An Essential Horror Playlist to Soundtrack Your Halloween
A creeptastic collection of spoopy songs and scary scores from a wide variety of horror films, to deliver you an indelibly Halloween-y mood.
Grab your pumpkins, stock up on candy, and lock your doors and windows to keep out those darn stab-happy seasonal serial killers wearing white-painted William Shatner masks - (i.e. Michael Myers, for those less versed in random horror movie trivia) - because Halloween's a-comin', and thus 'tis the season to get SPOOKY.
And what better way to get into the swing of all things All Hallows’ Eve than with the appropriate atmospheric selection of music for the occasion!
But rather than go the route of picking songs along the likes of Michael Jackson's ‘Thriller’, Bobby Pickett's ‘Monster Mash’, or Danny Elfman's ‘This Is Halloween’, this curation of music entirely stems from the soundtracks to a broad swathe of horror movies past and present, spanning the last sixty years of horror cinema. From original scores composed especially for the films, to pre-existing source music that then became inextricably associated with the films they were used in, this playlist has it all.
I’ve arranged the tracks into an order that allows for an eclectic yet organic listening experience, but you can also play it on Shuffle mode, and it should work just as well.
Are we ready to begin?
To quote the famous tagline for R.L. Stine's Goosebumps books:
"Reader beware... you're in for a scare!"
• ERASERHEAD (1977)
Do you live in a desolate industrial wasteland of a nameless cityscape that’s inspired by Philadelphia in the 1970’s? Do you have a disturbing mutant monster baby that - as he himself said in his song ‘Sexting’ from Inside - looks like Bo Burnham’s dick? Do you have a creepy puffy-cheeked miniature lady singing to you in the pitched-up voice of David Lynch, from a stage in a compartment in your radiator, with songs about everything in heaven being fine, while she casually stomps on symbolic giant sperms?
If so, maaaaaaaybe you need to lay off the sugar from all that trick-or-treat candy for a little while…
• SCREAM (1996)
Before becoming synonymously tied to Peaky Blinders by way of acting as an iconic theme song for the show, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ ‘Red Right Hand’ similarly first became most associable to Wes Craven’s Scream trilogy (excluding 2011's fourth entry - and Craven's final film - which neglected to use the song). By the time Scream 3 rolled around, Nick Cave even recorded a special "sequel" song to his original classic track, just for the film, with new lyrics and additional orchestration, really hammering home ‘Red Right Hand's status as the franchise’s unofficially official anthem.
No matter how many times you hear it, those tolling bells, that swaggering organ, and Cave's snarling vocals never fail to get the blood pumping.
• PSYCHO (1960)
Maybe don't listen to this until after you've had a shower.
• BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA (1992)
Wojciech Kilar's Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula soundtrack is a wildly operatic, sumptuously gothic affair pitched perfectly to the Grand Guignol melodrama of the film it scores. Soaring with sinister strings, swooping brass, and wailing choirs, Kilar's work is one you'll want to—
—(don't say it, don't say it, DON'T YOU DARE SAY IT)—
—sink your teeth into.
(You shameless hack, Jack.)
• SUSPIRIA (1977)
If there's any song that sounds suited to summoning demons, and actually having half a chance of doing so successfully (if demons really existed, of course), then Goblin's title track to Dario Argento's original technicolour prog-rock nightmare of Suspiria would probably do the trick.
• A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984)
"Do not touch, Willie."
Good advice!
• 30 DAYS OF NIGHT (2007)
Music to kill vampires to.
• SINISTER (2012)
One of the few tracks in Christopher Young's Sinister score that you can listen to without having a panic attack upon hearing the terrifyingly cursed sounds concocted by Young, and his evil genius evil-music-making.
• THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS (2016)
They always say that the book's better than the film, but one of my few hot takes about anything is that, in this one specific case, the film is better than the book.
(And yet the author of the screenplay adaptation and the novel were one and the same, so make that make sense.)
• A FIELD IN ENGLAND (2013) and CENSOR (2021)
Two British horrors. Two Film4 productions. Two films containing underrated Irish actor Michael Smiley. One shared needle drop.
The ways in which Blanck Mass' ‘Chernobyl’ was utilised by Ben Wheatley in A Field In England, and later by Prano Bailey-Bond in Censor, are both quite different, yet oddly similar. The scenes that this calm ambient instrumental hauntingly underscores both happen to feature characters with disturbing, unhinged, manic smiles as they lose their grip on reality completely.
Either way, no matter how moving and soothing the track is on its own (even in spite of the dark history its title harkens back to), it has come to gain two chilling horror film associations that are simply unforgettable.
(FUN FACT: Blanck Mass is the title of the solo electronic project by Benjamin Power, who alongside Andrew Hung - who composed the great score to the not-so-great The Greasy Strangler - was also part of the electronic noise/drone duo Fuck Buttons, which is relevant because on their third (and to date, last) album, 2013’s Slow Focus, the melody of ‘Chernobyl’ was repurposed for the Fuck Buttons track, ‘Stalker’. One can't help but wonder if the track's dual identities as ‘Chernobyl’ and ‘Stalker’ were intentional references to Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker. But that's a question to ponder another day...)
• YOU’RE NEXT (2011)
Music to get home-invaded to.
• IT FOLLOWS (2014)
Randy from Scream famously laid out the rules to survive a horror movie, and at the top of the list - before “You can't drink or do drugs,” and “Never ever under any circumstances say 'I'll be right back,' because you won't be back” - was “You can never have sex. Sex equals death.”
And never has a horror movie rule been so literalised than in the form of David Robert Mitchell's It Follows, where an evil curse of impending death is passed from person to person like a deadly supernatural STD.
Who knew the gym coach from Mean Girls was right?!
• BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW (2010)
I impatiently await there finally being a UK Blu-ray release of Beyond The Black Rainbow, because it is long overdue.
GET ON IT, ARROW VIDEO/SECOND SIGHT/88 FILMS/WHOEVER ELSE CAN GET THE DISTRIBUTION RIGHTS!!
• CANDYMAN (1992)
Imagine if the notoriously bee-covered Candyman ever asked one of his victims that most dreadful of questions...
• CARRIE (1976)
It's old news to say that Brian De Palma has always been critically cajoled for how often he infused his films with Alfred Hitchcock references, homages, and downright mimicry. So it's not unreasonable to wonder if, when he made Carrie (the first ever screen adaptation of a Stephen King novel), De Palma intentionally trolled his critics with his repeated sampling of Bernard Herrmann's famous "REE! REE!" screeching strings from Psycho, as the sound that occurs whenever Sissy Spacek's Carrie uses her telekinetic powers...
• THE OMEN (1976)
The name "Damien"/"Damian" gets a bad rep. There are plenty of cool Damiens/ans out there!
Damian Lewis... Damien Haas... Damien Rice... Damien Molony... Damien Chazelle... Damian... Damien...
...oh no, I've repeated that name so many times that it's lost all meaning!
Now that's the real evil!
• THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK (1987)
You can totally hear a snippet of melody herein that Williams later used in his theme for Harry Potter.
Self-plagiarism at its finest!
• THE AMITYVILLE HORROR (1979)
Living in the Amityville Horror house for more than a month? Now that's a real Mission: Impossible!
(You know, because Schifrin did the Mission: Impossible theme, too? You get it, you get it.)
• THE INNOCENTS (1961)
As of the time of writing, having not yet seen The Haunting of Bly Manor, I can only wonder about whether or not the show included this song, or some reference to it, seeing as Bly Manor and The Innocents both hail from the same source material of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw...
• THE WICKER MAN (1973)
No, not the “not the bees” one, the good one.
• SOCIETY (1989)
I had to do a bit of a cheat here, because currently, there doesn't exist an official release of Mark Ryder and Phil Davies' twisted soundtrack to Brian Yuzna's gloopy body-horror satire, Society. As such, the playlist contained herein only includes an instrumental version of the original ‘Eton Boating Song’, in lieu of the absence of the lyrically-altered film version.
Even so, I can never again hear this boisterous melody without hearing the film's chilling proclamation that “society waits for you”...
#WeLiveInASociety
• DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978)
Robot Chicken who?
• 28 DAYS LATER (2002)
FUN FACT:
For far too long, I was once under the misapprehension that the music in that iconic scene in 28 Days Later, where Cillian Murphy wanders through the deserted streets of a decimated London, was one of John Murphy’s compositions for the film. It wasn’t until around 2009 or so that I finally found out it was actually a needle drop of an extract from Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s ‘East Hastings’, off of their debut studio album, F♯ A♯ ∞. And so began my ongoing days as a fan of that band from then on.
This has nothing to do with ‘In The House - In A Heartbeat’, but here’s a couple of tidbits I can add about the track itself:
There was a time in the mid-to-late-2000’s when you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a trailer or TV spot or reality television show using Murphy’s music as a go-to needle drop (e.g. The X Factor, Strictly Come Dancing, and Top Gear likely all used it at one point or another; the trailer for Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf most definitely used it).
Also, there were at least two shows I distinctly remember deploying soundalike versions of ‘In The House - In A Heartbeat’, indicating the original was probably used as temp music, and the shows’ composers were tasked with remaking them, so as to adhere to the same sound and tempos to match the editing, while changing just enough of the chords and instrumentation to skirt copyright infringement. Marco Beltrami did it for the Season 1 finale of the 2009 V remake (in the same episode he copied another Murphy track, ‘Adagio in D Minor’ from Sunshine), while Joseph LoDuca did it for Season 1, Episode 10 of Spartacus: Blood and Sand, which you can hear on that season’s official score album on the track, ‘Different Sword’.
• THE RING (2002)
• THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES (2002)
The Mothman Prophecies was many things to me when I saw it in 2003, at the age of 10.
It was one of my very first DVDs I ever owned… it was one of the most terrifying films I’d ever seen in my young life… and with its end credits song, ‘Half Light’, it turned out to be my introduction to who would go on to become my favourite band, Low.
And while it wasn’t until 2019 that I would finally start listening to their music properly, via their album Double Negative and beyond, The Mothman Prophecies was the planter of that seed to blossom within me 16 years later.
• REPO! THE GENETIC OPERA (2008)
I may not be 100% a theatre kid, but every now and then, you’ll find parts of my tastes that expose the theatre-kid-adjacent aspects of my personality. Repo! The Genetic Opera is just such one of those examples, as well as being one of those paradoxical “five-star three-star” movies that are somehow both merely okay, yet also so great at the same time.
• SAW (2004)
Real ones know that Jigsaw doesn’t actually say “Hello Zepp” verbatim in the film, in the same way that real ones know Darth Vader doesn’t say “Luke, I am your father” in The Empire Strikes Back.
• MANDY (2018)
RIP, Jóhann Jóhannsson.
• THE SHINING (1980)
You most likely know it best as the ominous opening notes you hear in The Shining, but did you know that while Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s theme is an electronic reimagining of a section of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, those Dies Irae notes have turned up bloody everywhere?
Observe!
• THE THING (1982)
A little part of me dies inside whenever I think about how there’s a strong likelihood that younger generations, growing up from 2020 onwards, might only ever think of the plot of The Thing as it relates to the premise of Among Us, and I feel just that little bit older and older…
• UNDER THE SKIN (2013)
I once made the fateful error of falling asleep while listening to Mica Levi’s diabolically disturbing score for Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin.
The result? An incredibly vivid nightmare in which I kept desperately trying to turn the music off as it rang in my ears, pulling out my earphones and covering my ears but it just wouldn't stop, and then for some reason Hannibal Lecter attempted to kill me by letting a tiger loose in my house.
• THE NEON DEMON (2016)
There was much about The Neon Demon that left me unsure about whether I liked it, or hated it, back when I saw it in cinemas in 2016. But an unambiguous plus in the film’s favour was its scintillating soundtrack, including Cliff Martinez’s score, Sia’s original song ‘Waving Goodbye’, and this propulsive dance track from Nicolas Winding Refn’s nephew (and - *checks notes* - Brigitte Nielsen’s son?!), Julian Winding.
• HALLOWEEN (2018)
Well, a Halloween playlist wouldn’t be complete without a John Carpenter Halloween score appearing somewhere, now would it?
Is it bad that it’s from the 2018 David Gordon Green sequel/soft-reboot of the same name? Not when the music is this good, and the film itself is perfectly fine.
It’s only when we get to Halloween Kills that we start running into problems…
• RAW (2017)
Just like the Julia Ducournau film it scores, Jim Williams’ music is finger-lickin’ good!
• SUSPIRIA (2018)
No relation to Stephen Volk, writer/creator of notorious British mockumentary horror, Ghostwatch.
• HEREDITARY (2018)
Heads up! The playlist - and this article - is almost at an end, folks! Sound the horns, ring the bells, and fire up that demonically distorted saxophone, Mr. Stetson!
• THE EXORCIST (1973)
And here we are, at long last, finally at the epic conclusion, marked by all 25 minutes of the first half of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells!
(Personally, I only ever listen to Part 1 of the album, mostly because I’ve always been aggressively perturbed by the “caveman” section on Part 2. It’s very much not to my liking, to put it mildly.)
Oh, and remember how the Dies Irae gets referenced and quoted everywhere all the time?
Well, not only is it an integral part of the iconic piano refrain that The Exorcist took and inextricably tied into its very existence for all eternity, but as you get deeper into the track’s prolonged runtime, you find the Dies Irae notes played out quite explicitly, in full The Shining mode, years before The Shining made the Dies Ires inextricably tied to its very eternal existence likewise!
See? It all ties together in a nice little bow!
Happy Halloween, and happy listening, guys and ghouls!
Superb list!
I do think there are some major additions that should be made.
1. Fabio Frizzi's main theme from The Beyond. It really feels like they told him "We're trying to make the scariest movie of all time," and he was like I GOT YOU.
2. As much as I love Goblin's work on Suspiria, how could we forget their (or Claudio Simonetti's?) totally danceable theme from Tenebrae? No one hears that without dancing, and Justice knew this well which is why they sampled it a couple decades ago.
3. Speaking of Simonetti, he delivers that funky, rocking orchestral opening to Demons, a theme that hits so hard that it just BRINGS IT from the first moment on.
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