Halloween Countdown: October 29 – bodies with no surprises

The latest addition to my wife's collection of spooky ephemera, purchased yesterday at the local Target store for a buck and a quarter:


When a button on the side of the skull's jaw is pressed, its eyes light up and it emits a tinny OOOO-EEEEE-OOOO noise that freaks the shit out of our house's resident pet population. Mildly creepy, I suppose, but the back of the skull's packaging is where the real terror resides:


I'm well aware of the long-standing relationship between skulls and heavy metal, but never have I seen it manifested quite so literally...

The "recycle or manage as hazardous waste" line makes me wonder if there's an abandoned salt mine beneath the Nevada desert packed to the gills with concrete-entombed dry storage casks full of spent Skulls With Sound & Light from Halloweens past.

The Misfits - Skulls (from Walk Among Us, 1982) - I'm not one for compiling lists of "desert island discs," but if I were to dabble in such maddening pursuits, Walk Among Us would be right up in my top five choices. The album serves up some often imitated, but never duplicated, first-rate melodic punk rock dripping with retro-macabre goodness that crams more high points into twenty-five minutes than most bands manage in their entire careers.

Sparkle Moore - Skull and Crossbones (from a 1956 single; collected on Good Girls Gone Bad: Wild Weird & Wanted, 2004) - WARNING: This track is classic female-fronted rockabilly, a genre known to Armagideon Time to knock the unwary listener onto his or her ass with its sheer awesomeness.