Two Spooky Playlists For ALL Your Gay Halloween Music Needs

They’re heeeeeere! Last week, I asked you to tell me your favorite spooky songs. And primarily because of SUPERHERO COMMENTERS Lex and Snow, as well as a handful of the rest of you, I had literally about 200 songs to create a playlist from!

But! I realized that some of y’all are way spookier than me. I’m actually not that spooky at all! And I figured not all of our readers can be that spooky. Some people just want a nice casual playlist for their Halloween party!

So, I decided to split all of the song suggestions into two playlists. Up first:

Spooky Playlist #1: Casuals:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7qaY4aBXCExmpcVTCgXwx0?si=SFuaDpoaRa-y-owWWWu3Kw

The idea is that this playlist — over five hours long — is a decent playlist for your next Halloween party! The songs evoke spookiness or are explicitly about Halloween, spooky creatures, or dark topics — but aren’t genuinely scary. There are (hopefully, if I curated correctly) no demonic backwards voices, ear-shattering metal walls of sound, spoken word descriptions of murder, or things like that! There’s pop music, and quite a bit of other stuff, on this playlist.

Now, let’s say that is all too tame. You want the really creepy stuff. You want to have a soundtrack to your genuinely scary haunted house, for example! Then this one’s for you:

Spooky Playlist #2: Really Genuinely Creepy Stuff

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/30BKUc9WoH6DdlMqN4TT13?si=oWRtcifnTfWOrQB49_pnJA

Well, Lex and Snow really have you covered, and here are a handful of genuinely scary songs that I couldn’t even generally finish listening to because they creeped me out too much. There’s a Dracula soundtrack song, songs that sound like mental illness, or too-accurately describe mental illness, jump scares, really intense, punishing metal, really intense, punishing industrial, sinister whispers, harsh, grating techno, a weird Russian lullaby, cultish chanting, screams, droning, pulsating noise, and more things I can’t really classify.

This second playlist… I don’t really know what to say. It really unnerves me. Which is the point, I think! Don’t listen to it if you have a less-hardened constitution, like me.

Now, most of these artists are not gay, but Halloween is gay, so these are both big gay playlists!

Regardless of which playlist you choose, or you use both, or use these as starting points and add a bunch of other songs that didn’t make the cut (either because I was trying to keep it to one song per artist if I could or the songs just don’t exist on Spotify, as was the case a few times), or whatever, here you go!

Now, if you wanted to comment with what’s missing, and create another list of a bunch of other songs, in case some of you want to start here and build the greatest spooky song compendium ever, then feel free! But I won’t be making a playlist of them, because… there are seven hours of spooky songs across these playlists, y’all. That’s enough for me, personally, for this Halloween.

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Abeni Jones

Abeni Jones is a trans woman of color artist, educator, writer, and designer living in the Bay Area, CA.

Abeni has written 91 articles for us.

35 Comments

  1. Heeeeey we’re genuine creepy! Thanks Abeni! Now I need to find a friend who has spotifiy to actually play the list

  2. Abeni YOU are also a superhero for listening to all of these and putting them in curated order for us! Thank you!

    As a certified wuss I am proud that one of my suggestions ended up on the extra-creepy list.

    • Yes, cheers to Abeni! Music is instrumental for a fulfilling life (bump and set, @chandra)

      As a certified… creep? I am proud that 8 or so of mine made it on the casual spook list!

  4. Ugh, yas! This is so satisfying. Thanks for throwing these playlist together.

    Y’all really got me into the Halloween spirit!

      • It’s not really work if you got the MAD PASSION

        But thank you again! Keep up the good work with the music articles!

      • It was only work in that I had to rein the UberUrsula Id back into the scrawny mortal meatsuit, you had to sift thru the mess and make something of it.

  7. I’m DELIGHTED the Horrorpops and vintage Halloween actual facts rockabilly made the casual cut.
    Really wasn’t sure where the dark synthwave was gunna end up, I’m not the best judge of what is and isn’t a punishing drive in electronic music cuz music is my go-go juice, death metal bores me and electronic doesn’t have clear lines voltage like say metal and caffeine products do.

    @snowfell The departure from their usual style is part of what makes Kiss Eternal such a gem to me, it’s like sugared up mall goth suddenly gracefully showing up in a brocade corset, real velvet and table manners.
    (Couldn’t respond in thread anymore, all the embedded vids were giving my poor old computer fits.)

    • Listen Lex I ALSO didn’t know where to put a lot of things, some of the techno/EDM/whatever you call it seemed like it could go either way!!!

      • Keeping the names/genres/ancestry of electronic stuff in order IS HARD, it’s something that grew so independently of the regular music industries that label stuff that if you don’t make music or what characterizing by 4/4 rhythm and tempo bpm makes no sense, for the record I only know what bpm means.

        The dark synthwave I picked is 80’s cheesy scary movie inspired, the only reason I even can remember the name is because it has that 80’s sorta synth sound despite how hard and fast some of it can be. I just don’t have the best sense of what’s hard and what’s HARDDDD.

    • You made a good effort, Abeni! I’m glad you were open to stuff outside your comfort zone.
      :)

      Hey Lex! I agree, and that’s a great description. I’ve seen them blast it out live twice! Never got to see them with Jade, unfortunately, but they came through on tour with Orgy and the Genitorturers back in March right before my first surgery, and it was a great show. ~ Props to Gen for being such a sweet person, and being so supportive of trans people. yay!

        • Lex, please do check out more Genitorturers! I’ve talked to Gen at every show I’ve seen them at, and she always remembers me. She’s buds with Danica Roem! She supports trans artists! Too many exclamation marks!
          Here we are three days before my vaginoplasty –

  8. Ok this is now driving me BONKERS – there is a song I used to hear in clubs all the time in the late 90s/early 2000s that sounded almost exactly like “Blood is Pumping” except that the… “doodoodoodoo” riff part(?) gradually rose in pitch to a crescendo that turned everybody into manic dance freaks, myself included. I’ve Googled for 40 minutes now and cannot find it. Does anybody know what I’m talking about???

          • My EDM exposure of that era came from this lazer tag place that was killed by Katrina and nothing they played had a pitch near ear-splitting.

            Sandstorm is supposedly textbook “trace” that might help you narrow things down.
            Got my sympathies I know the experience have a song stuck in your head that you just can’t find very well.

  9. Wow, this is very spooky and very comprehensive! The only other song I could think of that fits this theme is Against Me!’s song Dead Rats, which I think is about dealing with having a punk rock witch as an ex-wife.
    Here is a fan video version featuring a girl getting progressively Goth-er: https://youtu.be/PfX-YxePC_A

    • If you liked Black Crown by FLESH it’s a genre called witch house, youtube has a lot of witch house mixes, but they are VERY mixed spooky bags.

      Android Lust is the work of Shikhee D’iordna, the way NiN is the work of Trent Reznor and her musical career is about as long too.

  11. I’ve made the possible mistake of joining spotify, am in the process of building a monster sized retro and vintage Halloween playlist in which Harry Belafonte shows up 3 times and is my really odd pennies from heaven moment for my grandmother who I didn’t know until after she died last December was a big fan of cuz she was legally deaf my whole life.

    Probably wouldn’t be having this oddball heartwarming moment if you Abeni hadn’t endeavored to make a Halloween playlist based off of straddler suggestions.

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