13 Songs in Which the Malady Lingers

‘Tis the season for “Monster Mash,” “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and other such frolicsome musical notions designed to make your Halloween merry and bright.

But enough of child’s play. Enough of candy-coating death and terror with giggles. How about some real scary stuff, some seriously haunting songs that live where the psyche would generally prefer not to go?

Here, for your inspection, are 13 seasonal selections, most of them masterpieces, that give me the creeps--which isn’t to say I don’t love ‘em to death. These aren’t ghosty-ghoulie supernatural novelties that pop up and say “boo,” or costumed play-acting turns of the Alice Cooper / Marilyn Manson ilk, but considered probes into fear, insanity, isolation and corruption.

Some carry a sudden jolt of terror, others work their scary impact by mood and implication, or generate weirdness by enveloping seemingly ordinary subject matter in a chilling sonic web. Read on if you’re brave; listen if you dare.

1. Beatles, “I Am the Walrus.” If “yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye” doesn’t give you the creeps, if the ornate, spooky bizarreness of one of rock’s great sound montages doesn’t send a shudder, if the ominous “King Lear” outtake at the end doesn’t unsettle you, then the chorus of a zillion demons and harpies chugging out “everybody oompah . . . goo-goo-ga-joob” will get you, sure as sharks.

2. Beatles, “Blue Jay Way.” On paper, a ditty about how annoying it is to be stood up by house guests who get lost in an L.A. fog. On record, an unnerving experience shrouded in eerie organ swirls, sinister sitar groaning and a ghostly trance vocal by George Harrison. As a kid, I’d peek out the window while this one was playing, worried that Charles Manson would be leering at me from out of the dark. Precedes “Walrus” by two tracks on the “Magical Mystery Tour” album. One scary band, those moptops.

3. Rolling Stones, “Stray Cat Blues.” The musical expression of utter corruption. Here’s Mick Jagger at his most concupiscent, seeking to debauch an underage innocent, while Keith Richards’ guitar shrieks and Charlie Watts lays down a sloshed shuffle. Ends with crunching guitar rhythms that sound like pure jackbooted evil on the march, thereby drawing a link between the moral morass of the individual and the terrifying moral eclipse of this century’s worst regimes. “But it’s no hangin’ matter,” drawls Jagger’s curdled libertine. “It’s no capital crime.”

4. Youngbloods, “Darkness, Darkness.” A breathtakingly great song that plants us in the cornered mind of a man on the brink of suicide. Clenched from the opening Appalachian death-song folk-fiddle strains by David Lindley through the searing fuzz-tone rock violence of Jesse Colin Young’s guitar break. The mounting urgency for release in Young’s vocal--”Darkness, darkness, be my blanket / Cover me with your endless night / Take away the pain of knowing / Fill the emptiness up right now”--is astonishing. Fearsome, but cathartic.

5. Bob Dylan, “Ballad of Hollis Brown.” The loudest solo-acoustic folk song ever recorded--not in volume, but in the imagery of shrieks of hunger and madness culminating in shotgun blasts as Dylan tells the inexorable, horrific and desolate tale of a starving, doomed South Dakota farm family. The master jacks up the fear factor by putting us right in the shoes of the pitiable farmer Brown.

6. Pink Floyd, “One of These Days.” A malevolent, wind-swept instrumental that makes me think of the opening archeological-dig scene of “The Exorcist.” Or of a flying pig with flaming eyes.

7. The Doors, “The End.” A long, weird, drone-like trip into the heart of darkness, in which the sense of foreboding builds throughout, climaxing in the horror of ritualistic Oedipal murder. Used to brilliant effect as theme music for the film “Apocalypse Now.”

8. Robert Johnson, “Me and the Devil Blues.” A man fatalistically and chillingly accepts his demonic side, which reveals itself in an all-too-commonly horrific way: “Me and the devil was walkin’ side by side / And I’m gonna beat my woman until I get satisfied.”

9. John Cale, “Heartbreak Hotel.” Slows down and blows up Elvis’ bopper into a swirling firestorm of gloom, revulsion and pain.

10. Neil Young, “Tonight’s the Night.” A harrowing, fatigued musical wake for a dead junkie. It’s unforgettable to hear Young’s voice pierced and shaken with rage and shock as he relives the moment “when I picked up the telephone, and heard that he died / Out on the mainline.”

11. Lou Reed, “The Kids.” This climactic song on “Berlin,” rock’s most sordid narrative album, is rendered almost too painful to hear as Reed unsparingly treats us to the cries of babies and toddlers being ripped from their terribly flawed mother by social workers, thanks to the Iago-like machinations of the unspeakable narrator.

12. Blue Oyster Cult, “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” Has death ever been made to seem more seductive? If rock really could induce youthful suicide, this beautifully arrayed bit of gothic-pop would have decimated the population.

13. Body Count, “Mama’s Gotta Die Tonight.” “Cop Killer” got all the attention, but the most memorable track from this speed-metal band is Ice-T’s bloody fantasy of ritualistically killing his mother and scattering her severed remains to blot out the racism she instilled in him.