Halloween After Dark

Snap snap! Vic Mizzy wrote this theme and sang it himself, harpsichord and all. It's under a minute, so get your fingers ready. We snapped along to it at my nan's every week.

Donovan, 1966. Lana Del Rey covered it for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark in 2019, but the original still sounds like fog creeping in under the door.

Hocus Pocus every October in our house, but the 1956 original is wilder. Screamin' Jay later opened his shows by climbing out of a coffin. Best part: those grunts.

Mick Fleetwood and John McVie on drums and bass. Phil Everly saw the 1935 film and joked it should be a dance craze, and they wrote it in about 15 minutes. AHHOOOO!

UK number one for three weeks in the summer of 1981, while riots broke out across the country. No actual ghosts, just the eeriest horns in pop.

The album version, not the 14-minute film. Rod Temperton first called it Starlight and wrote Vincent Price's spoken part in a taxi on the way to the session. Best part: that laugh.

Number one in the US for three weeks in 1984. Huey Lewis thought it sounded very familiar and sued; they settled out of court. Who you gonna call?

Paranoia you can dance to. Rockwell is Berry Gordy's son, and that's Michael Jackson singing the chorus. Creepier than half the horror soundtracks I own.

The 1975 soundtrack, of course. My first midnight screening: homemade fishnets, toast flying everywhere and a whole cinema doing the pelvic thrust. It's just a jump to the left!

Broken looking glass, ladders about to fall. Stevie plays the clavinet and the drums here, and Jeff Beck was supposed to release it first. Time to warm up the dance floor.

Qu'est-ce que c'est. David Byrne pictured Alice Cooper doing a Randy Newman ballad, and Tina Weymouth helped with the French lines. Best part: that bassline.

Danny Elfman before the Simpsons theme and Jack Skellington. The band plays it live in the 1986 film Back to School. Full six-minute album version: leave your body at the door.

Hot take: Disturbia is a better Halloween song than most actual Halloween songs, and it was never meant to be one. Bum bum be-dum bum bum be-dum bum.

Turn it up. The video cost about seven million dollars, and Guinness named it the most expensive music video ever made. Michael and Janet in a spaceship, worth every cent.

The original, not the A-Trak remix. Off with your head, dance till you're dead: the only dress code for Saturday.

For Juno, with love. From a 1996 album called Halloween Howls; Andrew Gold also wrote Thank You for Being a Friend, the Golden Girls theme. The original, not a remix.

For everyone who dresses like this all year. The 1984 synth single, before Al Jourgensen went industrial and spent years disowning it. Goth clubs never did.

Jonny Greenwood reportedly hit those guitar blasts so hard because he wanted to ruin the song. Halloween logic: you are the creep. Costume sorted.

Ian McCulloch says the first line came to him in his sleep. Donnie Darko opens with it. Lights down for this one.

Time to slow it down. Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh wrote it, Sinatra swung it in 1957. Glass of red, costume still on.

Started life as an instrumental, then Classics IV added the words and had the hit. Dusty's version is the one though. Couples to the floor, I'm slowing down for once.

That swishing sound is a broom. A witch's broom, I've decided. Neil wrote it for his wife Pegi, and it's the one I make my husband slow dance to in the kitchen.

Last one, lights low. Stevie Nicks used to introduce it as a song about an old Welsh witch; she found the name in a novel before she knew the myth. Thanks for haunting with me.

Any Halloween list without Lambert, Hendricks & Ross... I just can't take it seriously. -Prof. Screamcheese, DeadAir.co

Answering the Professor with more swing: Satchmo sang this in a haunted-house scene in Pennies from Heaven (1936). Welcome to the tape, the jack-o'-lantern is yours now 🎃