Featured Essay: When the Monster Mash Met My Mixtape

by Drex

I’ve always measured October not by the calendar but by the sound of eerie synths, offbeat laughter, and the occasional thunderclap that sneaks through my speakers. The first sign of Halloween for me isn’t the plastic pumpkins in stores, it’s when I drop the needle on “Monster Mash” and the familiar crackle announces spooky season is officially open.

Growing up, Halloween music wasn’t just background noise. It was a gateway into my earliest love of records. My dad had this old, slightly warped copy of Monster Mash and Other Terrifying Tunes, its sleeve worn and splitting at the corners. Every October, he’d dig it out like it was a family heirloom. The moment the stylus hit the groove, our living room turned into a haunted dance floor, complete with awkward zombie shuffles and dramatic werewolf howls from me and my siblings.

But what stuck with me wasn’t just the songs. It was the imperfections, the skips, the static, the way the laughter in “Witch Doctor” sometimes caught on repeat so that “Oo-ee-oo-ah-ah” became “Oo-ee-oo-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah” until someone gently lifted the arm and set it back down. Those tiny errors felt alive, like the ghosts trapped in the vinyl were improvising.

Years later, when I started collecting records for myself, I realized that same haunted charm followed me into adulthood. My Halloween playlist grew darker, moodier. I swapped novelty for nostalgia (Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cramps, and the occasional revisit to Thriller). But no matter how sophisticated my taste pretended to be, that old “Monster Mash” spirit still lingered. There’s something comforting about how ridiculous and sincere Halloween music is, the way it refuses to take itself too seriously, even as it flirts with the macabre.

One October a few years back, I found a copy of Thriller at a thrift store, original pressing, slight water damage, but playable. The price tag said $8. I bought it without thinking twice. When I got home and set it spinning, I braced for the Vincent Price monologue, but what caught me instead was the faint pop and hiss before each track. It was like I was listening to someone else’s October from decades ago. Maybe that record had soundtracked another kid’s costume party, or played in a shop window while ghosts and goblins strolled by. Vinyl carries memories you can’t hear on streaming, it breathes other people’s pasts into your present.

That’s what Halloween music does best. It doesn’t try to be timeless; it just keeps haunting you in new ways. Every generation remixes it, from novelty records to goth anthems, to electronic soundscapes and lo-fi “haunted house” loops that pop up on Bandcamp every October. But the feeling remains the same: a playful flirtation with fear, wrapped in rhythm and reverb.

I think that’s why I still hunt for Halloween vinyl specifically. There’s a thrill in flipping through dusty bins in late September, hoping to find some obscure pressing, maybe Halloween Horrors Sound Effects Vol. II or Disney’s Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House. Sometimes I come up empty-handed, and sometimes I hit gold like the time I found a translucent orange 7-inch of “Ghostbusters.” It was so warped it looked like it had melted in the sun, but when I played it, it worked. The warble actually made it sound spookier, like the ghosts were singing through molasses.

Collecting Halloween records has turned into its own annual ritual. Each new find feels like adding a scene to an ongoing story, part campfire tale, part love letter to imperfection. I even started making my own Halloween mixtapes on vinyl, blending field recordings of creaking doors, snippets of 80s horror soundtracks, and that unmistakable laughter from the original Monster Mash. When I play it for friends, they laugh, then pause, and then you can see it, that spark of recognition. They’ve heard that laughter before, somewhere in their own Octobers.

Vinyl makes memories tactile. The grooves themselves are fingerprints of sound, each pop, hiss, or skip tells a story. And Halloween, of all seasons, deserves to sound a little imperfect. It’s not about pristine audio fidelity; it’s about atmosphere, about that spine-tingling feeling that something old and strange is whispering through the speaker.

This October, as I cue up my seasonal stack: Thriller, Bela Lugosi’s Dead, Ghostbusters, and of course Monster Mash, I’m reminded that Halloween isn’t really about fear, It’s about play. It’s about giving in to the weird, the offbeat, and the joy of pretending. And maybe that’s why I’ll never outgrow it.

Because for me, the real magic of Halloween music isn’t the ghosts in the lyrics, it’s the ghosts in the grooves.

Drex is a writer drawn to the quiet intersections of memory, music, and emotion.. the places where sound becomes story and nostalgia hums beneath the skin. His work often walks a fine line between the real and the imagined, exploring how songs, records, and fleeting moments can turn into lifelong companions.

For him, writing is a way of listening (to the echoes of old sounds, to the ghosts of what once mattered, to the strange comfort that lingers in silence after the last note fades). He’s endlessly fascinated by how certain melodies cling to memory, how a single track can summon a season, a person, or a feeling we thought we’d long forgotten.

When he’s not writing, Drex can be found chasing stories in music, sketching ideas, or sitting with a playlist that feels a little too haunted to turn off. His work often leans into the reflective and the uncanny, not in the horror sense, but in the way life itself can sometimes feel like a familiar song played backwards.