It's Spooky Time Once Again

A spooky playlist for Halloween? Do you mean the one I listen to every other week just because I want to see the reaction of those willing to let me drive them places? The one I listen to in the car when I’m by myself, windows down, July? This challenge is right up my alley. Of the 60 or so stories and poems I’ve written and submitted to Vocal so far, I’ve touched on a cemetery setting twice, end-of-life scenarios four times, the underworld three times, a requiem, a conversation with a ghost, a review of a haunted amusement park, and my own eulogy. A prevailing theme permeates much of what I like to write. A playlist to go with the normal dark side of me as well as the Spooky Time decorations I put up weeks ago already? Yes. Very yes.

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The playlist can be played as it is, by artist, or my favorite – random. There are some patterns in my Spotify list named “Let’s get scared, Barb.” It’s different from “Dark” and “Scary Organ Music.” The first set of songs come from the movies of my childhood that scared the crap out of me during the age of disco and new wave. Most of the popular favorites are there, including Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Exorcist, The Omen, Friday the 13th, etc. These were typical teenager movie date-nights where popcorn went flying as the female protagonist goes BACK into a dark basement with nothing except a stick and a flashlight with weak batteries. These songs can easily bring back memories of scares and sleepless nights, but also a smile or two. The opening salvos of these songs are relatively calm, almost soothing, unless you recall what happened in that part of the movie.

The next grouping of songs come from more recent scares and lesser thrills, not the typical slasher stories. Nightmare before Christmas (good any time of year), Stranger Things, and the Rocky Horror Picture Show make an appearance here. For me, music has always conjured up visual images, and an association with a horror movie or show makes it even more entrenched in my dark heart. More on this later.

Years ago I came across a band called Midnight Syndicate, and each of their albums is cemetery-centered and death delicious. You can find whole playlists with just this group and feel a single deadly motif flowing through their wordless music. There are insane asylums, black roses, ruined cathedrals, you name it. If it’s dark and dead, there’s a good chance Midnight Syndicate has a song about it. A similar artist is Nox Arcana (i.e., Mysterious Night), but the focus is not always on death. Darkness and night are still there. Nox Arcana has a deep appreciation for asylums and their deranged residents.

Classical music abounds within a variety of aesthetics. There are delightful dancing waltzes, a plethora of patriotic marches, romantic ballads, and festive fugues and sonatas across time. Instrumentation of all kinds developed rapidly between the 1500s and the 1900s. The organ, surprisingly, preceded most modern instrumentation that we’ve become more familiar with. Primitive pipe organs go back as far as the 6th century, and during the Gothic period of art (12th – 15th century), organs began to ease into the scene. In the 18th and 19th century of literature, traditional gothic novels were specifically defined with dark, dreary settings, saturation of darkness, death, night, loss and heartbreak, and mysterious characters with nefarious intentions.

It was in this gothic literary period in 1833 that J.S. Bach gave us the glorious Toccata and Fugue, probably the best-known of “scary” organ pieces. Disney used it to open his controversial masterpiece Fantasia and in the short “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” This piece also made it into the movie version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera among other 20th century creations. Organ music, when experienced in a proper hall with high ceilings and multiple pipes, can elicit deeply concealed feelings and get those goosebumps going any month of the year.

Following the classical pieces on my playlist, there are rock songs with the along the same themes. Early Ministry, Rob Zombie, and Gavin Goszka have Halloween songs that can be played any time if you need a pick-me-up or a power pump before a workout. If you get the chance to see an Alice Cooper show, it’s worth the time and effort. He was an original freak, singing about what passed for macabre in the 70s with fake blood and gore and outlandish plots that are comically tame now. Marilyn Manson’s version of “This is Halloween” gives the song a much creepier vibe, which is quite appropriate. Both Marilyn’s and Alice’s onstage personas were carefully crafted over the years to feed into our darkest nihilistic moods. That fits the bill for this entire playlist.

I added one balladeer; her voice has such a haunting quality against an edgy rock background with Evanescence. Amy Lee’s voice floats above and through the music, pulling you through a journey that can be dark and twisting, a smooth sound dancing across sharp rocks. The lyrics are delightfully dark, and some may argue she doesn’t belong on this list. Then how do we define Halloween? What is considered scary? “Now I’m bound by the life you left behind” is more than a tale of loss. “Wounds that don’t heal” is part of the horror we sometimes we face in our lives, and as such, I feel it belongs here. The phrase “I tried to tell myself that you're gone” is similar to Kate Bush’s “Just watching you without me.” Everlasting loneliness is the probably the most frightening concept, more so than blood, gore, and fake monsters could conjure.

Darkness is not necessarily a bad thing. It simply implies the absence of light. We can all recall times in our lives where light seemed so far away; music deemed dark is one way to bring us out of that darkness, into the hazy gray area in between so we can recognize the difference between the two. A ying and yang of the extremes in our lives; without one, we wouldn’t be able to recognize the other. It’s the Good Friday before Easter, the darkest of the night that comes before dawn. Halloween may give us a fright, but we're soothed by the Reese's and Skittles that follow.

The last six songs of this current list are the most playful and harmless, especially if this playlist is meant for a true Halloween party. After four hours, the mystery punch takes its toll, the Shark Cuterie boards are empty, and watching your friends trying to dance to “Thriller” and remember all the words to “Monster Mash” becomes the highlight of the evening. That song from Disney’s “Haunted Mansion” ride – quick! – what are the words? Did any of the happy haunts go home with you? You’d better check, most likely in the closet or under your bed.