It Was A Graveyard Smash! On Loving Halloween and Missing Spooky Novelty Songs

I was working in the lab late one night — by which I mean I was writing stupid stuff on Twitter to amuse myself. It was August 25, just before midnight, when I fired off the following tweet:

If Beyoncé really cared about impressing me then she'd do a whole album of spooky Halloween songs.

— Djin-Manuel Miranda (@mrliamcarroll) August 25, 2014

While I was certainly trying to get some laughs first and foremost, there was a certain nugget of truth to my sentiment. I genuinely long for a return to the days when songs about ghouls and goblins could rule the charts, when famous monsters of the silver screen could inspire dance crazes, when LP artwork was adorned with creepy castles and groovy graveyards. It’s been far too long since we as a culture have enjoyed a genuine graveyard smash.

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. From a very young age, I was fascinated by the macabre. I was plagued by nightmares for the first few years of my life, probably until age six or so. Often, these dreams would find me separated from my parents, or worse, plagued by evil forces that were pretending to be my parents. My favorite stories were ghost stories. I constantly borrowed Scary Stories to Tell in The Dark from my school library (with the utterly horrifying original illustrations, not the neutered sissy crap they pawn off on kids these days).

I can vividly recall recounting the entire Legend of Sleepy Hollow to a rapt table of great-aunts and -uncles at my cousin’s post-christening dinner in 1993. Even though this stuff scared the bejesus out of me, I always wanted more. I loved Halloween, not just for the costumes and the candy, but because it was the time of year when real life most resembled my subconscious. It was my fantasy world come to life. It was the one day where being scared meant having fun.

The best Halloween novelty songs understood that fact all too well, and ran with it. Just take the most famous Halloween novelty song of all: “Monster Mash” by Bobby “Boris” Pickett. Here’s a guy who was a rock ‘n roll sideman that just so happened to have a killer Boris Karloff impression under his belt (and a passable Bela Lugosi). He got together a ragtag group of session musicians (known as “The Crypt-Kickers”) and recorded a fairly straightforward R&B number with ghoulish lyrics and haunted house sound effects. It’s a winning formula — one that pretty much every Halloween novelty song would later follow. Writing a song about a mad scientist whose undead creation teaches all the monsters of the land a new dance craze is all well and good, but it means nothing if you can’t dance to it. Luckily, even the undead can shake their bandages to “Monster Mash.”

“Monster Mash” would remain the high watermark of this trend, but that didn’t stop plenty of other acts from trying to get in on the spooky good fun. Fans of rockabilly and garage rock can point you to some groovy chillers by Screaming Lord Sutch (“She’s Fallen In Love With The Monster Man”), Jumpin’ Gene Simmons (“Haunted House”), even rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Bo Diddley (“Bo Meets The Monster”). The best thing about the Halloween novelty song scene was, you didn’t even have to be a musician to score a graveyard smash. Why, some of the best-loved songs of the craze came from folks like legendary horror movie host Zacherle, and Ted Cassidy, who played Lurch on The Addams Family.

The trend lived on through the Seventies, bringing us the supernaturally funky groove of Redbone’s “Witch Queen of New Orleans,” as well as the kitschy new wave of “Horror Movies” by The Bollock Brothers. By the time hip-hop pioneers DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince were warning us about Freddy Krueger with “A Nightmare on My Street,” however, the Halloween novelty song scene more or less returned to its crypt, where it’s remained ever since.

We may not be getting the Beyoncé Halloween novelty album I’ve been desperately hoping for anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean that “Monster Mash” and its ilk haven’t had a long-lasting effect on music. Just think of all the bands that owe their sound or image to celebrating all that’s weird and spooky and goes bump in the night: Black Sabbath, The Ramones, The Cramps, The Misfits. And “Monster Mash” continues to return from the dead, a la Dracula; it’s re-charted multiple times, always enjoys airtime around Halloween, and has been re-recorded by Pickett in many different iterations. (He even recorded an anti-George W. Bush version during the 2004 Presidential elections, if you can believe that.)

As for me, my love of Halloween will never die. You can try and kill it, but it will rise, like Jason or Freddy, every time the wind gets a chill and the leaves turn orange, to celebrate the fun of being scared. You’re welcome to join me… if you dare…

Liam Carroll

Liam Carroll has written for such sites as Critical Mob, TWCC, and Wonder & Risk. He is an alumnus of Ridge High School and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. If he could make a living by eating pizza rolls and watching bad horror movies on VHS, that's what he'd be doing. He currently lives in his home state of New Jersey, and he'll gladly fight you about it. He suggests dating the roommate of the editor as a good way to get published on REBEAT.