As long as there have been creepy and spooky stories, there has been the music accompanying it. From the days of folklore, to the modern horror or thriller movie, eerie music has always been closely connected to it. In fact, there are elements in the music industry that have since based their entire careers or images upon the scary tales, whether they’ve recorded for soundtracks or not.

This week, the podcast Social Blend has another of our Craniumelody music specials, this time looking at the theme of Halloween music. We made a selection of tunes that fit perfectly in the realm of disturbing, dark, and sinister story-telling.

It’s that time of year again, boys and girls! The temperature has dropped, the leaves have turned from green to varying shades of orange and red; children dress in the guise of their favorite characters, and the flickering of candles show the yellow grins of the jack-o-lanterns adorning the porches of your neighborhood. It’s Halloween, folks, and while there’s plenty of people out there that like cute, plastic pumpkins on their doors, we here at Geeks of Doom like our Halloweens a little more horrifying. So, it’s with this, Halloweekend, that I will be bringing to you a series of horror-themed features that showcase the wicked side of geek entertainment.

In the second installment of what I like to call the Halloweekend of Doom, I will be exploring 13 films that will completely fill your Halloween. Don’t want to stop watching horror movies all day? I’ve got your back, sunshine. From midnight to midnight, this list is chock full of frightening elements. Not all are what I personally consider horror, but they’re all perfect for Halloween.

People are fairly evenly split down the middle when it comes to Rob Zombie‘s brutal horror debut, House of 1000 Corpses. Many seem to love it while just as many have a pretty passionate hatred for it; it really just all depends on how the movie happened to play to you. Looking past your opinion on the film itself, you have to admit: the twisted and deranged world that Zombie created is nightmare-worthy visual accomplishment.

Universal Studios Hollywood has announced that they have partnered up with Zombie himself to create a brand new attraction to their popular yearly event, Halloween Horror Nights. The attraction will be called Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses: In 3D ZombieVision, and will allow entrants to throw on a pair of 3D glasses and make their way through terrifying locations from the movie including Captain Spaulding’s Museum of Monsters and Madmen, the Firefly family residence where our victims first meet the likes of Mama, Baby, and Otis before being turned into questionable works of art like Fishboy, and of course Dr. Satan’s underground lair.

Bob Weinstein, head of The Weinstein Company with his brother Harvey, has announced to the LA Times that they are already developing a third chapter in the re-booted Halloween franchise, that they will be calling Halloween 3-D — a loving tip o’ the cap to ’80s horror threequels.

Shock rocker turned film maker Rob Zombie directed the first two movies in the resurrected franchise, but decided a while back that Halloween II (which opened this weekend) would be his last work in this world. Not to waste any time at all, the Weinsteins say that they already have another director lined up and in-negotiations, who does have experience with horror movies, and has an entirely new vision for Michael Myers — which means this may already be an whole new reboot within the reboot.

Halloween II
Directed by Rob Zombie
Starring Tyler Mane, Brad Dourif, Chris Hardwick, Mark Christopher-Lawrence, Jeffrey Daniel Phillips
Rated R
Released date: August 28, 2009

A few years ago the Halloween franchise was in dire need of a change in direction worse than anything. The logical step from a Hollywood studio standpoint was to take the series’ iconic masked madman Michael Myers back to his roots and start anew. The idea of a remake of the original Halloween wasn’t warmly accepted at first among the franchise’s longtime fans with good reason but the series had long since scraped the bottom of the barrel so clean you could eat off it. The time had come for a new director to take the reins of Michael Myers’ gory exploits and put their own unique spin on the beloved horror series. Musician and filmmaker Rob Zombie was an odd choice for that job and the movie he ultimately delivered in the late summer of 2007 was greeted with the kind of warm enthusiasm Michael Myers usually reserved for his murder victims. I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve seen the remake several times and I even own it on DVD. It’s not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination but I regard it as a fascinating failure possessing greater re-watch value than 95% of the horror remakes being released these days.

Zombie did the best job he could when you consider the circumstances but the slow-burning narrative of his remake’s first two acts was crippled in the third act by the crude insertion of a compact rehash of the original that gave us no time to really get to know the other characters. Even the character of Laurie Strode, one of horror cinema’s greatest heroines, was reduced to a giggly, perky cipher I had little or no sympathy for. Zombie was heavily criticized for attempting to give Michael Myers a detailed origin complete with a broken home, a family who couldn’t give much of a shit about him (with the exception of dear ol’ mum Deborah, a fine performance by the underrated Sheri Moon Zombie, the director’s missus), and a society that has written him off before they even knew him.