You might like a good scare on Halloween. And this list highlights three creepy songs with nightmarish lyrics to get you in the mood for All Saints’ Eve. But apart from the horror, each track is also part of a groundbreaking album, making them crucial additions to any Halloween playlist.
Videos by American Songwriter
“Intruder” by Peter Gabriel from ‘Peter Gabriel 3: Melt’ (1980)
“Intruder” is best known for Phil Collins’s drum pattern. The gated reverb effect created with engineer Hugh Padgham would reemerge on one of Collins’s biggest hits, “In The Air Tonight”. Without getting into the technical weeds of creating a gated reverb effect, the large room sound created by the reverb feels powerful. Yet the gate, like an actual gate, quickly closes on the ambiance, giving the track its suffocating mood. Meanwhile, Peter Gabriel announces the prowler’s intentions. Leaving the victim paralyzed by fear.
Slipping the clippers,
Slipping the clippers through the telephone wires.
A sense of isolation,
Inspires, inspires me.
“Lullaby” by The Cure from ‘Disintegration’ (1989)
Writing in the liner notes to Galore, Robert Smith said his “very strange” Uncle Robert used to scare him with bedtime stories about a child-eating villain named The Spiderman. “Lullaby” references Uncle Robert’s grim character, but perhaps it’s also a metaphor for other things Smith feared. Or the things taking hold of you that you can’t shake or quit. The chords on “Lullaby” are both haunting and inviting. Two necessary components to fuel an addiction.
On candy-stripe legs, the Spiderman comes,
Softly through the shadow of the evening sun.
Stealing past the windows of the blissfully dead,
Looking for the victim shivering in bed.
“Thriller” by Michael Jackson from ‘Thriller’ (1982)
What makes a nightmare a nightmare is a sense of hopelessness. You can’t run fast enough to get away from whatever lurks. You try to scream, but your voice makes no sound. Michael Jackson’s dark funk and its horror-themed music video become truly terrifying when Vincent Price offers some spoken-word apocalyptic Halloween creepiness. The music video arrived in 1983 with a disclaimer that Jackson “in no way endorses a belief in the occult.” Still, if you’re approached in your dreams by a dancing zombie troupe, maybe they’ll be distracted by the routine long enough to allow time to escape.
You try to scream
But terror takes the sound before you make it.
You start to freeze
As horror looks you right between the eyes.
You’re paralyzed.
Photo by: Jim Dyson/Getty Images
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