Halloween music: an investigation

By Rosie Manford

We all recognise the sound of Christmas: Mariah Carey blasting out of every shop window, tastefully accompanied by the “ho ho ho” of a store-bought Santa Claus. But what is the sound of Halloween? A quick flip through Spotify shows some familiar classics: the soundtrack to Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, ‘The Monster Mash’, The Addams Family theme tune, every single song from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Now don’t get me wrong – I love Halloween and its music (who doesn’t love Tim Curry in fishnet stockings), but Halloween is one day a year. We all know that Christmas lasts for at least two months – by mid October Tesco’s is putting out the Christmas themed chocolates. Given that Christmas is more of a marathon than a sprint, I can accept the multitude of Christmas songs that assault my ears whenever I enter a shop in December. There are fewer Halloween songs, but there is still plenty of music created for a tradition that only lasts for 24 hours a year. So what makes a song suitable for Halloween, why are there so many ‘Halloween songs’ playlists, and how come they’re all filled with absolute bops?

Halloween originated with the Celtic tradition of Samhain, which celebrates the changing of the seasons, the end of the harvest, and the day that the spiritual and physical worlds intertwined. People would dress in costumes and masks, dancing and singing around bonfires. As Christianity merged with Celtic beliefs, All Souls’ Day was created to honour and remember the dead, usually through prayers and songs. By the 8th century however, strict rules had emerged regarding musical composition. Only ‘pure’ intervals (specific chords such as octaves and perfect fifths) were allowed in music; the Catholic Church strongly discouraged dissonance in music, for example the tritone (a specific chord made up of two notes three tones apart). This particular chord is often referred to as ‘diabolus in musica’, (the Devil in music), and while it was not actually believed to summon the devil, it was usually avoided in favour of more ‘pleasing’ harmonies. So how did we move from pure and holy church-approved music, with a very limited range of chords, to Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ and ‘The Time Warp’?

Skip forward a few hundred years and we’re into the early 20th Century. Music is no longer church-controlled or strictly harmonious, and jazz and blues music has grown in popularity. Blues music has often been associated with the devil, even today most people have heard the rumour of Robert Johnson, the man who sold his soul to the devil in order to play the blues. Interestingly the blue note (a flattened fifth that is part of the blues scale) when played with the root of the scale creates a tritone, our forbidden devilish chord. The growing  popularity of lyrics with references to the devil and witchcraft, combined with the emergence of musical movements concerned with moving away from ‘traditional’ musical styles (expressionism, impressionism) created an environment for the creation of ‘Halloween songs’.

It wasn’t until the late 1950’s that musicians started to produce the weird and wonderful songs that we associate with Halloween today. In 1956, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, after his record producer created a party atmosphere and plied Hawkins with alcohol, recorded ‘I Put a Spell on You’. While the words are not particularly ‘creepy’, the song was banned from being played on the radio across America due ‘sexual overtones’ (mostly attributed to Hawkins’ delivery) and the song was only released after all the grunts and groans were edited out (the unedited version is available on YouTube and is worth a watch). Over the next few years, more bands started releasing Halloween-specific songs, Sheb Wooley’s ‘The Purple People Eater’ (1958) and Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s ‘Monster Mash’ (1962) being some of the more notable releases. Then came the influence of the screen; the odd but ever-popular The Addams Family series gave us a catchy and memorable theme song (written by Vic Mizzy, 1964) and Richard O’Brien’s soundtrack from the cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show appears in many a Halloween playlist. Classic horror films from the 70’s and 80’s (The Shining and Halloween for example) gave us the template for ‘horror’ music: heavy on the strings and the synthesizer. Horror films and Halloween music influenced each other, as exemplified by Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ (1983). Often seen now as the Halloween song, ‘Thriller’ uses various horror sound effects in the beginning (howling, creaking doors, wind), and the music video is packed with horror film references. In addition to horror, we also have Halloween-specific films; Hocus Pocus (1993) introduced a classic cover of Hawkins’ ‘I Put a Spell On You’, and Danny Elfman’s score for The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) is a much loved Halloween classic.

So that’s how we got some of our classic Halloween music. But what links all these songs together? What moves a song into the niche area of the Halloween playlist? Is it using the devil’s tritone, referencing the supernatural, or simply using a minor key? These answers seem slightly too simplistic for a musical canon that is so varied and wide reaching. Write a catchy song in a minor key, heavy on the strings and synth, sing about the devil, and throw in a tritone – there is no guarantee this will create a classic Halloween song. You’re more likely to end up with a bad cliché. Perhaps it’s to do with the reception of the song. Will drunk students blast it at Halloween house parties? Will it be overplayed on the radio, or better yet, banned completely? If the answer is no, it might still be a ‘Halloween song’, but it seems unlikely. There is something undefinable about the ‘Halloween song’ that dominates the October recommended lists. Perhaps there is something delightful about singing along to a song that is unapologetically odd, and all the better for it. As to why there are so many Halloween songs and playlists? Well, everyone loves to be a little weird sometimes, so why not sing along?