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Ten (more) Great Horror Songs

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Sometimes I’m not looking for some “great classic work” to analyze and I don’t feel like pulling the trigger on something new that I may or may not enjoy or otherwise find value in. Sometimes, I just want some of the (perhaps ironic) comfort that comes with horror vibes in musical form. There’s just a specific pleasure to be found in music that somehow connects with the genre. Maybe it’s a rocking song based on some bit of horror film or literature. Maybe it’s a theme from a favorite movie. Sometimes, it’s even just a tune that features in a key sequence of a film that you don’t even exactly love, but the fact that it’s from a horror movie elevates it to a kind of beloved status. These songs can just be a lovely, familiar place to hang out, a warm blanket on a rainy November day, or a kick of energy to get in a party mood or get stuff done. Maybe it’s just because I’m a fan of the genre and they bring to mind remembered satisfaction, but I think there’s also some rich juxtaposition of dark and light at work. Here’s a fun song that plays while terrible things happen. Here’s a catchy dance song about death and destruction. It’s just easier to get into some upbeat number when it has a dash of murder to cut what could otherwise be saccharine – to entirely mix my metaphors, it’s the spoon full of sugar that makes the pop tune go down.

I’ve done a few such lists before, often with more stringent rules. Here you can find a list of some of my favorite horror scores. This is a list of treasured songs found in horror movies. And here is a list of groovy tunes that aren’t from films per se, but all have horror themes. That said, this week, I’m casting a slightly wider net. Some of these will be the title theme to a movie. Some will just feature in a particular scene. Some will be about a horror topic or will reference a horror work. But they all rock.

Killer Klowns – The Dickies (1988)

Killer Klowns From Outer Space - Music Video

I just mentioned this back in September when discussing the classic for the ages, Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988). It is a deeply silly movie with a theme to match. Building on Fucik’s “Entry of the Gladiators,” (the first song that comes to mind when you think of clowns or the circus, which I just learned was composed as a military march – wild), The Dickies get the party started during the opening credits with this bopping song. I read that they wrote it knowing very little about the movie other than the title, but it somehow strikes exactly the right tone. It’s bouncy – it implies circus – and it has just a bit of an edge, a note of something threatening, even sinister. It sets up what the movie is going to feel like: silly and playful, but with a bite.

No Vampires Remain in Romania – King Luan (2019)

King Luan - No Vampires Remain in Romania

Apparently this plays during the credits of s01e02 of What We Do in the Shadows, a show I love, but I can’t claim to have discovered it there. Rather, the Spotify algorithm just knew this was a song for me, and boy is it. Not actually connected to any particular horror work, it is just a great vampire themed disco song. Or maybe it’s a lack-of-vampire themed disco song, to be precise. What is it about actually? I’m not sure – maybe it’s just a bunch of random stuff that rhymes, but it feels vampirey, and it sounds cool and it’s the sort of thing that you can jump around the kitchen to or shout along with in the car. Seriously, I don’t really understand what’s going on here, but it makes me get up and boogie. And it’s got vampires and a video that for some reason features a lot of Nikola Tesla. Sure – why not?

Nosferatu – Blue Öyster Cult (1977)

Blue Oyster Cult - Nosferatu (lyrics)

Wow – I just discovered this one a couple of months ago, but it is tremendous. A quiet creeper with a bridge that just stomps, it is entirely about Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece, focused on Lucy and her death as an act of self-sacrifice. In this, it only touches on one aspect of the story, but I feel it does so richly and effectively. It hangs out in a seventies rock groove – maybe not the place you expect to really feel a German silent film from the 20s about a particularly ugly version of Dracula, but I think Blue Öyster Cult rather nails it. I feel the mood, the atmosphere, the drive of the story, and when it opens up into a full out rock song, the sustained tension of the beginning pays off with a real release. I’ve always loved their Godzilla – do they have other songs based on horror greats? Something to check… Also, one note of interest – to avoid issues with copyright (unsuccessfully), Murnau changed all the names from Stoker’s novel, changing the name of Mina Harker, for example, to Ellen Hutter. Yet, in the song, it does reference the character as “Lucy” (Lucy, of course, being Mina’s friend in the novel). Interestingly, two years later, in his remake of Murnau’s film, Werner Herzog names the character “Lucy” as well. With some rudimentary googling, I’ve not been able to find the story of how the name was changed thus, but I am so curious – was there some source that both the band and Herzog took the name from? Was Herzog just a fan of Blue Öyster Cult? (I wouldn’t expect it, but who knows.) If anyone out there has info on this, please leave a comment!

Howling – Steve Parsons and Babel (1985)

Howling II Soundtrack / Steve Parsons & Babel - Howling Club Mix (1985)

So, The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf (1985) is famously a “very bad movie,” a judgment that may be earned, but I’ve got to say, I think it’s a pretty good time, and in its defense, I feel it knows what it is, and that its failings as “cinema” are balanced by the degree to which its tongue remains firmly planted in cheek. But beyond camp value, one standout element is its main theme, simply titled “Howling,” by Steve Parsons and the New Wave band, Babel. The band is featured in a club scene playing the song, but otherwise, the song seems to play constantly throughout the film and somehow, for me, it never gets old. It’s got a cool, eighties erotic-pop sound, lyrics that all give solid werewolf vibes, and it unabashedly keeps repeating the title of the film (at least the “howling” part of it – the actual line “Your sister is a werewolf” is left to the great, unfortunate Christopher Lee to have to utter – this was reportedly not his favorite film appearance).

The Cask of Amontillado – The Alan Parson’s Project (1976)

The Cask of Amontillado by The Alan Parsons Project

The Alan Parson’s Project’s debut album was an ode to the works of Edgar Allan Poe, titled “Tales of Mystery and Imagination.” I don’t know how much it really feels like Poe to me, but it was obviously made with great love of his oeuvre, and it was a real nail biter for me to choose only one song to recommend. It all, as I understand the “kids” were saying a few years ago, “slaps.” Let’s just link the whole album – give yourself 40 minutes some time to check it out – it’s worth it. Alternatingly orchestral and proggy, every track is interesting and fun and at least Poe literate. The fourth song, “The Cask of Amontillado,” walks the line between the two poles of the album – about half of which takes the form of seventies prog-rock jams and half of which is a symphonic suite circling around “The Fall of the House of Usher.” This track certainly rocks, but also has an older kind of atmosphere as it tells the tale of a man slowly dying, having been walled up in the cellar.

The Blob – The Five Blobs (1958)

The Five Blobs - The Blob (Burt Bacharach and Mack David)

Somehow I’d never seen The Blob (1958) before last spring. I don’t know how this iconic 50s teens vs aliens monster movie had so long eluded my attention (I mean, I knew about it, but just never watched it), but I’m glad I finally checked it out. Here we have another super fun theme that plays during the opening credits and alerts us to the good times we have in store. The song is lively and playful, and so is the movie, though it does also have some real threat and weight and loss along the way, not to mention, pretty cool goo-based special effects. Never having seen it before, I’d somehow expected a more self-serious affair, but as the credits rolled, hearing this, I realized I was in for something a great deal more fun.

Also, I think it’s interesting how this theme, playing in the beginning, functions in such a similar manner as the above praised “Killer Klowns,” given the degree to which that later film is so clearly modeled on the skeleton of, if not The Blob, per se (blobs don’t have skeletons after all), then films like it, to be sure.

Prom Night – Paul Zaza, Gordean Simpson (1980)

Prom Night (1980) Disco dance

Prom Night, the 1980 slasher set on, you guessed it, prom night, is a pretty good time, if not groundbreaking. There’s a terrible prank gone wrong, a series of vengeance killings of teens out to have fun, a perfunctory but ultimately satisfying mystery as to the identity of the killer and a solid, downbeat ending. It’s also got Jamie Lee Curtis lighting the dance floor on fire in a disco sequence at the eponymous school dance (to a song that bears the title of the movie) that goes on way too long for narrative value, but who cares? It’s one of the best parts of the flick. She and her dance partner (Casey Stevens when he could pull the moves off, a dance double when he couldn’t) really bring the party to life. And it’s generally a groovy song to boot. Generally here, I’m sharing Youtube clips of the songs themselves, but in his case, I’ve gotta share the clip from the movie even if the song isn’t complete. This is probably one of those cases where if this song weren’t from an early 80s slasher, it would just fade into other disco of the era, but since it comes from a movie that features a severed head, I’m there for it!

Gangster Rock – Felony (1981)

Felony "Gangster Rock" from Graduation Day

So, following the last entry, I just have to include another clip from a different early 80s slasher, in this case, Graduation Day from 1981. Once again, we have a scene from a school dance that goes on so much longer than you ever might expect it to. But in this case, it is interspersed with footage of two teenagers (one of whom is scream queen, Linnea Quigley) slipping out to the woods to have sex and get murdered by a sword wielding maniac (the killer’s a bit less creative here – one person in this movie gets killed by a football with a blade attached to it). In the beginning, the song didn’t exactly grab me, but after it had been playing for like 8 minutes, and after being so integrally tied to a pretty fun golden age slasher kill/chase scene, this energetic, keyboard slamming rocker wormed its way into my heart. And honestly, I think the whole sequence is really buoyed by the music. In this era, you can see so many similar scenes that play out in such similar fashion, but setting it all to this party sound and cutting back and forth with such energetic editing gives the whole bit a real kick. It’s great. The bladed football is great. The movie has a great final girl. Honestly, this movie which might be deemed ‘objectively bad’ by some, which Linda Gross of the Los Angeles times called, “an insinuating and lecherous movie with many hokey effects and poor-quality acting,” has a surprising amount to love in it.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t link to Stacie Ponder over at the Final Girl blog and her observation about this party scene. I’d seen the movie a couple times before and had never noticed this detail, but once she pointed it out, it’s the only thing I can see, and it’s pretty special.

The Hell of It – Paul Williams (1974)

Phantom of the Paradise - The Hell of it

Playing over the closing credits of Brian De Palma’s epic, weird, wonderful flop of a horror rock opera, Phantom of the Paradise (1974) (starring, among others, Jessica Harper – most known to horror fans as Suzy Bannion from Argento’s Suspiria), this searingly cynical song is just so tight and mean and glorious. Apparently, it was written to play at Beef’s funeral, but the scene was cut, but as I think it might be the best track on the soundtrack, it’s a great way to close out the picture. The movie itself is odd, but really distinctive, and I do recommend it if you ever have the chance. De Palma throws “The Phantom of the Opera,” “Faust,” “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” and a particularly sour view of the 70s music industry into a blender and pours out an utterly unique film. It’s not for everybody, but I kind of love it, Harper has an amazing, deep singing voice that you might not expect from her slight frame (she’s also great in Shock Treatment (1981), Richard O’Brien’s follow up to Rocky Horror), and the music, all by Paul Williams, who also stars as the Faustian record producer, is uniformly fantastic, with this song being, in my opinion, the standout hit.  

Rock Until You Drop – Michael Sembello (1987)

Rock Until You Drop (Remastered Version)

From Michael Sembello (who also gave the world the Flashdance song, inspired by William Lustig’s gritty, scalp collecting killer film, Maniac (1980)), this up-tempo 80s inspirational jam plays during the montage in The Monster Squad (1987) when all the kids are spending the day gearing up to do battle with the, you know, monsters: carving stakes in shop class, riding bikes somewhere in a hurry, playing dress up with Frankenstein’s creature, writing a letter in crayon to the “army guys” to “come quik” cause “there are monsters,” making silver bullets and also business cards, consulting maps, and stealing archery equipment – the kids all get ready in their own way. This was a movie that I loved well before I was actually into horror (I saw it in the cinema when I was nine and I remember coming out at the end just so stoked – ready, myself to fight the forces of darkness). Generally I think it holds up as one of the essential ‘kids vs monsters’ flicks, though it hasn’t been one that I revisit often as an adult, and this has got to be one of the all-time-great 80s ‘preparation montages’. Even if I don’t often watch it, the movie will always hold a special place in my heart – it’s just a shame that it features some homophobic slurs, and that really hasn’t aged well (sure, it’s how kids really talked – and probably still do – on the playground, but it’s still a turn off).

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And there we have it – ten more great horror songs. It’s interesting to me how many of them are dancey disco tunes or seventies rock grooves – not something I expected when I first sat down to brainstorm what I wanted to include in this list. It is a specific sound, and one not always associated with horror, but all of these immediately give me a taste of the genre, if not instant associations with some specific horror work.  May they keep you bopping through the night as well.

Horror and Tragedy Pt.I – The Bacchae and The Wicker Man

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I so often say this (and it doesn’t come true), but my intention is for this to be a short post. I just got back from a two week vacation in Greece (fancy, huh?) and I really want to get some quick thoughts down on paper and return to them later to go more in depth (hence, “Pt. 1”). We’ll see how that works out…

I particularly enjoyed in Greece periodically being at some ancient site where it was possible to ignore the modern world and let my imagination spark. To be fair, this was not always the case. So often, significant ruins exist amidst the hubbub of a modern city and it’s hard to visualize the significance of what would have been a grand temple to a god people fervently believed in when you’re looking at two pillars standing bare, next to a busy, noisy street. But there were a few locations where I was able to make the imaginary leap, and in that, there was a special kind of magic. I’ve long been a fan of mythology (for a great retelling of the Greek stories, I highly recommend Stephen Fry’s three volumes of Greek myths and legends, written in a very modern, engaging, exciting, and often funny idiom: Mythos, Heroes, and Troy), and so, frequently it was the mythological significance of a given location that ignited my fancy, but more often it was a link to ancient drama.

The gate at Mycenea, the seat of Agamemnon and hence, the setting of many tragedies.

I came up in the theatre and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides loom large in my understanding of dramatic forms and structure. Walking up the hill to the palace complex at Mycenae, there was a delicate frisson of magic in visualizing Agamemnon returning victorious, Cassandra in tow as a spoil of war, having been stolen away from what had been the richest, most opulent city in the Greek world (Troy) and dragged to this politically and militarily powerful, but otherwise remote, strange land, screaming all the way about how her captor was doomed to meet his death at the hands of his wife and her lover (in revenge for sacrificing their daughter so the Greek ships could set sail), her cries of warning falling on deaf ears, all this more than 3000 years ago. Driving from Corinth to Thebes and then to Delphi, a trip of 200 km, often through craggy mountains, it was fascinating to consider Oedipus making such a journey on foot to learn the disturbing prophecy concerning his parentage, leading him to take every step to prevent it from coming to pass, which of course only hastened its fulfillment (Greek tragedies often prefigured time travel movies, teaching us that you can’t – and really shouldn’t try to – mess with a timeline).

From a 19th century Dutch production of Oedipus Rex, shortly after he stabs his own eyes out.

But this is a horror blog – why am I going on about old Greek plays?

Well, I’ve long had it in mind to dig into the notion of ‘tragedy’ (as an aesthetic concept – not as merely a very sad thing that can happen to someone) and how it relates to ‘horror,’ as I feel there’s a connection and that, in fact, the latter may be the true modern inheritor of the former. For a long time, tragedy was one of the very few genres of dramatic art (in the European context at least). From the Greeks, to the Romans, to Shakespeare – for millennia, we didn’t divide narrative entertainments into westerns or war films or horror, but generally into comedies and tragedies (sometimes histories, morality plays, or sex farces too, but the point is, tragedy was one of the biggies).

Now, in our modern times, perhaps thanks to the advent of nuanced naturalistic performance and writing, more focused on ‘normal people’ rather than larger than life ‘heroes,’ tragedy as a genre has fallen out of vogue. The old ones are still performed, but I think they now more often fall under the umbrella of ‘drama.’ However, I do find it striking that in the horror genre, a critically underappreciated field of artistic endeavor, certain key elements of tragedy live on today.

So I’d like to examine this. I think this first text will be on the short side, as I’ve been away on vacation and my mind is fuzzy, but I hope to return to this idea over the next months a couple more times to flesh it out more fully.

Pity and Fear

I love horror (or I wouldn’t pay for hosting this blog) and I also love tragedy – two genres calibrated to make the viewer “feel bad.” But while tragedy is overwhelmingly associated with ‘high culture,’ horror tends to be viewed as ‘low.’ Still I think they go on a similar journey: In classical tragedy, the protagonist is often given cause for at least concern, if not full on dread – they operate for much of the run time of the play under this pervasive sense of doom – they push on, true to their character, until they recognize what is often a terrible, unbearable truth (what Aristotle termed “anagnorisis”) – which ultimately drives them to a final, heroic, self-destroying (but possibly also defining act) act. Aristotle argued that all of this should come together to inspire pity and fear, calling them the “proper pleasures of tragedy.” By subjecting themselves to this terrible, though fictional experience, the audience can exercise their deepest, most unsettling emotions and in the end, exorcise them as well, undergoing a cleansing “catharsis.” While not every detail maps to every modern horror film (honestly, they didn’t really map to every tragedy in Aristotle’s time either), I think this concept should feel familiar for any horror buff.

Horror fans understand that pity and fear can be a source of great pleasure. We choose to watch, and are able to enjoy, fictional matter intended to be terrible, intended to inspire at least terror, but often much worse. We know the peculiar pleasures of sitting through cringe inducing, gasp eliciting horrors, knowing the laughter that can often follow a good scare or moment of revulsion, knowing how when horror really works, it can leave you feeling fresh, alive, perhaps “cleansed.” Wes Craven is quoted as saying that horror is “like a boot camp for the psyche” and that “horror films don’t create fear – they release it,” and I think for horror lovers, that’s true (mileage may vary – there are people in my life, people I love, who just can’t do horror – for them the tension is never released, catharsis doesn’t occur, and rather than being cleansed, they just continue to feel bad for a long time).

But for those who partake, when it works, it really sings. And I feel I’ve experienced very similar feelings at the culmination of good tragedy and good horror. I love what I think of as the ‘tragic pinch’ – the moment when a tragedy all comes together and just hurts so good – when all that is good and all that is terrible is somehow thrust together and something in the soul cries out in response to unbearable beauty  – the drama revealing some terrible truth. This brings to mind my favorite definition of tragedy, coined by the 19th century German philosopher, Hegel, who described it as “the conflict between two mutually exclusive goods.” For example, both Antigone and Creon act out of unyielding moral purpose and are thus thrust into irreconcilable conflict. Whereas the action of the play may lead to their downfall, for the audience, a kind of reconciliation of moral impulses can occur. Personally, I don’t know about what reads as a prescriptive call for “a new moral synthesis via the dialectic of the drama,” but his descriptive analysis of effective tragedy living in the conflict of two “good” things really rings true for me.

And finally, to once again bring this back to our genre of choice, this particular juxtaposition of conflicting goods that both lead to bad, I contend, can be found in so much horror work, delivering the horrific shudder of something quite akin to my “tragic pinch.” When at the culmination of The VVitch, Thomasina signs the devil’s book and rises, laughing, into the night, she is finally free from unbearable deprivation, hardship, and puritanical oppression, but to get there, her whole family had to die and she had to sign away her soul. At the end of The Cabin in the Woods, forced to choose between the good of her own life and that of her friends and the good of the whole world, Dana chooses to value her friends most, and the world is lost. For a very common example, so much horror turns on the notion of “yes, you’ve made it through the night, but at such cost”; watching Sally ride away in the back of that pickup at the end of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, covered in blood and laughing maniacally, one doesn’t have much hope for her future – she’s still breathing, but what remains? Like the poster says, “Who will survive and what will be left of them?”

Or furthermore, how many movies feature a character become truly monstrous in order to survive? In 28 Days Later, Jim seems to embrace his own rage (sans viral infection), dropping from the rafters to brutally gouge out the eyes of a rapist soldier, to rescue Selena –and in doing so, something of his humanity seems to be sacrificed.  Sarah’s turn to the monstrous, rising out of a pool of blood with death in her eyes and leaving Juno to die in The Descent follows a similar track. In all of these cases, and so many, many more, the height of not just simple scariness, but full on ‘horror’ consists in this moment of excruciating, exhilarating moral tension. I root for Thomasina and glory in her emancipation; I love Dana’s vengeful decision; I want Sally to escape; and I can roar along with Jim’s and Sarah’s animal rage – and at the same time, I feel the weight of loss and sacrifice and madness that accompany all of these ‘goods.’ Even as I cheer the choices, there is a clench in my gut as well – the dark consequence/cost still lands. And it is often the movies that give me this “horror moral tension” that I love the most.

Don’t mess with a god

Back to the Greece trip, I was particularly happy to make it to Thebes. Little remains at the archeological site of the palace – just a hole in the ground in the middle of a small, contemporary Greek city, but at their rather well organized historical museum, I was struck to be at another site where so many of the old tragedies took place – Oedipus Rex and Antigone are two prominent example, but most notable for me is one of my favorites, The Bacchae by Euripides. And while we were there, I was struck with the realization of how well that play parallels one of my favorite horror films, The Wicker Man. So I think it could be interesting to go through them to see how they both manage to land that moment of the “tragedy pinch,” or the “horror moral tension.”

I’ll start with what may be the more unfamiliar work for the horror crowd. The Bacchae is all about the cult of Dionysus (a new god at that time, not yet established in the pantheon) coming to the city of Thebes. In a way, Dionysus was from Thebes. His mother, Semele, was a Theban princess and a lover of Zeus, compelled by a jealous Hera to beg him to reveal himself to her in his true form. Reluctant, he acquiesced, and thus struck by a lightning bolt, she exploded. Zeus found the fetus of his new child amidst the charred wreckage of his lover and sewed it up in his thigh to grow to term – this grew to be Dionysus, the god of wine and theatre, of wild frenzy and orgiastic abandon. His new cult developed in the east and he eventually brought it to his home town where his cousin, Pentheus was now in charge. 

Vase showing the birth of Dionysus out of Zeus’s thigh.

When the play begins, the cult of Dionysus has been gathering in the nearby mountains for some time, drawing the women of the city out into the wilderness to get wasted and act all mysterious and wild – Theban society is totally disrupted by this and there is a conservative moral panic – what should be done about this hedonistic, new, drunken orgy cult? Won’t somebody think of the children! Pentheus isn’t having any of it and has Dionysus apprehended, humiliated (for example, cutting off his long hippy hair), interrogated and imprisoned. Refusing to accept the claimed divinity of this new presence, Pentheus is tricked by Dionysus into dressing up as a woman and going off to infiltrate the Bacchae (the female followers of Dionysus) in the mountains to see what’s actually going on. While he’s there, the worship grows more and more fevered until, caught up in an inebriated trance, the women go all bloodthirsty, tearing apart goats and cows with their bare hands. Finally, they turn on Pentheus, and it is his own mother, Dionysus’s aunt, Agave, who rips off his head and carries it triumphantly back into the city of Thebes.

Pentheus about to be pulled apart.

And here comes the horror. When she arrives, she’s still kind of worked up, high on the rush of the kill, of the lust, of the wine. She proudly approaches the chorus, declaring how she’s brought back the head of a lion that she, an old woman, managed to kill, as proof of the power bestowed upon her by her new deity, and she demands that her son be brought to her so that she might show him this glorious evidence. There is a solid scene of the chorus trying to get her to really see what’s in her hands before the horrific realization finally dawns on her. And when it does, it is terrible.

Image of Agave carved on an ancient jewel.

Something I love about this play is how for the vast majority of it, Pentheus just comes off as a dick. He is a prude, a moral scold who doesn’t like long haired hippies and is just trying to be a massive buzzkill for everyone else’s fun. Both the chorus and some of the city elders try to get him to see the light, warning him that you shouldn’t mess with a god, and going on to praise the wonders this new god has bestowed on them – inebriation, drunkenness, the ability to find respite from the endless troubles of life in the sweet forgetfulness of the fruit of the vine. And yet, in the end, those elders and that chorus are uniformly horrified at what comes to pass. They want to look away. While Pentheus was an unreasonable jerk, and Dionysus was a real cool guy, and everyone was having a really good time, the power of the god is also terrible and inhumane and unforgiving. The play ends with that horrific tension I love of getting what we want to see, but it’s awful. We had an amazing time last night at the party, but in the cold light of day, with a terrible hangover, we don’t like ourselves anymore. Maybe we have a problem.

The Wicker Man

Which brings us to The Wicker Man. Like Pentheus, Sergeant Howie is an unbearable, puritanical moral scold who cannot accept the pagan ways of the community he finds in Summerisle. We can go along with him in trying to find a missing child who may have been murdered, but he is constantly a jerk to the seemingly fun folk he encounters in this small, Scottish island town. Everywhere he turns, he brings the supposed authority of the Church and the State to bear, shouting at teachers, children, librarians, and people hanging out in a de-consecrated cemetery or singing in a raucous pub about how wicked they are. For the audience, the people of Summerisle come off as rather lovely – lusty, earthy types whose faith isn’t really any weirder than Howie’s Christianity. They seem a fun lot – hearty and having a really good time, with a nice, sex-positive attitude and catchy, bawdy folk songs. Like Pentheus, Howie meets their wild reveries with a moralistic, judgmental attitude. They are both difficult protagonists to like.

But at the end, when the penny finally drops and, after going in disguise to infiltrate their revels (remember, Pentheus largely did the same), Howie is captured, put in a giant, wicker man (we have a title!), and burned alive as a sacrifice to recover the island’s failed apple crop, it is suddenly horrific. As he screams from within the burning effigy, calling out to his Christian god, the people sway in colorful costumes on the cliff side, belting out a joyful hymn, celebrating their sacrifice. It is still beautiful. They are still lovely. But the very thing that makes them so lovely, also makes them premeditated murderers, who have lured this man to their little island with the express intention to kill him in such a terrible fashion.

I’ve never felt The Wicker Man is at all a scary movie, but it stands as one of my all time absolute favorite horrors. The horrific tension of this final moment is just so rich – such overwhelming warmth and loving ‘good’ so inseparably linked to such implacable, cold-blooded ‘bad’. It sings. It screams. It pinches. It is what I want from horror. And tragedy. And, interestingly, its final moments resonate quite loudly with those of The Bacchae.

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So this is a start. Thanks for bearing with me as I try to order my thoughts about this meeting of two artistic loves of mine. Focusing on my recent Greek vacation or 5th century BC Athenian dramatic literature are both perhaps odd choices for a horror blog during “spooky season,” but these ideas have been scratching at me for a while and I’m itching to birth them into the world. Like a fetus stuck in my thigh. Next post, I imagine I’ll hit something more classically “Halloweeny,” but in the future, I hope to dig into this further…

Post 100 – One Hundred Years of Horror Films

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So here’s a bit of a milestone. A little more than a year and a half in, this is my 100th post on this here blog (and also marks passing 200,000 words – a decent length book). In that time, I’ve reviewed 112 movies and 8 books (reading goes more slowly), I’ve composed 50 poems, and I’ve done essays on a range of topics from trying to define the genre and tracking how I got into horror to the often sadly toxic nature of fandom and issues of gender or queerness in horror. I’ve also put together quite a few lists.

And as 100 is a nice round number, that is what we’re going to do again today. I thought it could be fun, or at least interesting, to build a list that somehow looks back on the last one hundred years of horror films, highlighting one from each decade. I’m not making a claim that these are the “ten best” horror films or that each is the “best” of its decade, but rather, I’d like to draw attention to one film that is worthy of consideration, that might be a bit off the beaten path, and that might be somehow representative of the time in which it was made (also, I’m not allowing anything I’ve written about previously – which will sometimes rule out a film I would have otherwise chosen). I might not succeed on all counts for each entry (when it gets to the 30s and 40s, I just haven’t seen enough films to really offer a hidden gem that most people haven’t seen), but I’ll do my best. And hey, I’m the one paying for hosting, so let’s say that’s good enough.

So, here are Ten Great (or at least pretty good) Possibly-Underseen-Possibly-Representative-Films from Ten Decades (that I’ve not written about before). With catchy headings like that, how have I not taken over the internet?

2020s – Freaky (2020)

It’s still early in the decade, but I do think this one stands out as worth mentioning. For one thing, this combination of Freaky Friday and Friday the 13th, with Millie (Kathryn Newton), a shy teen girl accidentally swapping bodies with a Jason-esque slasher killer (embodied by Vince Vaughn), is just a ton of fun. It’s a great, high concept premise and it takes both its Teen Comedy and its Slasher tropes seriously, committing to both the laughs and the violence. But in addition, I do think it’s a good example of a recently identified trend.

In one of my earliest posts, I discussed a presentation at an academic conference given by Dr. Steve Jones on what he termed the “metamodern slasher.” Whereas from the mid-90s through the early 2000s, many slashers took an ironic, postmodern turn, resting on a self-referentiality that made a joke of its own subject matter (see, e.g., Jason X (2001) and its holodeck scene), recently there has been a recurrence of (still self-aware) emotional sincerity and Freaky is a good example of that. This is a funny movie, and while I don’t know how scary it is, per se, it is violent and gory. But it is also very emotional. Much of Millie’s story revolves around her father’s recent death and what this has done to her relationship with her mother and older sister. The film does knowingly play with genre tropes for comic effect, but the journey is actually one of healing and reconciliation. And along the way, Millie is rooted in friendships with other young people whom we are meant to like and hope won’t get killed, no “disposable teens” here.

There are still (and I expect always will be) actually scary, hard, disturbing movies being made, so I don’t think this trend threatens the bona fides of the genre, but I think it’s great that there’s also a place for work with as much heart as this. Kudos to Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy, who directed and co-wrote, respectively.

2010s – Bliss (2019)

It’s hard to choose a characteristic film from this decade. I think the biggest trend was probably films like The Babadook (2014), The VVitch (2015), or Hereditary (2018) reminding everybody that horror can deal with serious ideas and strong emotions, and feature significant performances and artistry (this is nothing new of course, but I guess from time to time, non-horror-fan pop culture writers need a refresher), launching the much derided phrase, “elevated horror.” And I really love all of these, but I feel like everyone knows them already and thus, they don’t need much support.

Joe Begos’s Bliss is a smaller film that may not be on as many people’s radar, but I think should be. The premise is that a young artist whose trouble finishing a commissioned painting coincides with her sobriety, after getting some bad news, goes on a bender, and in the process of doing a lot of drugs, happens to become a vampire. The metaphor of “vampiric bloodthirst as addiction” is not novel, but the addition of the artistic drive to the mix clicked for me. The film finds the parallels between the self-destructive, self-erasing drive of drug addiction, the outwardly destructive violence of being a vampire, and the mesmerizing thrill of being lost in creativity – of a place where the line between subject and object is obliterated and the action of making is the only thing that remains – the artist lost in the art – creation as oblivion.

This makes it all sound philosophical or heady, but it must also be said that this low budget flick goes hard. The violence and gore is intense and well executed. And the whole ride was very satisfying for me as a vampire story, all artistic pretensions aside. One of my favorite recent discoveries, I definitely want to check out more of Begos’s work (I also rather enjoyed his Christmas Bloody Christmas (2022), which was just released for the last holiday season.) Finally, in works that revolves around a painting like this, we usually don’t really get to see it, but in this case, the artwork, painted by Chet Zar, is present throughout, and I found it so refreshing to see it evolve with the main character. Plus, it’s pretty cool looking.

2000s – Shadow of the Vampire (2000)

This is another case where the dominant trends of the decade don’t seem all that necessary to get into. We know that there were loads of slick/gritty remakes of classics from the 70s and 80s, and past that, everyone was talking about “torture porn.” There were also a bunch of great movies that didn’t fit either of those categories. The Descent (2005), The Strangers (2008), Shaun of the Dead (2004), and the House of the Devil (2009) are all stand out examples, but I want to focus on an earlier film that I suspect is underseen.

Shadow of the Vampire tells the story of F.W. Murnau (John Malkovich) filming the iconic, essential, early vampire film, Nosferatu (1922), but posits that rather than hiring a professional actor who had performed with the acclaimed Max Reinhardt company (as happened in “real life”), he sourced an actual old world vampire (Willem Defoe) to lend the production authenticity. It is a fun, often hilarious, premise, but though it’s frequently quite funny, it is all played straight. Joining the ranks of the real Max Schreck and Klaus Klinski (who was great in Herzog’s 1979 remake), Defoe’s vampire is genuinely creepy, while still evoking real pathos. It’s a carefully crafted, very physical performance, and it may be one of my favorites.

While the vampire is a direct physical threat, the actual villain of the piece is Malkovich’s Murnau who is so intent on creating his art that he’s more than willing to sacrifice his actors and crew to that end. The rest of the cast is just great (Eddie Izzard, Cary Elwes, and Udo Kier are a treat), and the film is quietly haunting, even if it’s not short on laughs along the way. It is beautiful and funny, and occasionally even a bit scary.

1990s – Cemetery Man (1994)

The 90s are oft-derided as a poor decade for the genre, but of course some flicks have stood the test of time. In the wake of Scream (1996), there was a fresh teen slasher cycle. Before that, there were a number of reality benders that all have warm places in my heart such as Jacob’s Ladder (1990), In the Mouth of Madness (1994), and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), not to mention what may still stand as my favorite horror film of all time, Candyman (1992). But instead I’d like to focus on a quirky, weird little treat: Michele Soave’s Dellamorte Dellamore, released in America as Cemetery Man in 1996.

Based on an Italian comic by Tiziano Sclavi, this was my introduction to Italian horror well before I’d heard of Argento, Fulci, Bava, or Soave himself for that matter (who’d earlier made one of my favorite horror films of the 80s – Stagefright). It was even before I was particularly into horror movies – I mean, I’d watch them occasionally, but wasn’t really a fan yet.

I’ll always remember seeing this with one of my best friends in high school. We’d checked the newspaper to find out what was playing at the mall and while every other film came with a short description, this had nothing. When we got to the cinema, there was no poster and the title of the film was just written on an index card with a magic marker. We soon found that we were the only two people who’d come to see this mystery of a film and in the first few minutes of weirdness, assumed that we’d found some silly, bad B movie and figured at least we could crack jokes with each other. But we soon shut up because it was freaking amazing!

Set in a small Italian village, Francesco (Rupert Everett) is the cemetery caretaker whose main responsibilities include waiting for the dead to rise, as they always inevitably do, shooting them in the head, and re-burying them. He falls in love with a young widow at a funeral who is unfortunately bitten by her husband’s reanimated corpse as she and Francesco make love on her spouse’s fresh grave. He then has to kill her again and again and again; but she always seems to return.

It is an odd film to say the least. Gory, funny, sexual, morbid, poetic, and phantasmagoric, it somewhat defies description. But in its absolute weirdness, it is really something fresh and fun and challenging. It is a cheap b-movie. It’s also an existential meditation on living and dying. It’s also full of political subtext. It’s also dreamy and beautiful. I’m so glad we rolled the dice and went to see it. 

1980s – Intruder (1989)

I think it’s obvious that the 1980s were the era of the slasher. There were of course, the big franchises, but also literally hundreds of smaller pictures capitalizing on the simple premise of some (generally human) madman stalking and killing a hapless group of young people.

But rather than focus on any of the big names, I’d like to draw your attention to the deliriously fun late 80s supermarket-set entry, Intruder. Directed by Scott Spiegel, one could be forgiven for thinking it just might have been filmed by Sam Raimi, given how prominently his name was featured on the poster (he plays a small part, along with his brother, Ted, as well as the always enjoyable Bruce Campbell – I guess Spiegel worked on Evil Dead I and II, and all of them had been friends in high school). But the style feels quite similar as well – high praise indeed.

This is a pretty simple set up – the young workers of a small grocery store are doing a nightshift inventory when they all get locked in with a killer who picks them off one by one. But however straightforward the premise, it is filmed within an inch of its life. The creativity and energy that suffuse every shot is thrilling, making it a really fun, exciting movie, full of over the top murder set pieces, and a few actual twists and turns as you try to unravel the mystery of who is behind the killings and why. The camera is always finding new surprising places to watch the action from, and the bloody, bloody practical effects are great. This grimy little “dead teenager picture” was clearly made with love and glee, and its creative enthusiasm is unmistakable. One of those films that feels like it’s so much better than it possibly needed to be, it really deserves to be seen.

1970s – Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

John Hancock’s Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is one of my favorite kinds of horror movies: hard to pin down or categorize, uncanny, and just beautiful. Is it a vampire movie? Maybe. A ghost movie? Possibly? A psychological drama about a woman struggling with mental illness, desperate to keep a grip on an ever more slippery reality? Definitely, but it’s probably those other things too. It is also an exemplary sample of where horror cinema was in the 1970s.

Along with such stand out films as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Messiah of Evil (1973), this is a deeply unsettling, independent feature with a real artistic, poetic sensibility. There is a story, and an emotionally affecting one at that, but more than anything else, this movie is a mood. The atmosphere is so hazy, eerie, and beautiful, and I adore dwelling in that space.

The film follows Jessica (Zohra Lampert), recently released from a mental institution as she, her husband, and their friend, Woody, relocate from the stress and anxiety of the city to the supposed peacefulness of a run-down farm house upstate, only to find it currently inhabited by an intriguing, alluring drifter named Emily. All free-love, counterculture types, they let her stay on and things get immediately uncomfortable as Emily seems to be seducing both of the men. Also, she just might be a vampire/ghost who’s resided in the house for over 100 years, holding the creepy, elderly, seemingly exclusively male denizens of the town in her thrall.

Or Jessica is just paranoid, letting her mind run away with her. With frequent voiceover on her part, the whole film clearly has an unreliable narrator and nothing we see can fully be trusted. But something is definitely wrong (besides the clouds of poison they’re spraying in their newly purchased apple orchard).

The whole ordeal is a mesmerizing death trip, both seductive and threatening, and it’s clearly worth a watch if you have the patience for its languid, spooky, and ultimately unresolved vibe.

1960s – Repulsion (1965)

Speaking of mental instability, Roman Polanski’s Repulsion is really at the top of the game. In choosing a film that encapsulates this decade, my first impulse was his Rosemary’s Baby, easily one of my favorite horror films, but everyone already knows how good it is, and I think this striking, black and white piece from just a few years earlier might not be on as many people’s radar. Nonetheless, its exploration of urban paranoia amidst an epoch of great social change and shifting sexual mores is equally captivating.

Primarily taking place within a small London apartment, we follow Carol (Catherine Deneuve), a quiet young woman, left alone for some time as her sister has gone away on holiday with her lover. She seems tormented and repulsed by male attention and the notion of sex (for reasons that seem apparent by the end of the film), and left to her own devices, starts to unravel. Beset by recurring nightmares of rape and assault, Carol retreats into her domestic space, but even that does not feel stable or inviolate, its boundaries breached by men either blithely oblivious to her fears or explicitly predatory, its walls seeming to crack open, allowing in the external masculine threat. By the end, plenty of blood has been spilled and her mind has been shattered.

It is a boldly filmed, emotionally intense piece, clearly the work of a hungry young artist, eager to show off his vast potential. I remember the first time watching it, thinking, “Why aren’t films shot like this anymore – so expressively, making such strong choices?”  And past just being a triumph of style and technical prowess, the psychological terror really lands. Carol may have stronger, less controlled reactions than many, but the danger she feels is real. The world is full of men who will not respect her limits or her agency, who will force their wills upon her, men like the director himself perhaps.

1950s – The Giant Claw (1957)

So, this decade is a bit tricky as I just haven’t seen that many 50s horror films. Furthermore, I’ve already written about many of my favorites, such as The Bad Seed (1956), House of Wax (1953), Godzilla (1954), or Les Diaboliques  (1955). And so, rather than write about a good terrifying movie that was made in the 50s, I want to write about a terrifically fun movie that might typify a dominant trend in those years. Hence, we have one of the most deliriously enjoyable, silly, red-threat adjacent monster movies of the time, The Giant Claw.

Do we have a giant alien bird from an “anti-matter galaxy” as big as an aircraft carrier that can only be defeated by the square-jawed American military? You betcha! Is the monster puppet as lame as could be hoped for, with eyes that can never focus in one place? Oh yeah! Is the film’s gender politics hilariously out of date, featuring such delightful tropes as the “lady mathematician” whose primary role is making sandwiches for all the very-serious men, and who responds to what today would be considered mild sexual assault by falling in love with the guy? But, of course!

Apparently, there is an unsubstantiated report that the marionette of the interdimensional beastie was made in Mexico City for only $50. While that hasn’t been proven, it isn’t much of a stretch to believe. But I don’t want you to think that I’m saying this is a bad movie. I mean, it is. But it’s also a great movie. At least, if a film can be judged not by abstract, and perhaps outdated, aesthetic concepts like ‘quality,’ ‘logical consistency,’ and ‘technical adequacy,’ but rather, by how much unadulterated joy it can instill in its viewers, then this is a masterpiece for the ages.

1940s – Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

Again a decade that I’m not that deeply versed in – what stands out most for me would be the Val Lewton produced pictures made for RKO like Cat People (1942) or I Walked with a Zombie (1943), but I’m already in the middle of a series of posts about them, so let’s look in another direction. Coming at the tail end of Universal’s second horror cycle, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is one of the earliest and best horror comedies. Truth be told, it is pretty much exclusively a comedy, with the horror elements all played for laughs, but it is genuinely funny in ways that have held up well through the decades, and it is so steeped in the horror films that came before to make it a a treat for any lover of the classic monsters.

Bela Lugosi returns as Dracula, the mastermind of a nefarious, multi-monster plot. Lon Chaney Jr. reprises his doomed Lawrence Talbot, the wolf man. Karloff had long since stopped playing Frankenstein’s monster (Glenn Strange, who’d played the monster twice before, stepped in), but Vincent price does ‘show up’ as the voice of the invisible man, a suitably silky replacement for Claude Rains. And of course, there’s Bud Abbott and Lou Costello bumbling in and out of danger. I’ve read that its success was blamed for the downturn the genre took in subsequent years, the formerly terrifying monsters reduced to a series of jokes, but it really is funny, and I can’t imagine being angry at it. When I was a little kid I wasn’t ready to seriously be scared, but I loved monsters. This is the perfect film for that. I can establish no certain causal link, but I wonder if without this, we would have ever gotten such kid-friendly, fun, horror-themed works as The Munsters, Scooby-Doo, or, The Monster Squad.

1930s – The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

In previous entries, I often tried to choose some underseen treasure, but here I’ve just got to go with one of the biggies. Honestly, I think any of James Whales’s films for Universal could qualify as exemplary of the era, but I’ve already at least briefly discussed The Old Dark House (1932) and The Invisible Man (1933), and in my opinion, The Bride of Frankenstein is just untouchable.

In it, I think Whale takes everything that he’d already brought to the first entry and dialed it up to eleven: its gorgeous gothic atmosphere, its wicked, subversive sense of humor, and its real pathos for the creature – a figure of both fear and pity. Also, it is just really, really weird. I mean, just consider Dr. Pretorius’s collection of tiny jar people – something Mary Shelly somehow failed to include in her seminal work.

It is such a fun, funny movie. From the high camp of Ernest Thesiger’s Dr. Pretorious, to Una O’Connor’s hilarious screaming/fainting servant, to the bizarre, aforementioned miniature jar-folk, the film sustains a wild comic streak. But in spite of that, it is also creepy, sometimes a bit scary (for its time), and surprisingly heartfelt. I can’t imagine someone watching this without sympathizing with the poor creature, however many bereft villagers, still mourning the death of their children, he strangles. A lonely outcast, shunned and hated by society, he stands in for the disenfranchised writ large and the return of the repressed, and Karloff shines (as he generally did – he was outstanding) – his performance physically expressive and emotionally nuanced. And of course, when the Bride finally appears (my only gripe being that the absolutely iconic title character, played by Elsa Lanchester, is barely in the film), she is granted a kind of tragic agency. She may have been constructed solely to wed the creature, but on first seeing him, she recoils and screams. It is heartbreaking for him, but at the same time, oddly empowering to see her allowed her own will, her own desire – or lack thereof.

It is a sad, haunting, odd, dramatic, very funny film. What a combination – just whistling through the graveyard. It also feels quite personal. James Whale was an out gay director working in Hollywood in the era of the Hays code and morals clauses. Knowing a bit about his biography, it is impossible not to view this film through that lens – the monster a social pariah, feared and hated for what he is, seeking companionship and community (not to mention the film’s campy sensibility and that the driver of the story is Dr. Pretorius coming to his old colleague, Dr. Frankenstein on his wedding night to take him away from his new bride so they can create life in their own special way, without recourse to the womb), this queer reading ascribing further depth to what was already a moving, unique picture.

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And so, there we have ten films from ten decades that I wholeheartedly recommend. Some are big hitters in the genre, and others are a bit more off the beaten path, but all are great in their way, and all demonstrate some characteristic features of their era.

And also, there we have one hundred posts, covering the last roughly year and a half. This blog has been and continues to be an interesting project for me, and I still have plenty of ideas of what I might write about in the weeks and months to come. That said, I must admit that I sometimes feel I’m throwing words into the void. Google Analytics tells me I have visitors, but I don’t really know who any of you are, so if you feel like it, maybe drop a comment and say hi (it will be a nice break from the endless Russian Spam-Bots pushing online casinos and porn). What would be on your list of highlights form the last ten decades?

But also, if you don’t feel like commenting, no worries. Thanks for being here. I’m honored to have you.

Ten Great Horror Themed Songs

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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

Roky Erickson - Night of the Vampire

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

04 The Curse of Millhaven (Przekleństwo Millhaven) - 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

Gingerbread Coffin

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

Amanda Palmer/Neil Gaiman w/Jonathon Coulton "Creepy Doll"

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

Walk Like A Zombie

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

ALICE COOPER/Years Ago\Steven

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

No One Lives Forever

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

Concrete Blonde - Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)

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

"Weird Al" Yankovic - Nature Trail To Hell

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

I Eat Boys - chloe moriondo (official music video)

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…