Who Is Skeleton Sam?
Skeleton Sam is a character created by LVCRFT for their 2019 song of the same name. Netflix licensed it twice in one year. Disney used it to open Hocus Pocus 2. It has passed 22.4 million US streams.
He was supposed to be a song. He got out.
Seven people in a studio dungeon
Here’s the thing that started all of this. The Halloween song is its own sub-genre, and nobody has written a great one in forty years. Every October the same handful of records claw their way out of the crypt. “Monster Mash.” “Thriller.” We love them. We have also been hearing them since we were kids. We write hit songs for a living eleven months a year. The twelfth felt like unfinished business.
So seven of us went into a studio and didn’t come out until there was an album. Evan Bogart, Amanda “MNDR” Warner, Peter Wade, Sarah Barrios, Justin Gray, Scott Hoffman and Trevis Romell. The Slasher Seven.
“Skeleton Sam” was the first thing we wrote. Day one. Three of us: Evan, Justin and Sarah.
The rule was simple. Invent somebody. Make it sound like a song you’re already sure you know. We call that retro spooky. Justin, who goes by Count Trackula around here, built the track.
What crawled out was a skeleton who is, per the lyrics, the king of the Lafayette Cemetery in New Orleans. Nobody in that room thought they were starting anything.
Netflix took him twice
Netflix heard the This Is Halloween Vol. 1 sessions while they were still in progress, and what they wanted was track one.
They asked us to reimagine it for Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, specifically the part where Sabrina goes to hell to get her boyfriend back. Same melody, same track, same production. New lyrics, new title. That became “Straight To Hell.” Kiernan Shipka and the cast recorded it and performed it, and the video ran as the bridge between seasons two and three.
Nine months later Netflix came back for the song again. The original this time, untouched, for Adam Sandler’s Hubie Halloween.
One song, one year, two Netflix titles. That was the first sign Sam was bigger than the record he came from.
Then Disney opened a movie with him
In 2022, “Skeleton Sam” plays over the first scene in Salem in Hocus Pocus 2. Which means that for a few million people, the first sound of that movie is a song three of us wrote on day one of our first session.
It went to No. 8 on the global Shazam chart and onto every major Halloween playlist in America.
Then people started asking who he was
That’s the part nobody planned for. A song can just be a song. But people wanted to know who Sam actually was. Where he came from. What his whole deal was.
So we got him out of the Lafayette Cemetery and introduced him properly.
Sam is a character now, not a song title. People recognize him on sight. He’s in the videos, the artwork, the merch. He’s the thing fans ask about first.
Skeleton Sam’s Deadtime Stories
Our eighth album, out October 1, 2026, is built like a late-night horror broadcast. Sam hosts it.
Skeleton Sam’s Deadtime Stories
The lyrics
I was just a little ghoul when I heard his name, he’s the graveyard legend of the dancing game. Rumor has it he invented how to knock ’em dead, he’s the reason that we all say break a leg. Every bone is double jointed he can twist ’em all, spin his head on his finger like a basketball. No one knows where he’s from, but I heard he’s the king of the Lafayette Cemetery, New Orleans.