Halloween always means dressing up, indulging our sweet tooths, or watching countless horror movies. But the right soundtrack will also get you into the spooky season. But it’s not just dark, disturbed metal music blaring out of the speakers. Hip-hop has an abundance of horrifying songs to get into the spirit. Sometimes, they’re overtly horrorcore, with images of blood and death taking precedent. There are even more subtle records that reward a keen ear to really capture its terror.
Whether you’re pregaming for a Halloween party or listening to something in between binging horror movies, you need the right playlist to maintain the energy. Consequently, we picked three songs that reflect the spookier energy that comes with this time of year.
Three Classic Rap Songs That Are Scary Enough to Be In Your Rotation for Halloween
“Cell Therapy” by Goodie Mob
What makes “Cell Therapy” so haunting is all in its ambiance. The creepy piano loop, the uneasy creaking, all of it lends to the general paranoia that Goodie Mob feels in their neighborhood. But they ease any potential fears with a deafening gunshot in the event someone is trying to peek in their windows. It’s a bit more subtle than your typical horrorcore rap song but it’s nonetheless effective for Halloween.
“Kim” by Eminem
Eminem can be particularly difficult to listen to with how dark his songs can get. But “Kim” takes the cake for his most horrifying song by a wide margin, where he graphically depicts the murder of his now-ex wife Kim Mathers. As a work of fiction, it’s staggeringly effective, with Slim Shady giving deranged vocal inflections to make him a crazed monster hellbent on revenge. Knowing their extremely rough relationship, it blurs the lines of fiction, making for one of the scariest songs in hip-hop history.
“Mind Playing Tricks On Me” by Geto Boys
The only song on this list where an artist explicitly mentions Halloween. Houston’s own Geto Boys lay the groundwork for what horrorcore could become in hip-hop. “Mind Playing Tricks On Me” is both scary and devastating in how it pairs the nostalgic, almost whimsical nature of the instrumental with utter mental anguish. Scarface and Willie D ruminate on the paranoia and the borderline schizophrenia that they feel as a byproduct of street life.
Meanwhile, Bushwick Bill hauntingly depicted a hallucination that ended with bloodied knuckles from punching the concrete. By the end of the song, he realized it wasn’t even close to Halloween and he was all alone wondering who he was fighting. Storytelling in hip-hop rarely gets this dark and disturbing.
Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc
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