For today’s horror song of the day, we have the main title track for 1980’s The Shining. Composed by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind, this music perfectly capture the ominous grandeur of the Overlook Hotel and the snowy mountains that surround it.
It’s also a great song to play at the start of any road trip. Scare the Hell out of your friends. It’s fun!
This is not a Halloween song per se but it still feels appropriate for the season. Chloe sings that she’d rather go to Hell and have fun than go to Heaven and be bored. It sounds like someone just took a class on Paradise Lost.
“This is my job!”
I remember I saw a play in college where Hell was represented by lighting filters that were as red as my glorious hair. Unfortunately, someone screwed up and even the scenes that weren’t taking place in Hell were tinted red. Afterwards, I told the film’s cast, “You all were in Hell the entire time!” and they thought I was just referring to how much they disliked appearing in the play.
Today’s song of the day is Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Barry Adamson.
This instrumental work appeared on the soundtrack for David Lynch’s 1997 film, Lost Highway, and its one of my favorite pieces of music. It’s amongst the songs that I tend to play whenever I’m dealing with writer’s block or if I just need an extra boost of energy to finish up a project. This song also seems like the perfect way to kick off the second half of October and our annual horrorthon!
I also have to say that the video below, which was put together by Jessie Essex, is amazingly cool.
This video definitely has a decadent Halloween sort of feel to it. One gets the feeling that it’s actually about an ancient pagan priestess come back to life, to the appreciation of her adoring fans.
Technically, this isn’t a Halloween or a horror video, unless you live in California and you really hate the rain. But the foggy imagery and the deserted streets and the nighttime cinematography are definitely appropriate for the season.
Listening to this song, I thought it sounded exactly like the type of music that I like and that I wish more bands were performing. Then I read the comments on YouTube, full of people praising the band and video for embracing a retro aesthetic and I realized that, today, retro means anything that I thought was cool in the years before I hit 20
Never before have I felt so old. I know it happens to everyone eventually but I still had no idea that it would be the YouTube commentariat who would plunge me to straight into a midlife crisis.
This song is off of Ghost Cop’s 2nd album, Trouble, which was released on October 4th. For those who may not have heard of them before (and they’re new to me as well), Ghost Cop is based in New York and is comprised of Sean Dack and Lucy Swope. I like Ghost Cop’s sound and I look forward to discovering more of their music.
Dack and Swope are not only Ghost Cop but they also directed this video.
Because I’m getting old and I still don’t want to admit that the music I grew up with is now considered to be “classic” rock, this South Bay band is new to me but I like their sound and I like this video, which feels like a throwback to the days before music got boring and corporate.
I found an interview in which the lead singer (and director of the video) Meriel O’Connel had this to say about Poison:
The song is about society being subjected to constant overwhelming stimulus on our phones, devices, etc that creates this culture of comparison, disposability, and lack of fulfillment in our daily lives. There’s another component where these companies and corporations who push apps, social media, etc aren’t making these things just for fun, it’s all for profit. To keep us searching for more rather than being satisfied by ourselves and our immediate surroundings, and ultimately them knowing & tracking everything about us algorithmically.
It’s this lack of escapism that makes it more difficult for us to turn inwards & go into our own internal lives and spaces, and makes us place value on what we’re putting out externally rather than consider how we can be internally fulfilled, fill up our own cups.