Halloween Countdown – October 28 – a scary birthday to Foo

The Fierce and Terrible Queen of Rabbits, also known as “The Funky Foo”, also known as my partner of fifteen years and wife of two, celebrated her birthday today. In honor of this happy event, here are some of her favorite Halloween-themed tracks, all of which coincidentally are from horror movie soundtracks.

At the beginning of each October, my wife pulls out a stack of her favorite horror films to watch. From a pile of around twenty or so DVDs, she usually ends up watching five or six tops, the others getting lost in her hectic schedule. It’s really fun when she decides to pop one into the bedroom DVD player to watch after I’ve already dozed off. She’ll nod off during the opening credits, and I’ll inevitably wake up just as the most disturbing or violent scene of the movie occurs. (I’m lucky this year. The remote for the upstairs DVD is nonfunctional at the moment.)

The Damned – Dead Beat Dance (from The Return of the Living Dead OST, 1985) – The Damned are one of my wife’s favorite bands, and one of her most cherished memories is when she got to hang out with the band after a local show a few years back.

The Undead – Somebody Super Like You (from The Phantom of the Paradise OST, 1974) – Also known as “the Beef construction song,” this is a fun bit of ghoulish glam penned by Paul Williams and performed by the sinister Death Records’ chameleonic house band. (Before their glam/proto-goth turn as The Undead, they appeared as the 50’s nostalgia act The Juicy Fruits and the surf-revivalist Beach Bums, satirically anticipating the shameless demographic pandering of today’s acts by a good couple of decades.)

My wife and I love The Phantom of the Paradise. It’s Brian DePalma at his best (which is faint praise, I admit) and infinitely more enjoyable than the better known Rocky Horror, which has been loaded down with so much fan baggage over the years that it’s hard to get past the taint of its devotees. Kind of like how the nerd hive-mind has conspired to bleed all the enjoyment out of Monty Python’s material.

The Ramones – Pet Sematary (from The Best of the Ramones, 2004) – I was never a big fan of The Ramones, even though I did make the effort to catch them live waaaay back in the day. Their early bubblepunk stuff is enjoyable in small doses, but it gets repetitive fast. My wife, for some reason I’ll never understand, digs their later material, when they ditched the 1-2-3-4 schtick for a Lords of the New Church-style rock sound. I’d rather just listen to London Calling.