By Zach Hagadone and Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff
Alongside its jollier cousin in December, Halloween is as much a feeling as a specific date on the calendar. Critical to that feeling, of course, is the musical accompaniment. For the second year in a row, we’ll present a handful of suggested entries for your Halloween playlist each week in October.
Father John Misty
Folk rocker Father John Misty isn’t especially known as a grim lyricist, but his “Ballad of the Dying Man” (Pure Comedy) and “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings” (Fear Fun, and especially the YouTube video featuring Aubrey Plaza and someone who gives Charles Manson vibes), are certainly Halloween appropriate. “Now I’m Learning to Love the War” (about blood for oil and oil for art, also on Fear Fun) is also scary season-adjacent.
The Lighthouse soundtrack
Few movies do a better job of evoking soul-strangling dread — and sustaining it for a full feature runtime — than director Robert Eggers’ 2019 black-and-white masterpiece The Lighthouse. Starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson as two lighthouse keepers trapped in a hell of their own personal and supernatural making, the soundtrack by Mark Korven goes such a long way toward setting the mood that it might as well be a main character. Devoid of lyrics but full of percussion, accordion, flute, cello and heavy brass, “eerie” doesn’t quite do it justice. It’s the very essence of creeping terror.
Rabbitology
Folk-electronica artist Rabbitology doesn’t write songs so much as short stories that she then sets to music. Her ethereal, almost falsetto vocals give her songs a haunting throughline that she then accentuates with layers of harmonies and loud, driving percussion. If her sound alone weren’t enough to land her on “Tunes of Terror,” you can see from her song titles that Rabbitology draws most of her inspiration from death, decay and the laws of nature with a kind of gothic, neo-Pagan slant. Visit rabbitologymusic.com and listen to “Preybirds,” “Wolf House” and “The Bog Bodies” to see what I mean.
These Immortal Souls
The raw, abrasive nature of punk and post-punk naturally lends itself to Halloween’s gritty, retro side full of dark city alleys and spiked leather — think The Lost Boys. Most people reach for the classic punk bands that earned mainstream success, but few capture the essence of the season like Australian post-punk band These Immortal Souls. Get Lost (Don’t Lie), the first of only two studio albums, has everything you need for a terrifying soundtrack: unnerving, discordant vocals; hair-raising ambient sounds; a few circus-inspired elements; and ’80s guitar to tie everything together. Find them on your favorite streaming service, and start the experience with “I Ate the Knife” and the self-titled “These Immortal Souls.”
The Huntress and the Holder of Hands
People throw around the term “Southern Gothic” a lot when they really mean that a country song has some dark elements. No. The Huntress and the Holder of Hands, with layer upon layer of aggressive strings, melodic wailing and percussion that makes you feel like you’re being chased through a cornfield, is Southern Gothic. Most songs on the group’s 2017 album Avalon — especially “Shake Off Your Flesh” and “Severed Soul” — are worthy additions to any October playlist, both for their dark wordplay and the fact that they sound like a murderous cult is singing them. Listen at thehuntressandholderofhands.net.
‘Gloomy Sunday’
Composed in 1933 by Hungarian pianist and composer Rezső Seress, the song has a long and ominous history, starting out under the title “Vége a világnak” (“The World Is Ending”) and focused on the horrors of war. Upon hearing it, poet László Jávor penned a whole different set of lyrics about a doomed romance and suicidal ideation. He renamed it “Szomorú vasárnap” (“Sad Sunday”) and it was recorded as such in 1935 — all but eclipsing Seress’ original. By the time Billie Holiday recorded her rendition of “Gloomy Sunday” in 1941, it was already referred to as the “Hungarian Suicide Song” and a myth was growing that people who listened to it ended up taking their own lives — including Seress. That didn’t stop dozens of other artists from recording their versions, all the way into the late 2010s. Find it on YouTube, if you dare.
