Ooooooh Ohhhhh! Aaaaaagghhhhhhhh! Eeeeeeeeeee. Rruuuuuur!
Yes, spooky noises are a staple of All Hallow’s Eve and
rightly so. Where would a truly haunted house be without the
appropriate amount of howls, creaks, screams and other eerie
effects? The sad truth, though, is that these old standbys are
utterly passe. I mean, honestly, no one really worries when they
hear the tired old cliched noises because they’ve been played
out over the last hundred years. So, I’ve taken it upon
myself to search far and wide for ways to rejuvenate the audible
fright factor this lovely Halloween.
There are lots of routes you can take when choosing the
appropriate music to play to scare anyone who comes to your door,
but these are a few of the songs, albums or artists that will
instill fear in passersby.
An easy route would be to go with some creepy hard rock in the
vein of Alice Cooper, Marilyn Manson or Aerosmith post-drug
addictions. But like the old spooky sound tapes, these are all too
predictable and have already passed the apex of their scaring
abilities because of TV saturation (curse you MTV, curse you).
So if you are more of a fright sound connoisseur, I suggest a
more subtle approach. One method of messing with peoples’
heads only requires one song. If you can put your music-playing
apparatus on repeat, then the thing to do is to find a single song,
cut off the last minute of it by downloading it incompletely on
Kazaa, burn it onto a disc, and push play. As people walk by
they’ll hear the song once and be dissatisfied when it
doesn’t end. When they walk by again, they’ll start to
get intensely irritated. If they walk by a third time and
don’t get to hear the end of the song, they will have been
driven mad and will need to be committed to an institution. Good
work. Suggested songs: “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit
You” by the Monkees and “Mmmbop” by Hanson.
There are numerous individual songs by unlikely bands that you
might want to combine on a Halloween disc. Think along the lines of
“Helter Skelter,” (The Beatles: cuddly rock stars or
backward inscribing Satanists?), “Wake Me Up Before You Go
Go,” (I don’t care what you say, anything by Wham is
scary, they’re Wham people, Wham), or “Dancing
Queen” (Americans are scared of Swedes; whether this is
because of ABBA or the imminent threat of a Swedish-American epic
battle for world supremacy, you make the call).
Albums you could play run the gamut from a haunting masterpiece
like Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” which would be both
scary and funny on Halloween, to Aphex Twin’s “Richard
D. James,” the manic beats and poppy electronic noises will
have trick-or-treaters running the other way.
Another way to scare people would be to play music by the
world’s worst band, Travis. This is frightening not so much
because of the music (it’s not so much good or bad as it is a
vapid void), but because if I or someone else with sensitive ears
walks by your house, it might inspire a killing spree in response
to the terrible music. And I hear killing sprees sometimes freak
out the American public.
Then there are the scary women. Anything by Barbara Streisand is
horrifying. Ditto for most things by Bette Midler and Cher,
especially if you can project the music video where she shows off
her butt. Ditto for Julie Andrews (don’t pretend you really
thought the hills were alive with the sound of music and not ritual
animal slaughter).
If none of these ideas work, give you inspiration, or suit your
taste, then my surefire advice to you is to throw on Elliott
Smith’s “Either/Or.” It is 100 percent guaranteed
to frighten everyone by how good it is.