Songs That Once Spooked Me: A Halloween List

Last night, I watched a horror movie double-feature in honor of perhaps my favorite holiday, Halloween. It's not a huge contest for Lons' Favorite Holiday, just so you know. I hate all the Jew holidays, because they are all, every single one, depressing. Even the happy ones are only happy because something really depressing didn't happen.

Take Purim. This is the Jew equivalent of Easter, a Springtime celebration of renewal. Christians celebrate the resurrection of their Lord around this time of the year, and Jews celebrate the fact that once upon a time there was a really really evil guy named Haman who wanted to kill them all...but then he didn't! And now we eat three-cornered cookies called Hamentaschen (meaning Haman's Hat) that look nothing like a hat. Oh, and we wave around this bizarre fruit called lulov and egrog or some such nonsense inside a thatched hut we've constructed the day before.

Seriously. This is as ritualistic, primitive and ludicrous as lax American Judaism gets.

That's a stupid holiday. Halloween doesn't even have to work so hard to kick Purim's ass. It doesn't hurt, as well, that it's the patron holiday of horror movies. As someone who enjoys a nice gory horror movie year-round, I welcome a day set aside throughout the country for others to join me in watching splatterfests, grindhouse features, slasher films and giallos.

So, anyway, long story long, last night I watched the classic George C. Scott haunted house movie The Changeling and John Carpenter's original Halloween. I fell asleep about 3/4 of the way through that second film (don't worry...I've seen it before...), and woke up as the end credits were playing.

There's something rather unsettling about waking up in a darkened room at 3 in the morning to the sounds of John Carpenter's eerie synth theme to Halloween. (Trust me, even if you don't think you know it, you know it from 100,000,000 horror movie previews). It reminded me of being a little boy.

You see, when I was a kid, I would listen to the radio as I fell asleep. I guess I was a nervous, exictable sort, even when I was young, because I used to find getting a good, solid night's rest quite difficult. I would actually lie in bed at night and worry about whether or not I'd be able to fall asleep. Weird, no? But what do you actually do about that situation? The more you think about it, force yourself not to worry, the more you are, in fact, worrying.

Frequently, my solution to this dilemma would be to wake my parents up for no reason. Eventually, they devised a different plan - by listening to the radio, I could distract myself long enough to doze off. It kind of worked most of the time, except that, for whatever reason, certain songs would creep me out, there, alone, in the dark in the middle of the night when it seemed like the whole world was asleep.

Much of it has to do with how weird popular music was during this time period (roughly 1984-1988). Nowadays, I'd probably just hear Gwen Stefani declare that she was not, in fact, no hollaback girl, whatever the fuck that means. But back in '87, you were far more likely to hear some weird, Dio-esque power ballad about love in the time of the Vikings as you were 50 Cent inviting you to the candy shop.

So, after perhaps the longest and sloppiest introduction in Crushed By Inertia History, I present the songs that freaked me out as a young child listening to Top 40 radio late at night. You know, in honor of Halloween (it's all there in the first paragraph...)

Owner of a Lonely Heart by Yes

Something about the timbre of Jon Anderson's voice, or the weird freak-out synth part after he yells "Heeeeeeeeaaaaarrrrrrrrrttt!!!" used to genuinely rattle my young mind. Once or twice, I did have to get out of bed and turn off the radio when this song came on. I still don't like it, but it's hard to imagine what bothered me so much about it at 8 years old. I think maybe I was taking the lyrics to literally, imaging a man who actually owned someone's heart. Say, keeping it inside a heart-shaped box.

Thriller by Michael Jackson

I really liked this song. Still do. But when it was late at night and I was trying to go to sleep, the Vincent Price bit at the end used to bug me intensely. The song would come on, and I'd decide I was going to finally grow up and be a man and listen to the whole song without getting out of bed to turn it off, but then VP would come on informing me that darkness had fallen across the land, and that the midnight hour was close at hand. (I think this used to double unnerve me because quite often the midnight hour would be close at hand, which really drove the notion of zombie/werewolf violence home).

King of Pain by The Police

It was the very very beginning of this song that freaked me out. "There's a little black spot on the sun today...It's the same old thing as yesterday..." Why is that concept scary? What did it even mean? I have no idea. Even today, with Sting at his most nasal and the band totally quiet and then building to a crescendo behind him, that part's a little strange. During the day, I could listen to this song no problem, but I would turn off the radio the second I knew it was coming on.
Mexican Radio by Wall of Voodoo

There is absolutely nothing scary about this song. 9 year old me was kind of a pussy.

Invisible Touch by Genesis

Am I going to be really embarrassed by this list tomorrow? Maybe you all should pretend you haven't read this. Anyway, this is clearly a case of a metaphor going over my young head. See, Phil Collins says "She seems to have an invisible touch/She reaches in and comes out holding your heart/She seems to have an invisible touch/She takes control and slowly tears you apart."

He means she's a cold-blooded woman who has left him, and he's heartsick. I thought he was discussing some female version of Mola Ram actually reaching into men's stomachs to remove vital organs. Which I now realize would be a far cooler song. Also, this was the same album as "Land of Confusion," which spawned that hideous, bizarre Reagan-puppet-head music video, which TOTALLY used to give me nightmares.

Little China Girl by David Bowie

I really like this song now, but as a kid, I hated the part where David Bowie goes "shhhhhhhhh." Oh, David, just you shut your mouth.

At This Moment by Billy Vera and the Beaters

Okay, maybe this song didn't so much spook me as annoy me, but I used to dread hearing it more than any other song that would ever come on the radio. Maybe that's just because it used to come on the radio so goddamn much. And it's a terrible song! Did you know, in 1986, it was at the top of the Billboard charts for a while? The top! A #1 song.

You may not remember "At This Moment." It features Billy, a white guy soul crooner, singing a bunch of verses that begin "What did you think I would do at this moment" Except he doesn't say "do at this moment." He says "dooooooooooooo at this mo-meeeeeeennnnnt." At one point, he wails something like, "If you'd stay, I'd subtract 20 years from my life..."

As a young person with no conception of romantic love, this concept was very strange to me. He'd actually be willing to die 20 years earlier if this woman would stay with him? Forever, or just for a little while? Now, I realize it's just that kind of sentiment balladeers throw into love songs all the time.

There is a genuinely haunting, eerie quality to the song, aside from the fact that it just isn't very good.

Somebody's Watching Me by Rockwell

This is a tremendous song. Did you know that Rockwell is actually Kenneth Gordy, Motown founder Berry Gordy's son, and that the backing vocals on this track are done by Michael and Jermaine Jackson? Anyway, I still really like it. Classic 80's R&B.

I used to hate it because it reminded me of a scary story I had read in a random book once that had always stuck with me, stood out as particularly terrifying. I don't even remember the book. But it had this story about a little boy who heard a voice talking to him at night. And his parents would come in and look all around the room and show him that there was nothing there, and then leave. Eventually, after they did this a few times, the boy relaxed, safe in the knowledge that no one was in the room with him.

"Thank goodness," says the boy. "There's nobody here but me."

"AND ME!" responds a deep voice from his closet.

That's how the story ends. It touched a nerve in me. The idea that your senses and rationality could deceive you. That there's a man or a monster in the closet and the parents didn't see him, even with the lights on. Basically, it's that fear that the rational order of the universe is imperfect or uncertain, that everything we accept could disappear, or be proved wrong.

Anyway, it used to really bug me. I would look around the room and see no one was there, and then lie down and think about what might be right behind my head, out of my field of vision. And here was this catchy pop song about that very concept!