Music That Actually Scares You

5 Min Read

Welcome to the fourth edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know.

In case your neighbor having skeletons all over their yard, you have no sense of time, or everything being orange all the time didn’t tip you off, today is Halloween, at least here in the states. I can’t imagine buildings from the 1500s being turned into Spirit Halloween stores like the shell of every strip mall is stateside, so I hope for the sake of our European readers y’all don’t dress up as hot nurses or hot dock workers or hot Scooby Doo.

Anyway, this day is also, weirdly enough, kind of a music holiday. Every label, every streaming service, every grocery chain, every dentist office, every bar and grill: Everyone has a Halloween playlist locked and loaded. You know the drill: “Monster Mash!” Haunted sounds that sounded cooler through cassettes in the ‘80s! “Thriller!” That song from Wednesday! If they’re hip, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins!

Don’t worry: I won’t insult your intelligence and give you yet another Halloween playlist to clog up your Google algorithm. Instead, I want to talk about music that is actually scary and maybe be a bit vulnerable with you all.

Ever since the first Viking general (did they have generals?) decided to strap a giant drum to the deck of his warship, music has been used to strike fear into the hearts of men. Imagine you’re a Danish peasant in the fjords, minding your own damn business growing crops, and you hear this:

That’s the soundtrack to The Northman, the underrated 2022 retelling of the Amleth myth—also the basis for Hamlet. The soundtrack was created using only instruments accurate to the time period, so, you can imagine the kind of fear that it might have inspired. It sounds incredibly spooky to me now, and the worst battle I have to face is fitting my Kia Soul into a Trader Joe’s parking lot.

Scaring your enemy must be why every ancient military up until present has blasted music as they descend into battle. The ancient drums of Vikings became marching bands in the Civil War became that guy in Apocalypse Now playing Wagner:

Thinking about scary music also made me think of the first music I was ever truly scared of. But first, that requires we return to the halcyon days of the mid-‘90s. I was about eight or nine years old, and I was hanging on the basketball court of Washington Elementary in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. In my memory, it’s in the fall, and it’s one of those sunny days where you think it’s going to be 80, but instead it’s about 45 degrees. Me and my buddies are huddled together for warmth, and my friend Long pulls out the first CD Walkman I’ve ever seen in the hands of a child. My mom had one, but it was used strictly at our home computer while she used Quicken to pay our bills, and my sister and I were strictly prohibited from using it. Ever. He opens the Walkman to show what CD he’s listening to.

“What band is that?” I ask.

“It’s this rap group from New York City. They’re real life samurais. They kill people with swords. They wear masks, and are the toughest gang in the world,” he says.

“They kill people with swords?,” my friend Matt asks.

“Yeah, they kill everyone that fights them, and one of them cooks food for everyone. He’s the chef,” Long’s cousin Nong chimes in.

“That can’t be real,” I say.

“Oh, it’s real. They’re wanted by the cops, and their music is so good,” Long says.

“Can I listen?,” I ask.

“No way, this Walkman is mine!,” Long said, as he wandered off.

I remember leaving that conversation scared and worried, but sure of a couple things. 1. There is a roaming gang of samurais that is out on the streets, and I should be careful. 2. This samurai gang is so violent, they can release music and nobody can do anything about it. 3. I will never listen to the Wu-Tang Clan.

That’s right folks, the scariest music I’ve ever encountered is the version of Enter the 36 Chambers that existed in my mind as an eight-year-old. It took me years to actually hear the album, since this was pre-high speed internet and pre-Napster. I couldn't have heard it if I wanted to. The vision of swordsmen cutting people down in NYC persisted in my head canon until I was a late teen, when I got obsessed with Supreme Clientele and worked my way back through their catalog.

As we get older, what we fear evolves, becomes more diffuse. I used to be terrified of a story I half remember from Unsolved Mysteries about a teenager being kidnapped by a cult in the middle of the night (I was naïve as a kid, sorry; I assumed the show was journalism). Now I fear rolling my ankle on a curb, fear my dog getting a tick, fear running into a group of teenagers, fear sleeping weird and having my day ruined. Halloween is fun because it’s fear we can control; it’s fun to be play worried about giant spiders, Freddie Krueger, and mummies.

Music is a crucial part of that. Halloween playlists allow us to choose the music we think of as scary. Me, I’d rather return to being terrified “Method Man” was first person non-fiction, sure that I’m in imminent danger of being sliced down by evil rappers.