Halloween Discussion Forums, Costumes, Horror!

I am totally sure there was another thread like this but I don't remember what it was called. Maybe you can tell us a little about some scary records you know. Speaking from my own experience, I don't know of anything current, but I remember a lot of spooky Halloween records from the 70's. I even have a couple of records I bought on Ebay, things I used to have when I was a little kid.

Two major categories are: A. Spooky stories and B. Spooky sound effects. Some records are a combination of A and B. Sound effects will set up an atmosphere that gets your imagination working--they create mood and tone. And stories will lay the whole scene out for you, characters and all. I like stuff in these two categories a lot.

Then there is another category, C. Spooky Songs. I'm not as much a fan of category C because frankly, I think most Halloween type songs have trouble being really spooky. They often end up being silly.


Disney's "Thrilling, Chilling Sounds of the Haunted House" (late 60's) was a very popular album I remember MANY MANY people having. And Pickwick Records' "Sounds To Make You Shiver" was very popular in the 70's, partly because it had very attractive, lively cover artwork. I think a lot of people bought this because the album cover was so colorful. You can find both these records on Ebay...

tomanderson,

see my new post in the "I Have An Idea" thread. I think you'll especially enjoy it.

Hey Tom, check out the $1 stores around Halloween. I bought about 10 or 12 CDs of various things like you are talking about. No category C, but all sounds or stories. I thought they were pretty neat. Some were cheesy of course, but some were awesome...and for $1 you can't beat it.

I did actually get a CD from the dollar store this year, it was cool because it had a mixture of things...some spooky songs, mainly (including "The Monster Mash" and Sheb Wooley's "Purple People Eater," two pretty good monster songs) but it also had a sound effects track. I bet you found one of these, right? Not bad for a dollar!

It used to be that you could hunt around in thrift stores and used record stores for old Halloween recordings. You sort of still can, but the majority of everything seems to be on Ebay! And some of it is cheap...(I look for the listings in Ebay stores because they have fixed prices, so there is no bidding and waiting). It amazed me when I looked up "Sounds To Make You Shiver" and found a copy that was $2 plus $5 postage, or something like that. I ordered that, and it was in fairly decent shape. I could hardly believe it because I hadn't heard that record in, jeez, soooo many years.

The BBC sound effects library has a whole lp dedicated to Halloween sounds...with a trillion bands on it lasting about ten seconds sometimes..I think it's called SOUNDS OF DEATH AND HORROR...VERY VERY cool cover art on it.
Basil Rathbone did an AMAZING reading of Edgar Allen Poe for lp..for a while, available on Camden..don't know if it made the jump to CD...I'd suppose it did...
LIGHTS OUT the old radio show, is around on a lot of labels...
SUSPENSE is also out there on a few labels as well...