Hella Halloween : A Petrifying Playlist

Happy Halloween weekend. Here’s a playlist I started in 2015 when I was heavily in a really weird phase of musical life where I was listening to *only* new wave music and Nancy & Lee (I… have no idea) which, the former, now, just makes me think of Halloween. Added more recently discovered scary songs, terrifying tunes, and monstrous melodies.

Also including a short list of my favorite Halloweenish media:

📚 House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
I like to re-read House of Leaves once a year, with a notebook full of tons of scribbles, notes, questions, and theories at my side. Highly recommend the accompanying teleplays if you’ve already dug deeply into HoL – a few hints are revealed to keep you spinning down that labyrinth. Make sure you listen to Mark’s sister POE’s album Haunted which is an essential companion piece and just adds to the puzzle and layers upon layers of mystery enshrouding this family about this book about a film about a house.
🎦The Blackcoat’s Daughter
Directed by Osgood Perkins and scored by Elvis Perkins, this beautifully shot and continuously chilling film contains subtle nods to my favorite film of all time, Psycho starring the Perkins brothers’ late father.
📚 Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille
The man practically invented abjection, the human fascination with the grotesque – the sensation and ambivalence of being simultaneously attracted and repelled by viscera, the debased, all that we humans pretend to be separated from but what actually keeps us alive. Extremely NSFW and not for the uh Catholics, probably (although likely they’d secretly love it).
🎦Stoker
Intentionally or not, this 2013 thriller directed by Park Chan-wook contains many Bataillean references – eggs, eyes, sheets blowing in the wind, an obsession with the forbidden, and murderous convictions. Haunting, beautiful, disturbing.
📚 In a Dark Place by Lorraine Warren, Ed Warren, & Ray Garton
You know those paranormal investigators from the Annabelle movies? Well, they were real people, and they wrote a book that then became a Discovery channel special (A Haunting in Connecticut), and then a movie (also A Haunting in Connecticut). The TV show fucked me up, and the movie was further fictionalized. The real story though, is much more fucked up and disturbing than what they could show on TV or in the movie. It’s bad.

Photo is from Dr. Thomas Glendenning Hamilton and Lillian May Hamilton’s Groups I-III, #9, Five-Face Teleplasm, 1928
University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections, Hamilton Family Fonds