Sam’s Soundtrack to All Hallows’ Eve

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.

  1. 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.
  1. Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, J.S. Bach. c. 1833. This atmospheric organ portends Bad Things. Always. Instrumental.
  1. 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.
  1. 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.
  1. 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’.
  1. Halloween Theme, John Carpenter. 1978. The spare, eerie piano score from Carpenter’s seasonal opus stands on its own. Instrumental.
  1. 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
  1. 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.
  1. 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.
  2. 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.


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