The Goodnight Playlist, Vol. 9: The Top 40 Halloween Songs
This carefully curated, forty-song playlist is the first ever themed edition of RETRO’s longrunning “Goodnight Playlist” series. Enjoy the music—and as ever, sleep well and wake brave!
{Note: Unlike other entries in the “Goodnight Playlist” series, this edition includes songs from every decade since the 1940s. The playlist below approximates the length of a quadruple LP. Per usual, most of the songs on the list are best when listened to on high-quality headphones.}
Introduction
It’s late September, which means sales of Halloween costumes have begun and we are edging close to the one month that—it says here—feels unlike any other all year long: October.
If you’re like me (especially if you’re like me inasmuch as you grew up somewhere with a discrete fall, for instance New England) you’ll probably agree that the night air just smells different in October. And if you’re also like me in that you’ve always felt a special connection to Halloween—see below for my own reason—you probably spend all October anticipating Halloween and start thinking in what we might denominate “Halloween terms” (a consciousness of mystery, the dark, and forces unseen that you can’t quite shake even as you don’t take them terribly seriously) as soon as October 1 arrives.
Which it will, in under two weeks from now.
With this in mind, I thought it right to bring to RETRO readers a trove of Halloween music so vast you could spend all October listening to and enjoying it. But I wanted, too, to write a brief essay about Halloween music, as I think Halloween is a holiday both uniquely defined by its sounds—and yes, sights and smells—but also hard to pin down in terms of the music that rightly should be associated with it. Thus, this essay, followed by the “all-time” ranking of Halloween songs (from #40 to #1) that follows it.
Some Thoughts on Halloween Music
1
Songs truly intended to capture the spirit of Halloween were for many decades of U.S. music history few and far between, as songwriting connected to the holiday was typically limited to “novelty” songs that aimed more to be humorous than unnerving.
While some of these songs remain perennial favorites of Halloween-lovers, it’s only in that kitschy sense that frames Halloween as an event not be taken at all seriously—let alone adored.
When MTV popularized music videos in the 1980s, everything changed for the simple reason that songs could now be multi-purpose: universal in lyric but particular in self-depiction. A song ostensibly about heartbreak could become a “Halloween song”—or, more broadly, simply a scary song—just by visualizing itself that way in a music video.
While one notable example of this was the 1982 Michael Jackson song “Thriller”, in which the “King of Pop” actually turned a pop song into a horror flick-in-miniature, similar transformations have abounded since the 1980s.
And this change has even been retrospective. Now that listeners are more accustomed to thinking as much about the tone and atmosphere suggested by the instrumentation of a song as well as its lyrics, it’s possible to visit the same process of transmutation upon older songs that didn’t benefit from wildly imaginative music videos of the sort we’re now so used to seeing.
In this view, it’s hard to see/hear anything but Halloween music in sixties or seventies songs like The Eagles’ “Witchy Woman” and Donovan’s “Season of the Witch.” (Even as a song from the same era like Magic Carpet’s “Black Cat”, which is seemingly attuned to Halloween in its imagery, fails to make a list like the one below because its gentle, spiritualistic “freak folk” lacks the suggestively dark tone of many other tunes).
2
The hardest thing about making a “best Halloween songs” list is that you quickly see that you must leave out work by bands whose entire aesthetic was engineered to make every song in its oeuvre sound like a Halloween song. Trent Reznor is amazing; should we put every Nine Inch Nails song on a list like this? Or every Marilyn Manson song? What about Alice Cooper or The Cure? Ultimately, one realizes that the best thing to do is focus on musicians and bands that opted, in specific songs, to take a turn into the dark, the macabre, the eerie—so on and so forth—rather than branding themselves in such a way from the jump. This isn’t to diminish truly scary songs by, say, Nine Inch Nails, just to say that these are best enjoyed by listening to LPs and singles by Reznor and not reading a list like this one that might diminish his input by misinterpreting and mislabeling his earnest artistic aesthetic perspective as a mere ephemeral put-on.
By the same token, it’s not exactly clear what one should do with Halloween-oriented remixes of popular songs. These are neither novelty songs nor original songs, but (as it were) “Halloweenized” music that has a place—and certainly a value—but maybe not in a list like this one squarely focused on celebrating musicians and original songs. So while RETRO loves the A-Trak remix of Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Heads Will Roll”, the original is the one that makes the list below. But here’s the remix anyway, just for fun:
Then there are songs that would be diminished if they were pigeonholed as Halloween music, which is not to say that Halloween music is “less than” but that certain songs that regularly appear on “best Halloween songs” lists—like “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder—can only make such a list if they’re impermissibly flattened in some way.
Just because Wonder gives us a nasty bassline and a dark tale doesn’t mean there’s really anything below that invokes Halloween, for all that this song is a fantastic one:
The same goes for Radiohead’s “Creep”, which like “Superstition” is a great song that seems to make every list of top Halloween songs.
Other songs in this category include Taylor Swift’s “Haunted” and even Rick James’s “Super Freak.” There are even songs by Shakira and Beyoncé that regularly show up as “Halloween songs” in certain media outlets. Admittedly, my reluctance to list such songs here may be a personal bias: not against Shakira or Beyoncé, mind you, but just the idea that either of these extremely talented musicians is interested in or capable of producing music I find scary (however this sounds, I mean it as a compliment to both artists, even as I’m aware of the legal trouble the former has recently found herself in and, for that matter, the serious allegations Marilyn Manson, who I mentioned above, has faced).
But I suppose I should just let you all decide for yourself! The two songs below appear on almost every “top Halloween songs” ranking I’ve ever seen (to be clear, the Beyoncé video below is plenty creepy, I just don’t think the song it accompanies is, as without their videos I’d never associate the beautiful “Haunted” or Shakira’s provocative “She Wolf” with Halloween):
Some other songs that regularly appear on lists of top Halloween songs candidly get there because of their author rather than the song itself, which is a real disservice to all themed listmaking. I love David Bowie, for instance, but not so much that I would pretend his 1980 song “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)” was one of his better compositions—in fact, it came during one of his only down periods as an artist—or that it belongs on any Top 40 Halloween-themed list even if it’s thematically on-brand.
Also worth a brief mention here are covers and film scores. Yes, there are many who might prefer Nina Simone’s “I Put a Spell on You”, and no, RETRO is never going to gainsay anyone who loves a track by Nina Simone. But Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ first stab at the tune was quite fine and predated Nina Simone’s, so it gets the nod here (and there are likely other entries, below, that may have displaced certain readers’ favorite cover versions). Film scores present a different sort of problem: yes, Goblin’s “Suspiria” did wonders for the movie of the same name, but so too did a hundred or more scores for a hundred or more historically great horror flicks, and if RETRO tried to distinguish between them all the list that follows would end up being exclusively instrumental accompaniments to artworks better seen in their entirety as multimedia than exclusively heard in audio.
{Note: And hopefully it goes without saying that the mere placement of a song with lyrics in a horror movie doesn’t alter the bones of the song in question at all. Sadly, there are outlets that send up “Hip to Be Square” by Huey Lewis & the News as a “Halloween song” because of its famously prominent placement in the movie American Psycho. Yes, this is very arch and droll and sly—and if one were throwing a Halloween party, it would be appropriate to branch out in this sort of way—but not for a solid curation of Halloween songs like we’re aiming for here.}
3
As someone who was born on Halloween—October 31, 1976—I have always felt a very strong connection with the holiday, even if I must cop to having been perhaps the least imaginative Halloween costume-picker of any child of the 1980s I’ve come across.
While it’s true my parents never got particularly involved in our costume selection, I have no excuse for going out on Halloween as a baseball player twice, a ghost once, a burglar once, a “popcorn seller” (from a ballgame, what else), and a Union infantry soldier once. I can’t remember my other costumes, but I suspect they were even worse.
It’s quite embarrassing, in retrospect, especially as I would end up going to Halloween parties in art school in the late 2000s and see my fellow artists sporting costumes so ornate and inventive they deserved to be called art. At the one Halloween party I can recall going to in Iowa City, I went as—wait for it!—a baseball player. Like I said, it’s legitimately embarrassing. (As a poet, I apparently was saving all my art for the page.)
Still, if you live in (say) Massachusetts, you know that Halloween night smells and feels like no other night—it’s dead leaves and a dark, living energy—so you can imagine that also having that night be your birthday makes the whole experience a magical one.
Even now, at 45 going on 46, I find myself thinking of my remaining years in terms of, “How many Halloweens do I have left?” I know it sounds morbid—but it’s really one of the ways I measure time.
While I almost never watch horror films (because I don’t like to see others suffering), and while I almost never read horror novels for the same reason, I firmly believe that my interest in Dungeons & Dragons as a child, my interest in paperback fantasy as a teen, and even my interest in ethereal British folk music (think Pentangle) as a twenty-something stemmed from the awareness of “the beyond” that Halloween inspires.
While I don’t believe in ghosts (and didn’t really believe in evil as a concept capable of personification until Donald Trump, who I know is the not the most evil man to ever live but seems to me to be the most evil person to successfully enter public life in my lifetime), I’ve always thought there’s something to be said for an imagination that can consider the Abyss as well as the heavens. Though I see nothing at all to admire in the seedy underbelly of the human spirit, I also know that it gave to us some of our most endearing myths and archetypes and visions. I sometimes think fear of the unknown drives us to explore the stars as much as wonder at the limitless scope of the possible.
And while I don’t enjoy feeling anxious or afraid—who does?—I know that my fear of the real-world horrors humans create for themselves and one another has often driven me to fight for a better future for myself, those I care about, and the communities I am and have been part of.
All of which is to say there will be songs below—a lot of them, in fact—you absolutely have to watch the video for as you listen to the song, even as there will be other songs so perfectly crafted that they may become favorites of yours long after October is gone.
As ever, I hope you’ll let us all know your own favorite songs—in this case, Halloween songs—in the comments!
That's nice - thanks for your efforts!