A Brief History of Halloween Music

Halloween has a music problem that Christmas does not

Every December, dozens of new Christmas songs compete for radio play, streaming placement and a shot at becoming next year’s standard. Every October, almost the opposite happens: the same handful of songs, most of them decades old, get replayed on a loop. Halloween is one of the biggest retail and cultural events of the American year, and it runs on a remarkably small, remarkably old songbook.

The Songbook, Briefly

“Monster Mash” (1962), written and performed by Bobby “Boris” Pickett, is the genre’s founding document: a novelty dance song built around a Boris Karloff impression that hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 the week of Halloween. Six decades later it is still the single most recognizable Halloween song in the world.

“Thriller” (1982), Michael Jackson’s title track from the best-selling album of all time, turned a horror pastiche into the genre’s most ambitious entry: a nearly 14-minute short film, directed by John Landis, that did as much to define what “Halloween” sounds and looks like as any single piece of music released before or since.

“Ghostbusters” (1984), Ray Parker Jr.’s theme for the film of the same name, and “Time Warp” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) both entered the same small canon: songs written for a specific film that outgrew it and became October standards in their own right.

“Spooky, Scary Skeletons,” written by Andrew Gold for a 1996 children’s Halloween record, spent nearly two decades as a minor entry before a wave of internet remixes in the 2010s turned it into one of the most-streamed Halloween songs of the modern era, proof that the canon can still admit new members, just rarely.

The Gap

Notice what almost none of those songs have in common: they were not written by artists trying to build a Halloween catalog. They are mostly one-offs. A novelty single, a film theme, a soundtrack cut. Almost no act in American pop music has treated Halloween the way Mariah Carey and a hundred others have treated Christmas: as a genre worth returning to, on purpose, every single year.

Where LVCRFT Fits

LVCRFT was built to close exactly that gap. Founded in 2019 by pop songwriters Evan “Kidd” Bogart, Amanda “MNDR” Warner and Peter Wade, credited between them on hits for Beyoncé, Rihanna, Mark Ronson and Charli XCX, the group set out to do for Halloween what an entire industry already does for Christmas: write new original songs about it, every year, on purpose. Eight Halloween albums later, “Skeleton Sam,” their first song, has been streamed more than 22.4 million times in the United States and opened Disney’s Hocus Pocus 2. Their music now scores real haunted attractions, including all of Thirteenth Floor’s Queen Mary’s Dark Harbor.

The classics got there first. LVCRFT is trying to make sure the canon has a chance to grow.