It’s Halloween! Darkness falls across the land, and the midnight hour is close at hand. Creatures crawl in search of creepy bops and bloody bangers to make all the cretins hop.
Every October, a gathering of ghoulish tunes climb out of their tombs and back onto the streaming charts and party playlists. Halloween has a soundtrack with certain songs appearing at every dead man’s party, skeleton dance, and vampires’ ball. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” is one such track, and though it only reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, it has remained No. 1 in the zombified hearts of all Halloween fans since the album of the same name arrived in 1982.
There are some genuine Halloween hits on the “Killboard Rot 100,” as Billboard puts it. Roy Orbison’s “Running Scared” reached No. 1 in 1961. More than 50 years later, Eminem and Rihanna pulled off the same feat with “The Monster,” a song that has become a staple of Halloween streaming playlists since 2013. Post Malone and Ty Dolla $ign’s “Psycho” also topped the Hot 100, reaching the No. 1 spot in 2018.
In the 2020s, songs once considered dead have been reanimated thanks to viral trends on TikTok. Lady Gaga’s “Bloody Mary,” from her 2011 album Born This Way, was released in 2022 as a single after fans spliced a sped-up version of the song to a dance sequence from Netflix’s Wednesday series. Sadly, this removed The Cramps’ cover of “Goo Goo Muck,” preventing the band from experiencing a Stranger Things-style bump that propelled Kate Bush (“Running Up That Hill”) and Metallica (“Master of Puppets”) to the top of the charts.
Halloween can raise the dead – and give plenty of old songs a bump during October. Ministry’s “(Every Day Is) Halloween,” Type O Negative’s “Black No. 1 (Little Miss Scare-All),” Yeah Yeah Yeahs “Heads Will Roll,” Rob Zombie’s “Dragula” and Misfits’ “Halloween” are some of the songs that see spikes in their stream numbers during this time of year, according to Billboard.
While most Halloween songs are decades old, there are groups like LVCRFT looking to make some modern spooky music. Their “Skeleton Sam” was used for Freeform’s “31 Nights of Halloween” campaign, racking up 8.5 million on-demand audio streams since its release in 2019, according to Billboard. So, while you enjoy this terrifying holiday, here’s a look at some of the biggest songs of the spooky season.
Michael Jackson, ‘Thriller’
Michael Jackson’s landmark album Thriller arrived in 1982, but it took two years before the title track was released as a single. By then, the John Landis-directed music video for “Thriller” was an MTV mainstay, and the bloom was off the (bloody) rose. This might explain why, as the album’s seventh single, “Thriller” couldn’t get higher than No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100.
However, in the 40 years since its release, Halloween doesn’t seem complete without it.
Eminem feat. Rihanna, “The Monster”
Eminem and Rihanna’s fourth collaboration (following “Love The Way You Lie,” “Love The Way You Lie (Part II)” and “Numb”) arrived in 2013. The track, taken from The Marshall Mathers LP 2, entered the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 3 before reaching the top of the chart in its sixth week on the Hot 100.
Arguably, the part that makes the song a Halloween staple is Rihanna’s hook: “I’m friends with the monster that’s under my bed / Get along with the voices inside of my head / You’re tryin’ to save me, stop holdin’ your breath / And you think I’m crazy, yeah, you think I’m crazy.”
Rockwell, ‘Somebody’s Watching Me’
In its write-up, Billboard said that “Somebody’s Watching Me” is a favorite of “Nepo Babies.” That was a shady wink to Rockwell, aka Kennedy Gordy, the son of Motown founder and CEO Berry Gordy. With guest vocals from Jackson, Rockwell’s song reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and forever solidified him as a Halloween hit. However, as Todd In The Shadows’ review of the song reveals, not many watched Rockwell afterward.
Post Malone feat. Ty Dolla $ign, “Psycho”
As the third single from Post Malone’s Beerbongs & Bentleys, “Psycho,” featuring Ty Dolla $ign, was released in February 2018. But, the song’s vibe was better suited for October. The track hit the top of the Hot 100 in the summer of 2018, but it continues to find life whenever Halloween rolls around.
Warren Zevon, “Werewolves of London”
Though Warren Zevon remains highly regarded as a songwriter and performer, he never had a No. 1 hit in his all-too-short life. The closest came in 1978, when “Werewolves of London.” The song reached No. 21 on the Hot 100 and remains Zevon’s biggest commercial hit.
Three years later, John Landis would direct An American Werewolf in London, which somehow didn’t include the song in the soundtrack. Thankfully, outlaw southern rocker Shooter Jennings kept Zevon’s memory and legacy alive with the 2023 album Shooter Jennings and the Werewolves of Los Angeles Do Zevon.
Rihanna, “Disturbia”
Another Halloween entry from Rihanna, “Disturbia,” topped the Hot 100 in August 2018, roughly six weeks after it first appeared on the Billboard singles chart. As a bonus track for Good Girl Gone Bad: Reloaded — the rerelease of her third studio album — “Disturbia, delivers on the emotions within the title, spinning paranoia and fear against a wicked dance beat.
Like “The Monster,” Rihanna’s chorus makes the song a perfect fit for Halloween playlists: “Put on your brake lights / You’re in the city of wonder / Ain’t gon’ play nice / Watch out, you might just go under/ Better think twice / Your train of thought will be altered / So if you must falter, be wise.”
Little Mix, “Black Magic” / Fifth Harmony, “I’m In Love With a Monster”
The girl-group revival of the 2010s produced two great additions to your Halloween listening. Fifth Harmony released “I’m In Love With a Monster” as part of the soundtrack for 2015’s Hotel Transylvania 2. While the song failed to chart, it has since found some (after)life as a Halloween bop.
Another song that did chart, however, was Little Mix’s “Black Magic.” As the lead single from their 2015 album, Get Weird, it reached No. 67 on the US Billboard Hot 100 while going to the top of the UK Singles Chart.
Lady Gaga, “Bloody Mary”
It didn’t take a deal with a devil or a witch’s spell to make Lady Gaga’s “Bloody Mary” a hit. It just needed TikTok. In 2022, fans on the platform took a scene from Netflix’s Wednesday and dubbed in a sped-up version of the song from Gaga’s 2011 album, Born This Way. The original song immediately saw a dramatic surge in streams, resulting in the label releasing it as an official single eleven years after the LP was first released. It ultimately reached No. 41 on the Billboard Hot 100 after twelve weeks.
Bobby “Boris” Pickett, “Monster Mash”
It may be corny. It may be “spoopy.” It may be campy. But Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Cryp-Kickers’ “Monster Mash” is the theme of Halloween. Released in 1962, with Bobby Pickett mimicking Boris Karloff, the song reached No. 1 on the Hot 100 in October of that year.
Since then, it has been a favorite of creeps, ghouls, vampires, werewolves and all sorts of denizens of the October Country. In 2021, it was a Halloween Miracle when the “Monster Mash” re-entered the Hot 100 at No. 37, nearly 60 years after its release. Some would call that a “graveyard smash.”
