This is one of the stranger Private Release tapes because “Halloween” is almost too ordinary a word for what is actually happening across these ninety-plus minutes. The front looks like cheap seasonal decoration: a pile of orange jack-o’-lanterns with yellow mouths and eyes, crowded together so tightly that almost nothing exists outside their faces. They are goofy, ugly, friendly, sinister and mass-produced all at once. The same paper continues underneath the handwritten track list on the back. The cassette itself is a black Maxell Professional Industrial C90, with HALLO written huge across Side A and WEEN across Side B. The split word is funny enough on its own. It reduces the entire holiday to two blunt chunks written with a marker.
The music does something considerably less simple. Side A opens with Ron Spoones’ “Unity Gain Intro,” although the handwritten insert appears to spell the name “Oron Spoones.” From there the tape immediately starts behaving less like a compilation and more like channel surfing through somebody’s Halloween-damaged nervous system. Dystopia’s “Slaved Chains” lasts only a few seconds before Assdroid Melt’s “Invocation Dance Nation,” followed by the twenty-second “Welcome Holocaust” by Sister Fucker. These aren’t introductions in the normal sense. They are abrupt little ruptures. Before the tape has established any single musical language it has already moved through multiple forms of ugliness, noise, punk and electronic abrasion.
Then Cube gets six minutes. “Her Instrument / Cellular Clown” is important to the first side because suddenly the tape stops pecking at the listener and lets something develop. Cube belongs to a very different world than Dystopia or Brokencyde or Suicide. The electronics feel physical rather than decorative, with voices, texture, repetition and damaged machinery occupying the same space. The tape was made in 2014 and Cube’s Her Instrument material was also appearing around that period, so this was not simply digging through an old horror-record collection. Contemporary underground music was being fed directly into the Halloween material.
The short “Paulie Melt” from Street Trash follows, pulling an actual piece of low-budget horror cinema into the sequence, and then comes Suicide’s “Love You.” Suicide may be one of the funniest possible bands to place on a Halloween tape because they never needed Halloween costumes to sound frightening. Alan Vega and Martin Rev could make affection sound unstable. “Love You” originally existed among Suicide’s rough early material, with Vega floating between seduction, desperation and threat while Rev’s primitive electronics refuse to behave like normal rock accompaniment. Coming after Street Trash, even a song whose central subject is love becomes part of the horror tape without needing bats, coffins or a minor-key organ.
“The Degradation of Emanuelle - A Picture of Love” makes another hard turn. This comes from the world of Joe D’Amato’s 1970s Emanuelle films rather than conventional horror, introducing erotic exploitation cinema into the pile. That distinction matters because the tape keeps widening what “Halloween” is allowed to contain. Sexploitation, gore movies, crust punk, electronic music, soundtrack cues, novelty sound effects and music that simply feels disturbed can all occupy the same cassette.
Then the cheap Halloween record begins invading. “And Now...,” “Screams,” “Howling,” “Groans,” “Creaking Door,” and later “Cackle” are all credited to The Sounds of Halloween. Instead of using one long haunted-house sound-effects track, the effects have been broken apart and inserted between actual music. That completely changes their function. A scream by itself becomes punctuation. A creaking door becomes a transition. Groaning gets dropped between Brokencyde and Phuture Doom. The corniness of stock Halloween effects is preserved rather than disguised, which is essential to this tape. It has no requirement that horror remain dignified.
That becomes particularly obvious with the leap from Halloween II into Brokencyde. “Still He Kills” is followed by a tiny burst of screaming, Bernard Herrmann’s “The Murder,” another little stretch of howling, and then “Freaxxx.” Herrmann’s Psycho music is one of the most severe pieces of twentieth-century horror scoring imaginable, all stabbing strings and controlled panic. Brokencyde’s “Freaxxx,” meanwhile, belongs to late-2000s crunkcore and scene-kid culture. Putting those beside one another is ridiculous. It is also much more interesting than assembling ninety minutes of music that everybody already agrees is tasteful horror music. The tape doesn’t care about maintaining cultural status. Bernard Herrmann gets no velvet rope protecting him from Brokencyde.
Phuture Doom’s “Burn the Knowledge” pushes the tape back toward electronic extremity. The track is dense, accelerated and overdriven, closer to digital overload than traditional Halloween music. Then another stock creaking-door effect opens the way for “Boomstick,” taken from Army of Darkness. Bruce Campbell’s performance as Ash turns horror into boastful slapstick, so now the tape has moved from dread into comedy without actually leaving horror.
Saves the Day’s version of the Misfits’ “Skulls” follows. That choice is another small collision. The Misfits are almost inseparable from punk Halloween iconography, but instead of using the obvious original recording, this is Saves the Day covering it. The song gets passed through another generation and another kind of punk. Then a canned Halloween cackle arrives as if somebody standing beside the cassette deck has decided that none of this has been sufficiently obvious yet.
Side A ends with the longest piece on the side, Orange Soda’s “Russian Sleep Experiment,” running more than thirteen minutes. The title refers to the internet horror story that circulated as the “Russian Sleep Experiment,” one of the best-known early creepypasta stories. That places internet folklore beside all the older sources already accumulated on the tape. Psycho, Suicide, Army of Darkness, Street Trash, scene music, electronic noise and a piece connected to web-era horror mythology all become historical equals once they are recorded onto the same C90.
Side B begins by jumping much farther backward. “Gooble Gobble One of Us” is taken from Freaks, Tod Browning’s 1932 film, one of the oldest sources anywhere on the cassette. The chant has survived for generations precisely because it can be silly, welcoming and disturbing at the same time. Here it opens a side that becomes much more heavily occupied by film music.
Two “Night in a Graveyard” pieces surround Harry Manfredini’s “Overlay of Evil / Main Title” from Friday the 13th. Manfredini’s music immediately changes the scale of the tape. That famous vocalized rhythmic figure does not simply announce a horror movie anymore; sitting between these homemade-looking graveyard selections, it becomes another object in the Halloween pile.
Chuck Cirino’s “Running Rampant” from Chopping Mall comes next. This is exactly the kind of soundtrack choice that makes the cassette more interesting than a greatest-hits horror collection. Chopping Mall is an absurd premise executed with complete commitment, and Cirino’s synthesizer score has the bright mechanical energy of 1980s electronic film music. It sounds much closer to an arcade machine or malfunctioning shopping-center technology than Gothic horror.
Then Ennio Morricone enters with “Pazuzu” from Exorcist II: The Heretic. That is a genuinely deranged piece of film music. Morricone could write enormous melodies, but “Pazuzu” is built around pounding rhythm and aggressive choral voices. Its presence points toward one of the tape’s recurring attractions: music that becomes frightening because human voices stop behaving in reassuring ways. It is followed by Mortician’s “Chainsaw Dismemberment,” where the cinematic horror imagery becomes death metal and the title no longer even bothers pretending to be subtle.
Tonstartssbandht’s “Black Country” is another wonderful disruption because it does not belong to any obvious Halloween category. It originally comes from An When and brings loose, reverberating psychedelic rock into a side increasingly dominated by film scores. That track demonstrates something the cassette keeps insisting on: Halloween is not being treated as a genre. It is being treated as permission.
Michael Andrews’ Donnie Darko material appears twice, first with “Burning It to the Ground” and later with “Slipping Away.” Between those two pieces, the tape makes another run through cinema: a Jaws trailer, Justin Greaves’ “A Lesson in Dilemma” from The Devil’s Business, and two pieces from Johan Söderqvist’s Let the Right One In score, “Virginia Is Bitten” and “Lacke Dies.” Söderqvist’s music is especially useful here because its sadness is as important as its darkness. Let the Right One In does not treat horror simply as attack or shock, and these cues open a quieter emotional area inside a tape otherwise full of chainsaws, screams and melting bodies.
“The Night of the Electric Insects,” associated here with The Exorcist, comes from George Crumb’s Black Angels, the violently experimental string work that became connected with the film’s musical world. Again the cassette reaches beyond conventional soundtrack writing. Crumb makes string instruments sound alien, insect-like and electrified. It sits naturally among this material even though it comes from the concert-music avant-garde rather than punk, metal or horror soundtrack culture.
The strangest commitment on Side B may be the nearly eleven-minute piece credited on the insert to The Equestrian Vortex: “Our Confessions Were Merely a Formality. The Acts That Prompted Our Signatures Are What Remain Here.” The actual music is Andrew Liles, whose Equestrian Vortex project connects to the fictional film inside Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio. So the tape has now reached horror music connected to a film about somebody creating sound for a horror film. It is a hall of mirrors: imaginary film, real soundtrack work, sound design, cinema and experimental music folding into one another.
And after all that, the ending is “Everybody But You” from Night Train to Terror. There is something perfect about ending with Night Train to Terror, a movie assembled out of other movies, because this cassette has spent both sides assembling an object out of things that were never originally meant to occupy the same room. Horror cinema, exploitation films, punk, crust, crunkcore, death metal, experimental electronics, psychedelic rock, orchestral scoring, avant-garde composition, cheap Halloween sound-effects records and internet horror all end up pressed against one another. The front cover promises pumpkins. The cassette contains everything that crawled out from behind them.
