Sometimes, you’re not actually looking for the big scare, nor are you looking to be particularly disgusted or disturbed, but you still want to enjoy that horror vibe. Sometimes, it’s just really satisfying to hang out with horror-themes and imagery even while the tone is playful, silly, or outright comic. And sometimes you want all that while you’re driving someplace or getting work done on the computer. And so I thought it could be fun to throw together a short list of some horror themed songs that I really enjoy.
These aren’t necessarily from any particular soundtracks (though of course, some have been used in a film here or there). For some of my favorite tracks used in horror movies, you could check out this list, and for my favorite scores, here’s another post. Generally, I’m also trying to stay off the beaten path a bit – so no Monster Mash, Season of the Witch, or anything by The Cramps (though perhaps I should have made room for ‘I was a Teenage Werewolf‘). Also, I make no claim these are the best horror songs out there, but just songs I really like. There are bands that specialize in riffing on horror flicks, but I don’t always get into them. I get that Ice Nine Kills does some really cool stuff, for example, but I just haven’t clicked with their sound. What can you do? I’m also not including anything that’s just straight out Satanic as there is just too much to choose from. While I love the eponymous title track on Black Sabbath’s first album, Iron Maiden’s ‘The Number of the Beast,’ or Ghost’s infernal inversion of Christian rock “praise music,” ‘He is,’ I feel like that constitutes its own whole sub-genre, so maybe it’s a post for another day.
Ok, enough about what I’m not including – let’s get into what I am, in no particular order…
Night of the Vampire – Roky Erickson
How did I not get into Roky Erickson sooner? He has one of my favorite tracks on the soundtrack to Return of the Living Dead (“Burn the Flames”), but I’d never looked into the rest of his output. Then a couple of weeks ago, while looking for information to fuel my post on Val Lewton’s I Walked with a Zombie, I came across Erickson’s song of the same name and proceeded to go down a real rabbit hole. I learned that he’d had a couple late 60s hits with the psychedelic rock band The 13th Floor Elevators, and apparently struggled with some serious mental health issues over the course of his life. He also released some absolutely rocking horror themed songs.
‘Night of the Vampire’ is included on his 1981 release, The Evil One, along with other slamming tracks about zombies, fire demons, ghosts, and a creature with an atom brain. There is something essentially playful to it all, but at the same time, this stomping garage rock sound explodes with an absolutely rabid ferocity – atmospheric, wild, dangerous, and just plain fun – I’m so glad to have recently discovered it.
This song encapsulates much of what I love about his sound. There is a creeping, building sense of menace and drama, all riding on top of a kind of rock-march and bellowed without a hint of irony or equivocation. It’s a real blast.
Curse of Millhaven (Przekleństwo Millhaven) – Nick Cave / Kinga Preis
Originally released on the 1996 Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album, Murder Ballads, ‘The Curse of Millhaven is a glorious, feverish first person song from the perspective of a sweet little girl who recounts the terrible killings that have been taking place in her small town, before it is (unsurprisingly) revealed that she’s been behind them all along, that “It is I, Lottie, the Curse of Millhaven – I’ve struck horror in the heart of this town – like my eyes ain’t green and my hair ain’t yellow – it’s more like the other way around – I got a pretty little mouth, beneath all the foaming…” It’s pretty great stuff.
While I love Nick Cave’s original version, I was really struck when I came upon Kinga Preis, a Polish actress-singer, performing a translation of the song on Youtube some years back (for regular readers, she played the singer in The Lure, the Polish Mermaid Horror Musical I wrote about last summer). I assume most of my readers don’t speak Polish, but especially if you’re familiar with the original lyrics, I don’t think you need to understand her words to go on the ride, and it is a wild one: unhinged, physical, manic, and dangerous. Also, I understand the translation itself is really quite good (if you do speak Polish and have the ability to compare) – it captures the spirit of the song, while really speaking in a different, culturally specific idiom. There’s also a video out there of her doing ‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’ with Mariusz Drężek, but I don’t think it quite holds a candle to the intensity she brings in this performance.
Gingerbread Coffin – Rasputina
I first came to Rasputina due to their song, ‘Transylvanian Concubine’ being featured on an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (“Surprise” – when Drusilla has a birthday and gets an arm). I really got into their ‘chamber-rock,’ cello forward sound, and back when CDs were still a thing, bought all of theirs.
‘Gingerbread Coffin’ kicks off their 2002 album, Cabin Fever. It’s a solid, morbid, gothy jam about a group of young girls that find a broken old doll and proceed to build a black mass around it, burying it in a gingerbread coffin and knowing that when they need her, “she’ll rise to the light.” The song details the elements of their created ritual (a set of old knives they brought, but didn’t use, passing around an old tea cup all filled up with dead flies, etc.) and looks forward to the imagined future magical payoff. Trading in a dark childhood spiritualism, the romantic sense that things have power, that the world is a more mysterious, darker, more magical place than we come to inhabit as adults, Rasputina evokes some secret, arcane potency that can perhaps only exist between children and their imaginations. It also always makes me think of Heavenly Creatures (1994).
Creepy Doll – Jonathan Coulton
While on the subject of creepy dolls, how about a song about just that? I apologize for the quality of the video, but I really wanted to share exactly this version of the song, from a tour that Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman did together, mixing readings of short stories and songs (It’s available on the 3 disc set, An Evening with Neil and Amanda). In addition, they also brought out a couple guests, one of which, Jonathan Coulton, had this gem of a silly, eerie song to share.
It paints a story for you, wherein you come to this spooky old house, find a creepy doll in the attic and are thus doomed to have it accompany you forever, being, you know, creepy, and also passive aggressively suggesting that you don’t eat particularly well. It’s all a silly lark, but the picture it creates is still so rich in the tropes of a certain kind of scary story, and it is just great fun. Gaiman narrates one verse in this version and it’s a pleasure. Again, this video is not good so here’s a link to a cleaner version of the song itself, but honestly, I find it a bit over-produced and really prefer the stripped down guy-with a guitar rendition from the concert.
Walk Like a Zombie – HorrorPops
A Danish psychobilly band, HorrorPops has put out three albums of poppy-punky, double bass driven horror themed boppers and this one is no exception. Perhaps the danciest song on this list, it’s a really upbeat love song to a paramour who happens to be an undead monster. They may ‘wanna hold hands in the cemetery,’ and they may ‘wanna be lost for all eternity,’ and everything might be ‘dark and kinda scary,’ but she doesn’t care. She’ll follow her love into the grave, bopping along all the way in a retro fifties groove. It’s a fun tune.
On a heavier note, in 2020, frontperson, Patricia Day was diagnosed with cancer. Apparently she beat it, but still has a GoFundMe page open as I guess there are ongoing medical bills to deal with. If you’re a fan, I guess she could still use the support.
Steven / The Awakening – Alice Cooper
The climax of Alice Cooper’s first solo album, Welcome to My Nightmare, this is a spooky, dreamy song that actually brings a solid horror kick when it’s revealed that through the whole album, things have not been as they seemed. The concept album leading up to this moment had taken us through the nightmares of a young boy named Steven, featuring devilish stuff, a spot of necrophilia, and a black widow set to conquer the world (with a delicious spoken word intro from Vincent Price).
In ‘Steven,’ the nightmares reach their culmination in a vertiginous sequence of murder and regret, possibly involving a newborn baby, all through the eyes of this tortured young boy. It’s not 100% clear what exactly is going on, but that’s part of the disquieting charm, and all through it, someone is calling his name, as if to wake him up. And then awake he does, and we learn he is no child, but a grown man, and in his dream state, he has committed real acts of violence. It’s a great, chilling, cool turn to cap off an album that has largely had its tongue firmly in cheek. If you like Cooper’s sound and have never listened to this album, sit down some time and take it for a drive – critically panned on release as melodramatic and cheesy (representing a clear change in style from the original band, which had just broken up), I think it stands the test of time as some of Alice Cooper’s best work, and it marks the moment that he came into his own as a dark vaudevillian showman.
No One Lives Forever – Oingo Boingo
Propulsive, chaotic, tight, quirky and just a bit spooky, ‘No One Lives Forever’ finishes Side 1 of Oingo Boingo’s 1985 album, Dead Man’s Party in explosive fashion. It’s a great record with some of their biggest hits (such as ‘Dead Man’s Party’ and ‘Weird Science’), but somehow I’ve never seen this song get the attention it deserves. I guess the two aforementioned songs got featured in bigger cinema hits (Back to School and Weird Science), whilst this up tempo ode to death and dying plays during the bridge scene at the start of Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2, which I’m guessing might not have done the same box office numbers – I mean, I love it, but it is an odd flick.
Circling around an ominous bit about how we should have a party with the “full moon in the sky – it’s the hour of the wolf and I don’t want to die,” the singer alternatingly claims to be too clever and quick for the reaper to catch and councils us to live it up now cause no matter how many tricks we think we have up our sleeves, there’s no way to outrun his scythe. It’s clearly a song about mortality, but it also carries such a lively carpe diem spirit of dancing through the graveyard.
Bloodletting (The Vampire Song) – Concrete Blonde
Centered on a really simple, but still driving bass line, the title track of Concrete Blonde’s third album, released in 1990, is a whole mood. “There’s a crack in the mirror and a bloodstain on the bed – You were a vampire and baby, I’m the walking dead.” The song both feels like a gothic celebration of eternal undeath set against a sultry New Orleans nightscape and possibly also like a much darker song about abuse and personal trauma, the fall-out of a toxic relationship rightly ended. The vibe is rich and cool to hang out in, but there is a sense of something emotionally painful at the heart of it all. Both elements make it a great horror song. I dig the fun vampire stuff, but I appreciate how it’s also grounded in genuine feeling.
Nature Trail to Hell (in 3D) – Weird Al Yankovic
They sometimes say that to parody something well, you need to really love it, and I’ve always felt that when Weird Al does his spin on someone’s song, he never seems to be putting the artist down. I’d say the same is true in this mind-blowingly great send up of don’t-go-in-the-woods early 80s Slasher flicks. It advertises, “Coming this Christmas to a theatre near you – the most horrifying film to hit the screen – there’s a homicidal maniac who finds a cub scout troupe – and he hacks up two or three in every scene!”
Released in 1984, this came out after the peak of the first big slasher cycle, and it’s interesting to see this pop culture reference to what was probably a bit of fatigue with the formula, including the reference to it all happening “in 3D” (Friday the 13th pt. III brought 3D eyeball pops and yo-yo tricks to cinemas the year this was recorded). At the same time, it really sells it, and makes it sound just awesome. I would watch this movie.
Also, just a note on the link – this isn’t an official Weird Al video, but rather a fan edited compilation of loads of appropriate slashers of the time (mostly, but not exclusively Friday the 13th movies). It’s pretty great and the song works so well with it. Enjoy. Sadly, as it’s filled with violence and has a touch of nudity, it’s “age restricted”, and you’ll have to click through to Youtube to see it.
Excitable Boy – Warren Zevon
I have always loved this song. It encapsulates one of my favorite sub-genres of music – the peppy, sweet, upbeat, positive song…that is really about terrible, terrible things if you actually stop and listen to the words. This could play in supermarkets or waiting rooms if no one paid any attention to what he was singing about. With a bouncy sax line and doo-wop backup singers sweetly repeating “ooo-wa-ooo ooo-ooo excitable boy,” Zevon spins a tale of a young man who first starts exhibiting simply odd eccentricities, but who rapidly grows dangerous, until he rapes and kills a girl at the junior prom. Then, “after ten long years they let him out of the home – excitable boy they all said – and he dug up her grave and built a cage with her bones – excitable boy they all said – well, he’s just an excitable boy.” You could say it gets dark.
I also really appreciate how, for all that the song morbidly plays with awful events, it also feels like an ironic excoriation of a culture that happily accepts ‘boys being boys’ and looks the other way, whistling a jaunty tune and allowing horrors to carry on unchecked. It is not a “message song,” but I feel it does have a satirical bite in this respect.
And, at my wife’s suggestion, one bonus song:
I Eat Boys – chloe moriondo
This feels appropriate to follow the last song, given the theme of young men and privilege. Responding to the kind of threat women often feel in public spaces, this turns that on its head and creates a young, female predator, out to “eat boys” and “get them gory,” defiantly stating, “you can’t control me – cause I wrote this story.” The sound is all minor key light pop, but its ethos is all to do with making the other side feel that fear instead, warning “hands off kid, or you’ll wake up in my basement.” In its juxtaposition of a light, poppy sound, the threat of violence, and a sense of social commentary, it has a few things in common with the previous song, though it is the flip side of the coin. Perhaps there are echoes of the line in Bit (2020) about making all women vampires and letting men be scared to jog at night for a change.
Also, the video is great – very cool, bloody fun (it’s what my wife did for her most recent Halloween costume); its look really gives me a Jennifer’s Body kind of vibe, and its lyrics bring to mind a line from that film’s trailer (which was inexplicably left out of the final cut): “You’re killing people?” “No, I’m killing boys.”
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And there we have it, ten eleven great tunes that bring the horror vibes. May they put a bop in your step and a chill in your heart…