How to choose songs that best represent the season: Overt Halloween themes? Atmosphere? Nostalgia? Some combination of all of these? I began with the goal of one song for every day of October. Thirty-one is a lot. In no particular order, here are a non-comprehensive and personally-biased ten.
- Halloween, The Misfits, 10/31/1981. Eponymous. Sinister. If the festival has a theme song, this is it. Notable lyrics: Bonfires burning bright, pumpkin faces in the night/I remember Halloween/Dead cats hanging from poles, little dead are out in droves/I remember Halloween.
- Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, J.S. Bach. c. 1833. This atmospheric organ portends Bad Things. Always. Instrumental.
- This Is Halloween, Danny Elfman, 1993. Tim Burton elevated our beloved day to it’s rightful place in the pantheon of holidays with his critical and commercial hit stop-motion film, The Nightmare Before Christmas. Notable lyrics: This is Halloween, everybody make a scene/Trick or treat ‘til the neighbors gonna die of fright/It’s our town, everybody scream/In this town of Halloween.
- Fall Children, AFI. 1999. Invoke the revelry. Notable lyrics:Deadened branches stirred/By whispers in the wind/Fall children fill the streets at dusk, at last, it all will begin.
- Monster Mash, Bobby Pickett. 1962. A cheerful annual essential; the best kind of nonsense. Notable lyrics: The scene was rockin’, all were digging the sounds/of Igor on chains, backed by his baying hounds/The coffin-bangers were about to arrive/With their vocal group, ‘The Crypt-Kicker Five’.
- Halloween Theme, John Carpenter. 1978. The spare, eerie piano score from Carpenter’s seasonal opus stands on its own. Instrumental.
- Ritual, Ghost. 2010. Campy, catchy Swedish blood-and-Satan rock’n’roll redolent of the finest 80s slasher flicks. Notable lyrics: This chapel of ritual/Smells of dead human sacrifices/From the altar bed/On this night of ritual/Invoking our master/To procreate the unholy bastard
- Lose Your Soul, Dead Man’s Bones. 2009. Ryan Gosling gets weird. Who knew that cool kid in class liked creepy things, too? Notable lyrics: You’re gonna lose your soul, tonight.
- Funeral Thirst, The Black Dahlia Murder, 2003. A gore-soaked celebration of reincarnation. Because this time of year, corpses don’t always stay where we put them. Notable lyrics: I seek to bathe my fetid flesh in crimson spray/My body writhes without consent of conscience/I lift the lid the pounds of dirt shall not subdue/I shall walk the earth once more.
- Danse Macabre, Camille Saint-Saens. c. 1874. The dead rise at midnight on Halloween in this interpretation of an old French folk tale. You might think, instead, of animated skeletons. Instrumental.
