Best albums for soundtracking your Halloween festivities

It’s a dream of nightmares.

The menacing synth burbles of “The Thing,” the dark choral sweep of “The Prince of Darkness,” the iconic, pulse-raising repetition of “Halloween”: All are collected on horror auteur/musician John Carpenter’s “Anthology: Movie Themes 1974-1998.”

If you’re looking for an equally ominous and rousing soundtrack for your Halloween festivities, it’s a great to place to start.

But you’ll need more than that.

Here are another five must-have albums to make your All Hallows’ Eve gathering as killer as a certain Jamie Lee Curtis tormentor that Carpenter knows all too well:

Misfits, “Collection 1”

If you’re going to throw a Halloween bash and not soundtrack it with a couple dozen horror punk singalongs featuring brain-lusting space zombies and such, don’t invite us. And if we’re not invited, it’s not really a party, is it?

The Cramps, “Songs the Lord Taught Us”

The Cramps are Halloween personified, albeit with Spanish fly in their trick-or-treat bags as opposed to bite-sized Snickers: a campy, vampy, tawdry, devilishly debauched good time. If “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” doesn’t get you howling at the moon, in fishnets no less, you’re doing it wrong.

Gravediggaz, “6 Feet Deep”

Shovel some dirt on polite sensibilities with this horrorcore classic, where the mating of hardcore hip-hop with B-movie slasher flick tropes births a rap Rosemary’s Baby. Here, rhymes and skulls get busted alike.

Nick Cave, “Murder Ballads”

Nick Cave has always bore the dark-yet-dapper look of a well-heeled undertaker. And one could imagine an abnormally rakish mortician humming these blood-freezing ballads as he’s injecting your corpse with embalming fluid. As the evening progresses and the party slows, this one will ensure that pulses follow suit.

Diamanda Galas, “The Litanies of Satan”

It’s the end of the night, you want everyone out of the house and yet, considering the occasion, you want to send them all home with sleep-crippling nightmares — you know, like a good host. With Galas giving nerve-jabbing voice to the titular Charles Baudelaire poem while sounding as if she’s shrieking in tongues instead of speaking French, your guests will be gone in seconds. Only rub: They probably won’t ever, ever want to come back.

This story was published originally on October 31, 2017. It has been updated.

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.