Spooky song stories
These ten Halloween favourites bring together horror films, monster stories and the afterlife. Here’s how those ideas found their way into the music.
There’s an app icon waiting for you, too. During our Halloween event, open the details of five different spooky songs in NowPlaying to earn the Halloween app icon for free. It’s yours to keep afterward, with no NowPlaying Gold subscription needed. Tap the song cards in the app to start discovering.
The event runs from 26 October to 1 November 2026. Reading this story or playing a preview won’t advance the achievement. Opening a song’s details in the app does.
Michael Jackson: Thriller
Horror actor Vincent Price supplies the spoken finale on Thriller, which became the seventh and final single from Jackson’s album in 1983. John Landis directed its nearly 14-minute short film. The horror goes well beyond the title: the film includes a werewolf transformation and zombies climbing out of graves. Price’s voice and the film’s monster imagery give this Halloween favourite a direct connection to horror cinema.
Bobby “Boris” Pickett & The Crypt-Kickers: Monster Mash
Bobby Pickett had been practising celebrity impressions with his band on the nightclub circuit before he put his Boris Karloff voice into Monster Mash. Its other ingredient was the Mashed Potato dance craze, associated with James Brown. The song brought together two popular interests: Universal’s classic monster films and dance records. That explains the combination you hear: a horror-movie voice telling the story of a monster party, set to music made for dancing.
Ray Parker Jr.: Ghostbusters
Ray Parker Jr. credits the Ghostbusters’ fictional TV advert with solving his songwriting problem. Director Ivan Reitman wanted the film’s title in the song, but Parker found it awkward to sing. Seeing the advert and its phone number gave him a solution: he would sing a question and let a crowd shout the name. He also recalled extending the original short theme into a full song by cutting and joining analogue tape. Its supernatural subject comes straight from the film it was written for.
Rockwell: Somebody’s Watching Me
The voice on that chorus is Michael Jackson, singing on Rockwell’s 1984 hit. Rockwell is Kennedy Gordy, son of Motown founder Berry Gordy, and the song reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. The Recording Academy traces the song and video’s horror influences to Thriller and Psycho. Its Halloween connection comes from paranoia and horror-film references, with the narrator worrying that even his own home offers no privacy.
The Citizens of Halloween: This Is Halloween
Danny Elfman wrote This Is Halloween to introduce the story of The Nightmare Before Christmas, with the Citizens of Halloween performing the song. In a Song Exploder interview, he described building the musical from Tim Burton’s drawings and spoken storytelling, then making orchestral demos with samplers in a makeshift garage studio. Here, the monsters are the cast introducing their own town. The song establishes the film’s Halloween world before Jack Skellington discovers Christmas.
Nina Simone: I Put a Spell on You
Nina Simone’s 1965 recording is a string-backed cover of a song by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. The song’s horror connection has a theatrical history: Hawkins credited broadcaster Alan Freed with suggesting that he emerge from a coffin to perform it. Simone’s arrangement takes the song in a different musical direction, but the title and its association with Hawkins’ stage act help explain why it fits a Halloween playlist.
Blue Öyster Cult: (Don’t Fear) The Reaper
Buck Dharma, who wrote and sang (Don’t Fear) The Reaper, describes its meaning as lovers reuniting after one of them dies. The afterlife is part of the songwriter’s stated idea. He also recalled making an early four-track demo with improvised percussion: playing on a dictionary and recording his foot against the floor for a kick-drum sound. The finished song was recorded at New York’s Record Plant. Its subject gives it a place among Halloween songs, even though Dharma describes a love story.
Andrew Gold: Spooky, Scary Skeletons
Andrew Gold wrote Spooky, Scary Skeletons for his 1996 album Halloween Howls: Fun & Scary Music. In the original liner notes, quoted by his label, he explained that Halloween had plenty of scary sound effects but too few songs, so he set out to fill the gap. Years later, a YouTuber paired the recording with Disney’s 1929 cartoon The Skeleton Dance, helping it reach a new audience. The dancing skeletons fit the song’s playful approach to Halloween, long before the remixes and dance videos arrived.
Warren Zevon: Werewolves of London
Werewolves of London began with Phil Everly mentioning a horror film he’d watched. What started as a joke became a song for Warren Zevon’s 1978 album Excitable Boy, encouraged along by performances from Jackson Browne and T-Bone Burnett. The recording took numerous attempts before the band found the right feel, with Fleetwood Mac’s John McVie on bass and Mick Fleetwood on drums. Its monsters come with a sense of humour, giving the horror-film idea a place on a dance floor as well as a Halloween playlist.
Ramones: Pet Sematary
Director Mary Lambert recalled asking her friend Dee Dee Ramone to write a song for the 1989 film Pet Sematary. Co-writer Daniel Rey remembered Dee Dee buying Stephen King’s book and leaving lyrics on his answering machine about five hours later. Rey wrote the music that evening, and they soon made a demo. The song shares the film’s fear of the dead returning to life. Even its video went to a real cemetery: director Bill Fishman described filming at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, with the band lowered into a grave on a lift.
Pick five, open their details in NowPlaying during the event, and give your Home Screen a spooky little souvenir.
