory about horror films and B-movies and things like that, and you can take your child to any Misfits show at any time, and have a good time. But there are some shows that parents are genuinely offended by the things that we do or say onstage, and it just kind of happens, that’s just who we are. If we do have an all-ages show, it’s the difference between, like 18 and Over is Evil Dead, All Ages is Evil Dead II. You know -- you could use Slime II. That’s all right. Slime’s no crime.”
Adds Von Spivey, “We try and have a little bit of nudity and blood…it depends on the age level of the club.”
“Also,” says Cancer, “in certain counties, if you have hard alcohol, you have to be covered -- you can’t be topless. So those are the variants; we have to find out how we have to work within like a club or a venue.
“We’re out to have fun. And we want to play for people that appreciate a good horror show. We want you to come in and just be totally like immersed in all sensory avenues: Sight, sound; you will get splattered with blood, you will see almost naked women running around getting stabbed onstage, you’ll hear this bitching kick-ass music, you can see all this stuff going onstage, so when you come out you’re just going like, that was worth the price of admission. It’s like we’re a mini-movie in the flesh: You can come up, you can talk to us. I’ll spit blood on you!