As I’m sometimes wont to do in this weekly excavation of old words, I am opting to dip into the voluminous collection of “Five for Friday” posts at my former online home. Back in the end, I helped usher in the end of the work week by posting a quintet of songs under a certain theme and encouraged others to submit their own corresponding lists. During the span in which this feature ran, Halloween fell on a Friday once. This is the list I shared. 

As usual, the lists submitted by my pals were better and more inspired by mine. I encourage a perusal of their insights at the original post. I’ve also created a YouTube playlist from the crowdsourced offerings digitally presented almost a decade ago. It is suitable for all your Halloween-related listening needs.

Here’s the humble tally I used to begin the discussion.

Five Scary Songs

1. M83, “Car Chase Terror !” With the undercurrent of a thick, pounding electronic beat, actress Kate Moran emotes through a story of a woman and her daughter fleeing a menacing figure. When I was a kid, I was leery of anything remotely frightening. The ads for a movie like The Incredible Melting Man could almost make me faint when they came up on the television or radio as my mind immediately started concocting horrors. Then I started actually seeing horror films and I realized that my actually instinctual reaction to such material is, at best, amusement. More typically, I find even some classics to be pretty dumb. I don’t get scared easily. This song scares the crap out of me.

2. Bruce Springsteen, “I’m On Fire.” More of a creepy song, if you see the distinction. I know the Boss is just trafficking in the sort of jargon he’s always used, but something about “Hey little girl, is your daddy home/Did he go away and leave you all alone” combined with “I’ve got a bad desire” makes this song seem less like it’s about a Jersey girl and more like it’s about a Jersey girl.

3. Pink Floyd, “Brain Damage.” It’s that laugh that accompanies the lyrics about the lunatic (wherever he is: grass, wall, head…) Odd that laughter can be so creepy.

4. Husker Du, “How to Skin a Cat.” Some patented early Husker Sturm and Drang and barely perceptible lyrics involving feeding cat carcasses to gigantic rats. Those Minnesota winters can mess with your mind, ya know.

5. Robyn Hitchcock, “Sleeping with Your Devil Mask.” “…and when I stop it means I’m through with you.” The way Hitchcock bends that “you” is chilling. For all of his macabre tendencies, he’s not often that frightening, but this song sounds like it could accompany a stalking butcher knife murderer in an especially hip horror flick.