Welcome to 2026's 31 Days of Heistoween, a daily dose of spooky icons, spine-tingling oddities, and — most harrowing of all — memes. Check back every day from now through October 31 for each daily entry!
There are certain things that unite all of us. In my experience, a Dracula puppet is one of them.
In the 2008 romantic comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall, writer and star Jason Segel made his character, Peter, creatively passionate about exactly one thing: A musical he'd written about Dracula, to be performed entirely by puppets. Titled A Taste For Love, the musical came to represent Peter's authentic self, the thing he needed to devote himself to in order to become a fully rounded person in the wake of a devastating breakup. The film's finale reveals that he actually finished the musical and staged it in a small Los Angeles theater, and watching even a brief scene from it remains one of the great movie comedy delights of the 21st century.
Whenever Forgetting Sarah Marshall comes up, you hear one refrain, often above all others: "Man, I wish we could have seen the whole Dracula puppet musical." It's just so delightful, so warm, and so strange.
Well, we never got the full-length version of A Taste For Love, though Segel did get to channel his love of puppet musicals into a fantastic feature-length Muppets movie. What some fans might not know, though, is that there are more, well, tastes of the show out there.
In 2009, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson celebrated its 1,000th episode, and because Ferguson was and is a madman of a chat show host, he decided to make the whole thing puppet-themed. That brought out a whole host of delightfully weird moments, but the best was Segel and Dracula, returning to offer a new version of "Dracula's Lament."
The only song that we hear completely from A Taste For Love, "Dracula's Lament" originally emerged as a sad ballad about how Dracula wanted to die but couldn't. Since that's kind of a bummer for a talk show, even if it is pretty funny coming from the mouth of a puppet, Segel rewrote the number to make it about the joys of falling in love, upped the tempo, and put on a delightful, joyous performance in front of a studio audience.
It's incredible.
I love everything about Halloween, but if I had to pick one thing I love above all it's the way that playing pretend with monsters can make us much more human, much more loving, much more alive. Segel's performance here is a testament to exactly that feeling, and I can't think of a better way to close out Heistoween this year.
Happy Halloween from all of us at Pop Heist.
