October 31, 2016

It’s Halloween! And for a lot of us, we’re going to make today count. Whether your tradition is to take the kids trick or treating, or to marathon horror movies and gorge on candy, or to dress up and scare the neighbors, today’s the one day of year where you can proudly let your freak flag fly and bask in the celebration of all things scary.

No doubt, a lot of you will be breaking out the HALLOWEEN movies. Maybe you’ll stick with John Carpenter’s original 1978 masterpiece? Perhaps one of the sequels is your preferred Halloween night feature? Maybe you’ll be brave enough to watch Rob Zombie’s bold vision. But no matter what, it’ll probably be tough to avoid the infamous Michael Myers theme composed by John Carpenter. So we thought why not share with you some of the best covers of this catchy, and terrifying tune.

Here we go!

“Halloween night, in 1963…”

The king of all of them has to be courtesy of You Tube user GoldenTusk, aka comedian extraordinaire Andy Goldenberg. I originally stumbled upon Andy’s work via this amazing Halloween cover where he tells the plot of the movie while singing the actual melody. If you delve further back into his You Tube channel, you’ll find dozens of other similar works of genius with him setting his sights set on films such as BATMAN, MAN OF STEEL, E.T., SAW, JAWS, THE TERMINATOR and more! You’ll also find original shorts, series and more, but nothing will top the brilliance of this rhyming Halloween theme masterpiece!

Here’s a classy multi-screen cover of the Halloween theme by Mark v/d Meulen, composer, guitar player and violinist :

This is easily one of the most famous of the bunch. Famed cellist Tina Guo made a huge splash with her cover and corresponding video of the Halloween theme a few years back. But alas, the Halloween rights holders are vicious and almost all trace of this have been pulled off line. Alas, I found this as a YouTube upload, so enjoy while it’s there!

This heavy metal version is pretty silly, but the video made me laugh, the musicianship is actually pretty darned good, and it’s fun to see Freddy, Michael Myers and Jason rockin’ out.

Celldweller is the alter ego of multi-instrumentalist Klayton, and here, he delivers another pretty cool metal version of the theme to HALLOWEEN in metal form.

Last but certainly not least, I myself record a 7 track EP of HALLOWEEN inspired music for a featurette just after the announcement that Rob Zombie would be doing his remake. So these are slightly more industrial “Zombie-fied” versions, with a few original tracks as well. Only 5 seconds of this entire EP made it into that featurette, but here’s the entire thing for your enjoyment!