Pop Culture Happy Hour - Halloween Songs

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

Who's the Mariah Carey of Halloween? Every year we hear many familiar Halloween songs – from the Ghostbusters theme to “Thriller” to “Monster Mash.” But beyond those Halloween staples, what���s next? Today we've got an episode of NPR’s All Songs Considered that offers up a new canon spooky season songs – from the truly terrifying to autumnal and nostalgic.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Halloween is almost here, and you've maybe started hearing those familiar Halloween songs that resurface every year. Your Ghostbusters theme, your thriller, your monster mash. But beyond those Halloween staples, what's next? I'm Stephen Thompson, and I recently joined my pals on NPR's All Songs Considered to come up with a new canon of songs for spooky season. Here's host Robin Hilton. It's All Songs Considered. I'm Robin Hilton. I'm here with NPR Music Editor Hayes.

Lsills, and our correspondent for all things a mile wide and an inch deep, Stephen Thompson. NPR dilettante correspondent. Host of New Music Friday, also with Pop Culture Happy Hour. Stephen, the idea for this year's Halloween episode is yours, so maybe you should set this whole thing up for us. Well, it's interesting. One of my beats at NPR is the Billboard charts. And if you look at the Billboard charts in late October into early November, you'll see, like, all of a sudden, Ray Parker Jr.'s greatest hits, hits, the album chart. Michael Jackson's greatest hits or the album thriller, you know, really, you know, pop up.

There's sort of a number of kind of Halloween staples that have started to form a Halloween music canon beyond the song Monster Mash by Bobby Boris Pickett. And what I pitched to Robin and what I wanted to disson. discuss with you all is let's agree on a more expansive Halloween music canon. What songs do we want to see pop up around spooky season that are true to the season, but also are not just novelty songs, are not just like, gather around my boys and grills, you know, but like actually spooky songs that are, that rule. So we've got a number of categories we're going to do to sort of winnow down what kind of songs belong in the Halloween canon. I thought we would start with songs that are truly terrifying, not the goofball songs. Right. All right. Well, I'll kick us off.

Not a terribly old song, but this song is genuinely spooky. It's also beautiful. It's also just by one of, you know, my favorite singers to pop up in the last decade or so. It's the song Killer by Phoebe Bridgers. scared you in your house. I even scared myself by talking... I think part of what's creepy about it, first of all, it is a gloomy song. It is a song that feels autumnal.

I think a lot of the horror and kind of the horror icons that speak most to me have a certain level of like of humanity to them. This song felt true to that. It felt like it has this intimacy, but it's like a whisper

about murder. Yeah, there's a spooky kind of almost like normalcy to this song, like what she's expressing about, do I have the capacity to do the kinds of things that I'm singing about? Sometimes the most terrifying thing in the world is your own thoughts. I mean, totally. Right? Who were you talking to, Robin? And I think specifically the fear of not being in control of your own thoughts and actions. And that's something that she alludes to in the song. So, a killer from Phoebe Bridgers. That's from Stranger in the Alps. It came out in 2017. We're going to add that one to the canon. Hazel, what do you want to add? And this is for the category songs that are truly terrifying. A song that I thought of when you mentioned this category is the song, If I Had a Heart by

the artist Fever Ray. That is such a good pick. Yeah. It is so unsettling. I'm just sitting there. The whole time I was listening to what I was like, who are you going to call? It's creepy.

It's just like, you know, costumes and spooky images and ghosts and monsters are just such a big part of the Fever-Ray project. And I think aside from the instrumentals of this music, the way it's so foreboding, and it almost feels like like a Western score. It's like I feel like I'm walking down a dark road. The lyrics are so terrifyingly opaque.

It's like if I had a heart, I could love you. And, you know, it's this kind of almost like creature is singing about how much they want more and more. And it's like, well, more of what? I mean, everything Fever-ray does is terrifying to me. The videos, videos, too, and you say some sort of creature, that's the spirit and even the physical form that they inhabit in their videos, right? They're always monstrous. That is such a good entry in the Halloween canon. That's exactly what I'm talking about.

I want to see Fever Ray pop up on the Billboard charts every October. Yeah. Well, I think the thing that's interesting about the billboard charts and this whole thing becoming a thing right now is that the cynical side of me immediately thought of how labels just want to capitalize on this. this thing that they're seeing. They start to see like, wait a minute, if thrillers popping up on the charts this time of year,

maybe we really need to be releasing more Halloween-themed music just so we can really capitalize on this. And then I've already taken it as far as, well, Fever-Ray will never get the attention that Fever-Ray deserves because the oxygen is going to be sucked up by all the pop stars and the big labels and everything trying to capitalize on this market. Halloween's gotten too commercial, man. It's just too commercial. There's too many spirit Halloween. It used to be about the fear, man.

All right, we're doing these categories. The next category is ghosts from your childhood. No, nostalgia. Let's just take a nostalgia trip here and talk about the songs, regardless of whether or not they're scary, that really take us back to the magical time of our youth when maybe Halloween resonates the most with us? I feel like the music that reminds me the most of my childhood

Halloweens or just, you know, spooky times in my childhood, which were a lot of times, is the goosebumps theme song, the theme song to the TV show Goosebums. And I should clarify that I'm a millennial, so I'm a child of the 90s. And this song, just, it lives so large in my brain. Hazel currently running out of the studio in here.

Actually, the song, it really slaps, like, as a piece of music. Yeah. So, Goosebumps, that was your jam growing up? This is, like, instantly takes you back to your childhood. Instantly takes me back. I watched so much Goosebumps. I read the Goosebump's book series by Arles Stein, and I feel like it was, it was like the Twilight Zone for being a child in the 90s.

And it was scary. Some of those episodes were, even to this day, I'm like, that was kind of a lot for children's television. So I know about goosebumps, but I've never seen it. I mean, I know it's like, I think it had a reboot. I think there was a movie. There was a movie. I don't think I saw the movie. And really like epic, extremely state-of-the-art special effects.

You know what? Yes. Yeah. Really state-of-the-art. I mean, at least it wasn't all CGI. I can say that much. Well, I want to go next because I have something that also instantly takes me back to my childhood. And this actually isn't even a song, but it is synonymous with spooky season to me.

And there are people of a certain generation, I think, when they hear this, they'll instantly know what it is. One dark and stormy night, a light appears in the topmost window in the tower of the old house. You decide to investigate and you never return. So this is from 1964. Okay. But it was played all through the 70s and 80s. It's the album. Played where?

Okay. So this is an album from Disneyland Records called Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House. For people of a certain age, this was inescapable. It was a Halloween tradition. Any haunted house you went to, it was playing. Any Halloween party you went to, it was playing. Or just trick-or-treating, you're going to. go to someone's house and invariably they'd have this plane on a record player on their front

porch or you could hear it coming from inside the house. I definitely heard this in passing on several different front porches in Mentor, Ohio and Iowa, Wisconsin. Yeah. So the first half of the record, it's these little stories with that narrator. And every track is a new scenario, you know. But then the second half of the record is just the sound effects, you know, no narration or whatever. I feel inspired honestly to just start playing this in my home at all times.

Like I actually am like, oh, this would be great ambiance for like dinner parties when people come over. Yeah. Like was it just brought out for trick-or-treaters? I mean, for the most part, but I had my own copy that I would just put on. I just, I mean, I was the same way with the Chipmunks Christmas. I mean, because, I mean, you know, Stephen, we do the goofy holiday show every year. That whole thing that we started more than a decade ago, that was my baby that I started just because I love all the sound effects and I love doing all the Foley. You have always loved the sound effects record.

All right, we've got to take a quick break here, but we'll have more songs for the new Halloween canon right after this. And you're listening to All Songs Considered from NPR Music. It's All Songs Considered from NPR Music. I'm Robin Hilton. I'm here with Hazel Sills and Stephen Thompson. And we're talking about songs for a new canon of Halloween music. Well, let's talk about new songs because that's one of the categories. We did nostalgia. We did songs that are truly terrifying.

Let's talk about some of the new stuff that's come out that we think belongs in the canon. Yeah, I was thinking about this compilation that was released this year by a artist I wasn't familiar with. Her name is Oksana Lind. She's like a Venezuelan composer, and she mostly made stuff like from the late 80s to the mid-90s. and I want to play a song of hers called Horizontes Lechanos. Yeah, very John Carpenter. Like, I could hear this during a scene of like The Thing, that movie The Thing, or one of his films.

So Oksana Linda is totally new to me too. You know, she, I guess, started recording as far back as the 1980s but didn't put out an album until just a few years ago. Yeah, it's crazy that we don't, like we haven't heard this before because it just feels so ethereal and weird. weird and like twisted and I feel like you could play this music on the porch when the trick-or-treaters are coming up if you wanted to. Nobody would stop. They would just keep walking. Yeah, there's just such a sense of like dread to this song, kind of like the fever guy song that

we played earlier, you know, just feeling like I'm being pulled into this other world. So that's from an album that just came out this year called Travisius from Oksana Linda. Stephen, what do you got for something new to add to the canon? Well, I think this song is pretty clearly engineered specifically to be part of the Halloween canon, and I happen to think it does a phenomenal job of it. Florence in The Machine, there's a new album coming out on Halloween, and the first single from it feels so Halloween friendly. It is called Everybody Scream. You know, I hadn't thought of it until hearing this song in the context of this conversation we're having, but this song has that. borderline goofy, super theatrical kind of melodrama to it that I hadn't quite clocked until

here, like even the organ sound at the beginning, you know? I think the difference is she's committed. She gives a committed vocal, and I think they're, she's not coming in there, like, I am here to suck your blood. She's like singing the hell out of it. Yeah. And like letting the instrumentation do the work of, you know, kind of the organ. and it's spooky and it's a little silly.

I get the sense that she is creating this themed fantasy, and she is existing within it as the artist that she already is. Like this song, you know, with the organ, and it has these kind of like Halloween hallmarks and it's clearly pointed towards the holiday and has a purpose, it doesn't feel that out of line with her catalog or the work that she already makes as an artist. Yeah, I mean, her music's always had drama and been very theatrical and kind of an undercurrent that's a little creepy.

Well, and when we're talking about who is the Mariah Carey of Halloween, this is clearly a bid for that. And I would be remiss if I failed to mention that Lady Gaga has a new song called The Dead Dance, which has a video directed by Tim Burton, and she's like a creepy rag doll kind of twitching around to this very Halloween. coded song. So we'll add that one to the Halloween canon. Florence in the Machine, everybody scream. Brand new song for the something new category that we're adding to the canon. I'm going to pick a song by Ethel Cain, a song called House of Psychotic Women from the sort of weird one-off album that Ethel Cain did at the top of the year. Perverts.

Oh, perverts. Again, there's that contrast. Like, the music is so unnerving. And she's saying, I love you. over and over again. So creepy. And all the words are kind of buried, like they're kind of coming up from underground or something.

Yeah, Ethel is just such a master. You know, she's so young, but she's such a master already in her career at this very kind of specific strain of American Gothic music in a way that I feel like so few artists make. She is just so good at creating the, desolate, like, haunted houses of songs.

Like, there's so much going on in there, even though it feels quite minimal. And, yeah, I mean, this is music that truly scares me, actually. So the song, House of Psychotic Women with, I think all the E's are missing from that. And it's all one word, House of Psychotic Women from Perverts from Ethel King. Just came out at the top of this year. All right, we've got one more category to talk about. and that is the Mount Rushmore of Halloween songs. These are the songs that are so undeniable, such classics,

that they belong on the Mount Rushmore of Halloween songs. So this song, total classic to me, I think should be on the Mount Rushmore of Halloween music. I'm curious to know what you guys think. When I think scary Halloween music, I think the cramps. I think of that is a band that is basically like, They're given monsters. They're giving,

every day is Halloween for them. And so I wanted to play their song, I was a teenage werewolf. The slide of hand that this song pulls off is that it's got just a hint of camp to it. Yeah. But you could totally imagine this scoring a truly horrifying moment in a film or haunting your dreams. Yeah. It's like it's not Monster Mash.

It's not thriller. It's like a dial down enough. in that, like, campy, vampiric energy that it's cool. Like, they are, at the end of the day, this punk rockabilly group. There's a costuminess to it, and there's, like, a goofiness to it, but it's not over the top. It's not party city. It's a more dialed down Screamin' Jay Hawkins, I put a spell on you, right? Like, it's going hard instrumentally, but it's not shrieking at you.

Yeah, I could see this on the Mount Rushmore. But who is going next to the cramps, Stephen, on this Mount Rushmore of Halloween songs? Well, when we're talking about the Halloween canon and the songs and albums that kind of come back and chart every year, I'm always shocked that one of those isn't a duo from 2009 called Dead Man's Bones. Dead Man's Bones was the duo of a guy named Zach Shields and a fella you might have heard of named Ryan Gron. And a little someone you might have heard of. And feeling very Paul Harvey, like, and that little boy whom nobody loved grew up to be Ryan Gosling. That was a terrible imitation.

It was terrible. That didn't sound anything like Paul Harvey at all. But basically, Dead Man's Bones, these two friends, one of whom happened to be Ryan Gosling, you know, they grew up obsessed with Halloween, grew up obsessed with haunted houses and the haunted mansion ride at Disneyland. And they made an album together in 2009, and they made a bunch of Halloween-themed music, including this song, which belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Halloween music. It's called My Bodies a zombie for you. Yeah, and like it has an A-list superstar at the head.

But he wasn't at the time. I just was checking at his filmography. Like, he had done a handful of things. He had done the notebook. The notebook. The notebook. By that point, it was definitely. But his career did not really take off until like 2010-11, when he did drive.

I mean, but like you look at the play count on Spotify, and that song has been played like eight million times. Wow. Yeah. Well, mine is one that could have gone in the nostalgia category as well because, well, I think you'll hear why. The Great Pumpkin waltz, Vince Goraldi from The Great Pumpkin. Classic. Absolute classic. I think, admittedly, it's not quite.

quite the level of a Charlie Brown Christmas, maybe not that instantly recognizable, but no less a classic. Yeah, I grew up watching all of the peanuts, like the Christmas special, the Thanksgiving special, the Halloween special, had so much affinity for the Halloween special where I laugh every time, even to this day, when Charlie Brown goes trick-or-treating and he gets a rock. I got a rock. I got a rock at every house. Everyone else gets candy. I'm still like the funny It's so twisted and sad

Why would you give him for rocks? You just keep a bowl of rocks In case Charlie Brown shows Every time Yeah no I This also could have gone In the nostalgia bracket for me Because I just

I love this music so much So we'll go out on this then From Vince Guraldi The Great Pumpkin waltz From the Great Pumpkin Stephen Thompson And Hazel Sills Thanks so much to you both

Thank you Thank you And for NPR music, I'm Robin Hilton. It's all songs considered.