How to Make a Halloween Song

Halloween music is a real compositional genre with a long pedigree - Saint-Saens' Danse Macabre, Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, and Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King were scaring audiences long before horror films existed. Writing your own Halloween song means borrowing the specific musical devices that reliably raise goosebumps, and they are surprisingly learnable.

Choose a Dark Tonal World

Start in a minor key - the fastest signal of shadow - and then push further. The harmonic minor scale, with its exotic augmented second, instantly evokes candlelit crypts. The Phrygian mode, with its lowered second degree, sounds ancient and ominous. And no interval says Halloween like the tritone, the "devil in music" of medieval theory: build a melody that leans on it, or alternate two chords a tritone apart, and the music turns unstable and wrong in exactly the right way. Diminished seventh chords - stacks of minor thirds - are the classic horror sting for good reason.

Write a Creeping Rhythm

Fear lives in rhythm. Two approaches dominate the genre: the slow creep and the mad dance. For the creep, use a low, repeating ostinato - a two- or three-note bass figure that plods like footsteps and never resolves. For the dance, write a lilting waltz or tarantella and gradually accelerate it, the Mountain King trick, so the music seems to chase the listener. Sudden silence is the third weapon: cut everything off for a full beat before a loud return, and you have written a jump scare in pure sound.

Orchestrate for Shivers

Certain colors are permanently spooky. Low register anything - piano, cello, bass clarinet - supplies dread; high, thin, dissonant violins supply panic. Bells and chimes evoke midnight; a pipe organ evokes the haunted mansion; hollow percussion - woodblock, xylophone - has rattled like skeleton bones since Danse Macabre made the xylophone famous. Electronic and recorded music adds theremin-style sliding tones, reversed sounds, detuned pianos, and whispering voices. Choose two or three of these colors rather than all of them; a lean arrangement is eerier than a haunted-house gift shop.

Shape the Fear

A good Halloween song is structured like a ghost story: something is slightly wrong at the start, the wrongness grows, and the ending either erupts or - often scarier - goes quiet and unresolved. End on an unresolved dissonance or a bare open fifth and the listener's imagination finishes the job. If the song is for children, keep the same devices but soften them with humor and a bouncing tempo: spooky, silly, and danceable is the trick-or-treat formula.

Steal From the Masters

Before writing, spend an evening with the classics - Danse Macabre, Night on Bald Mountain, the Addams Family's finger-snapping vamp, John Carpenter's minimal piano ostinato from Halloween itself - and identify the device each one rides. Then imitate the device, not the piece. The better you can hear these dark colors in your head before you write them - minor versus Phrygian, a tritone versus a fifth - the more control you have over the shivers you produce. Training that inner ear is what we do at UreMusic.com, all year round.