Scary songs to play in the dark

How a drunkenly recorded Halloween song invented shock rock, American parenting dread, and the best spooky songs.

“On a hot summer night, would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses?”

“Yes!”

“I bet you say that to all the boys.”

Easily the best Halloween-themed song — aside from the 7 second 30 Rock gag song “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah”¹ — is Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ 1956 classic “I Put a Spell On You.”

There are dozens of great versions of it²: the most beautiful is Nina Simone’s, but Creedence Clearwater Revival and Annie Lennox both did solid renditions, and Bette Midler’s version of it remains the only watchable part of 1993’s godawful Hocus Pocus. But my favorite version remains the original, performed by Hawkins himself.

Prior to the release of this song, Hawkins was a blues singer, and he’d hoped to perform it on the record as a ballad, but the day of the recording, he, his producer, and his band got blackout, knee-walking, shitfaced drunk, and they absolutely massacred the song, with Hawkins grunting and screaming his way through it.

It sounds fucking great, and it ruined Hawkins career. A Cleveland DJ picked up on it and persuaded Hawkins that he should lean into the gimmick by wearing a cape and begin the performance by rising out of a coffin. Hawkins at first balked, saying, “No black dude gets in a coffin alive — they don’t expect to get out!” but he eventually relented after being offered more money. His producers affixed the “Screamin’” moniker to his name, and Hawkins’ performances became absurd, over-the-top, performances in which he leaned into racist voodoo/witch doctor stereotypes (complete with a bone through his nose). The result would be painful to watch if Hawkins wasn’t such an entrancing performer, but either way, the song earned him the ire of mainstream white America, who thought the record was too primitive and sexual, and the ire of the NAACP, who felt Hawkins was cashing in on harmful stereotypes.

Today, Hawkins is recognized as perhaps the earliest figure in what is now known as “Shock Rock,” which was popularized in later decades by the likes of Alice Cooper and Marilyn Manson. His fusion of horror with rock music has had a lasting impact, and “I Put a Spell on You” remains the best spooky Halloween song. Sorry, Thriller.

This week on BS: American Parenting Dread

This week’s article on BS was free to all, so I’m not going to TL;DR it here, but if you missed it, I wrote about the struggle of parenting in an age where it feels like the world is falling apart. Read it here:

I hope everyone had a lovely Halloween! Instead of dropping links this week, I’m posting videos of my favorite spooky season songs.

• My Spotify wrapped this year is going to be almost entirely White Lies, a British post-punk revival band that writes soaring, beautiful songs. Their best is “Death,” which I first heard in this fantastic scene from the Iranian vampire movie A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. The girl in the scene is the vampire, and the scene, in which she toys with the idea of murdering the boy she brought home is just unbelievably good.

• I’ve been obsessed with the Eels’ “Fresh Blood” for years, and was thrilled to find that its music video is just insanely low budget:

• During the Halloween season, my kids love to watch the old Betty Boop cartoons featuring Cab Calloway’s renditions of “St. James Infirmary” and “Minnie the Moocher.” The cartoons — delightfully surreal animations from the era before everything became Disneyfied — feature the “rotoscoping” technique in which they filmed Calloway’s strange dancing style and then drew the cartoon over it. The result, in the “St. James Infirmary” cartoon, is Koko the Clown being magicked into a long-legged dancing ghost, and is one of the spookier things you can get away with showing to a four and six year old.

  Rotoscoping was used many decades later in Richard Linklater’s delightful, hallucinatory Waking Life. Hopefully it’s a method that will keep coming back.

• Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Book of Mormon is a show made up almost entirely of showstoppers, but when me and my wife saw it years back, we were surprised, after listening to the soundtrack for months, that the best performance was not “I Believe,” “Hello!” or “Hasa Diga Eebowai,” but instead was one we’d tended to skip in the soundtrack: “Spooky Mormon Hell Dream.” The song is stupidly fun (and unlike a lot of the show, it hasn’t aged that poorly unless you’re a Mormon), but for some reason, the theatrical version has never been filmed or showcased. So here (“Rectus! Dominus! Spookytus!”) is the audio version.

• Finally, I leave you with the best intro to any rock song ever. Meat Loaf’s 1977 Bat Out of Hell is miraculously one of the best-selling albums of all time, which is astounding, considering just how over-the-top it is. The album, written by Mr. Loaf and his writing partner Jim Steinman (who was also responsible for literally all of the best songs of the 80s, including “Holding Out for a Hero,” “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” and “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)”) wrote an album that sounds like Springsteen would if he’d been a high school theatre kid. Steinman, who famously once said, “If you don’t go over the top, how will you ever see the other side?” started the song with the most ridiculous dialogue you have ever heard. The version on the album is silly enough, but make your day better by watching at least the first minute of this video.

1. Spooky! Scary!

2. I also discovered while writing this article the Alan Price version. Price had been keyboardist for the stupidly underrated proto-garage rock band The Animals, and this was his first popular solo song. It is fantastic.