Welcome to 2026's 31 Days of Heistoween, a daily dose of spooky icons, spine-tingling oddities, and — most harrowing of all — memes. Check back every day from now through October 31 for each daily entry!
While Halloween lags behind Christmas in terms of having distinctive songs dedicated to the holiday, Halloween as a holiday more than makes up for it via a huge volume of songs which are "Halloween-ish," songs which, while not as directly connected to the spirit of the season as Christmas Carols, nevertheless channel the general sentiment of Halloween in various ways.
As a result, whereas Christmas songs tend to either be or not be a Christmas song, building a Halloween playlist involves a lot more decisions about whether or not a song "counts." With that in mind, here is the logic (or perhaps "logic") which governs the contents of my Halloween playlist.
Songs or Scores?
I'm going to lose a lot of you right off the bat: the vast majority of music I listen to, when working and writing and otherwise going about my day (unless I'm cooking or driving and not listening to a podcast) are film scores. So while I do have a (much smaller) playlist of lyrical Halloween songs (including such no-brainers as "Monster Mash," "Ghostbusters" and "Season of the Witch"), these rules govern inclusions to my much larger Halloween film scores playlist.
Rule #1 - Is it Halloween?
Starting broad (and easy): Does the film score in question belong to a movie set on or during, or which is about, Halloween? Is it the kind of movie that a cable channel, your Freeforms or AMCs, are likely to throw on specifically during the month of October? If yes, then it makes the playlist.
Obviously, this gets us stuff like John Debney's Hocus Pocus score (which, honestly, is pretty boilerplate), a movie set on Halloween; or The Corpse Bride, a movie about a, uh, a corpse bride; and this also gets us to the superlative Vince Guaraldi score to It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. This is also how stuff like Danny Elfman's Beetlejuice and Sleepy Hollow scores (two movies not explicitly set at or about Halloween, but which are often presented as Halloween movies) scores make it onto the list.
Rule #2 - Is it scary?
No genre of film is more associated with Halloween than horror, even when the contents of the movies aren't directly related to the holiday. Outside of the Ur-slasher, John Carpenter's aptly-named Halloween (more on that below), there's nothing specifically Halloween-y about the Friday the 13th and Nightmare and Elm Street movies, yet their scores make the cut. Ditto the scores of the Scream series, and many M. Night Shyamalan scores (definitely Sixth Sense; not so much Unbreakable).
Space horror is still horror, so that gets us Jerry Goldsmith's iconic score to Alien (and by extension, all its various sequels, even though Aliens is 100% an action movie above all else).
Rule #3 - Are there monsters?
Most monster movies fall into the horror category, so stuff like the scores of various classic monster movies starring the likes of Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolfman are already covered, from their classic Universal beginnings to the Hammer Horror of the 70s to the more modern retellings ("Vampire Hunters," from the score of Bram Stoker's Dracula, is an all-timer), and, of course, Monster Squad (whose score is admittedly pedestrian).
This is also how Ghostbusters — a movie that once only made the rounds on cable during October but has become more far-reaching of late, especially with a sequel set explicitly on New Year's Eve — makes the cut, since it's about, you know, ghosts.
But not all monster movies are horror movies, so this rule allows the inclusion of stuff like Godzilla and King Kong scores. It also grants access to the score from Signs (not all alien movies are monster movies, but the aliens in Signs are definitely presented as monsters). I don't include Jaws — as a movie, it's so firmly rooted in the summer that I can't consider it a Halloween movie, even if the shark counts as a movie monster — but it has a case.
Rule #4 - Did I ever dress up like it for Halloween?
Here's where it gets really personal: if I dressed up as a thing for Halloween, and that thing appears in movies, those movies scores are eligible for the Halloween playlist. Thus, the vast swath of Batman scores (who I dressed up as when I was four), including everything from Batman '66 to the animated series to Matt Reeves' Batman, make the cut.
In 5th grade (the year of the '91 blizzard; ask a Minnesotan, we love to talk about it), I was a pirate. So enter the Hans Zimmer & Klaus Badelt scores to the various Pirates of the Carribean movies (this rule also extends to the underrated David Grusin score to The Goonies, because it indirectly involves pirates).
Rule #5 - Does it feel like Halloween?
AKA the Herrmann/Elfman Clause, or the Vibes Rule.
Some scores feature no monsters, no horror elements, no connections to a Halloween costume past or an explicitly Halloween setting, yet still feel like they belong on a Halloween playlist. You can make a case for Psycho as a horror film and a foundational text of the slasher genre (with those wicked strings as "mother" attacks Marion in the shower unequivocally associated with Halloween), but there's nothing horrific or monster-based in Vertigo. Yet Bernard Herrmann's score feels like it belongs to Halloween almost as much as his Psycho score does.
Similarly, Edward Scissorhands isn't really a Halloween movie (if anything, it's a Christmas movie). Yet with so much Danny Elfman on the list already (thanks to Beetlejuice, Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride, the Batman films), the elegiac and haunting Scissorhands score feels right at home on a Halloween playlist.
The Halloween Rule
Finally, whether you're constructing a Halloween playlist composed only of film scores, "regular" songs, or both, it absolutely must start with the main title to John Carpenter's Halloween, which is the perfect audio amuse-bouche for whatever aural feast is to come. This should be a law.
What rules govern your Halloween playlists? Let us know on Bluesky.
Come knock on our door tomorrow for even more 31 Days of Heistoween treats.
If you haven't already, consider supporting worker-owned media by subscribing to Pop Heist's newsletter or leaving a tip. We are ad-free and operating outside the algorithm, so all dollars go directly to paying the staff members and writers who make articles like this one possible.
