My Halloween mix

Sorry about the lack of links, but the list is long and time is short… most of this is probably on Youtube. There’s a lot of obvious tracks in this list, but some are based strictly on personal associations or memories… I’ll try to explain if something seems like it might not be obvious.

I’m also planning to post my Samhain mix on Saturday (since I observe that holiday completely separately from Halloween… if that means it passes you by this year, hopefully it will give you plenty of time to find the music before next year! ;) )

If you have other favorite tracks, please share! I deliberately don’t have novelty songs like “Monster Mash” or “Purple People Eater” in this mix, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy them… so if you have something relatively rare in that genre, again – please share.

Tracks

• “This is Halloween”, from the soundtrack of “The Nightmare Before Christmas”
• “Double Trouble”, from the soundtrack of the third “Harry Potter” film (this is the wonderful setting of the “three witches” scene from Macbeth – “double, double, toil and trouble…”)
• “Frankenstein” – Edgar Winter Group
• “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper” – Blue Oyster Cult
• “Bad Moon Rising – Creedence Clearwater Revival (because of its use as the end title in “An American Werewolf in London”, still one of my top two favorite werewolf movies)
• “Thriller” – Michael Jackson
• “Werewolves of London” – Warren Zevon
• “A Transylvanian Rhapsody from Young Frankenstein” – Gil Shaham and Jonathan Feldman (this is a truly marvelous piece, built around the short theme that calms the monster in the movie)
• “Moon Over Bourbon Street” – Sting
• “Fire on High” – Electric Light Orchestra (Oh come on, it’s totally spooky!)
• “Godzilla” – Blue Oyster Cult
• “Hotel California” – Eagles
• Title theme from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (the series)
• Title theme from “Forever Knight” (the series)
• “El Dorado” – Donovan (It’s Poe, that’s why)
• “Black Magic Woman” – Carlos Santana
• “Don’t Pay the Ferryman” – Chris deBurgh
• “Tam Lin” – Steeleye Span (I find their version bears up under repeated listening better than Fairport Convention’s, which gets a bit plodding. This is the 10-minute live version from “Spanning the Years”, with the really spooky ending.)
• “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” – Bauhaus
• Title theme from “The Addams Family” (the original series)

Albums

• “Tales of Mystery and Imagination – The Alan Parsons Project.
• “Classics from the Crypt” – one of any number of “spooky-classics” CDs (they all basically have the same material: Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, The Sorceror’s Apprentice, Funeral March of a Marionette, Night on Bald Mountain…)
• “Vampire Circus” – a collection of themes from vampire movies. I grabbed this one in particular over any of the dozens of other similar ones mostly because (a) I found it used, and (b) it had one really unusual theme – the end titles from “Sundown: the Vampire in Retreat”, a fairly campy Vampire Western starring David Carradine and Bruce “Army of Darkness” Campbell. The theme shifts from standard vampire flick to Aaron Copland-esque to full-fledged cowboy movie style before it’s done. Well worth a listen.
• “A Night in the Old Marketplace” – Frank London. Mr. London is a renowned klezmer musician, writer and arranger, and here he has created what has to be one of the oddest and most thoroughly engaging projects I’ve come across in years – a klezmer operetta based on a hundred-year-old ghost story by the Jewish playwright I. L. Peretz.