About this Playlist
The musicto community’s favorite tracks for halloween Zombies
As with last year’s Vampire Ball, halloween is on the horizon and the musicto community are here to speak to your inner monster – this year we’re going all out Zombie!
As with any good Zombie flick, we’re starting out all nice and benign, with maybe a slight foreshadowing of the horror to come! While every track comes with its own write up – some come with full on stories guaranteed to have your hairs standing up! As the list progresses you’ll be taken further and further into the horror until – well – you know what happens at the end…
If you’re planning a Halloween party our Zombie Fest 23 playlist is the perfect selection to set your guest’s brains on fire (we like our brains cooked before we eat!)
11 Great Tracks For Zombie Fest ’23 from the music to community
If I Only Had A Brain – The Flaming Lips
Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse is a beloved 2005 Xbox game in which you play a zombie on the rampage in a retro-futuristic city called Punchbowl, Pennsylvania, eating the brains of innocent bystanders and making them your bumbling followers. It’s gory, dumb, inventive fun in which Stubbs is able to pull off his own head and use it as a bowling ball and direct his own severed hand to leap onto people’s heads and control their minds.
Set in a fictionalised 1959, the accompanying soundtrack album featured some of the coolest artists of the early 2000s playing cover versions of golden oldies, including Death Cab For Cutie playing ‘Earth Angel’, Ben Kweller tackling ‘Lollipop’ (which features very memorably in the game) and ‘My Boyfriend’s Back’ by The Raveonettes. But arguably most appropriate for this list is ‘If I Only Had a Brain’ originally, of course, from the soundtrack to 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz, as interpreted by The Flaming Lips. I love the fun they had with the lines Judy Garland sings in the original.
Beat Goes On – The All Seeing I
A name is usually the first thing we learn about a person. The first thing you learn about her is her favorite song.
Drums keep pounding a rhythm to the brain
It’s hard to remember if it was winter, spring, or summer when you first heard The All Seeing I’s cover of “The Beat Goes On,” but when you become conscious of it, you hear it every day to the east, not exactly at noon, but always by the time the sun cuts through the arcade window and stretches over the lemon-yellow Pacman coin-op cabinet. Sometimes it’s loud, other times soft, although you’re never quite sure whether it’s close or far away.
Drums keep pounding a rhythm to the brain
It becomes an addiction, at least in the same sense that you might be addicted to food, heroin, or sex. Pleasure — jouissance is apt — floods your body as the dopamine kicks in and all you want to do is hear it again. Even when the song ends, it consumes you with a primal hunger on which your very survival hangs.
Drums keep pounding a rhythm to the brain
It obsesses you.
It obsesses you because it’s not merely a song. It’s a potent soundscape of irrepressible repetition, a throbbing seduction, an insistent pulse of auditory adrenaline luring you toward it with its relentless beat as if you’re on the receiving end of a boombox serenade, as if you’re Ione Skye’s Diane Court to John Cusack’s Lloyd Dobler, though you can’t respond or say anything.
Drums keep pounding a rhythm to the brain
Until you have this song in your head, you don’t know what an earworm is. It’s on repeat all the time. It’s always the same, but occasionally you notice something different; the superficially simple lyrics; the relentless hook; the guitar riff, repetitive and hypnotic and echoing your craving to connect with the person playing it.
Anyone might think, “I’m insane,” but you’ve already had a lobotomy of sorts and you’re stuporous with this insatiable appetite you can’t explain, but because the song is the only thing making you feel alive, keeping you human, you let it burn in your mind until you can’t hear anything else.
Drums keep pounding a rhythm to the brain
Even at nightfall, when it stops as if it never existed at all, you hear it sing while sleepwalking in circles, knee-deep in Smarties-colored plastic balls, your feet shuffling for footing on gooey gummy bears and between stuffed toys…
Drums keep pounding a rhythm to the brain
… until it seduces again when the sun reaches its peak above the roller coaster, enslaving you like clickbait when, one day, however long after, one of the blue padded walls collapses, and you follow the music out of the ball pond, past deep groans and restless moans and pinball machines, over broken glass through the front door to Main Street USA, and then on to Orlando International Airport, Terminal A, Airside 4, Departures.
That’s when you — when I first see her and she is mouth-watering, dressed in black, a character straight out of an action movie with raging, determined eyes, a film noir flair of allure, indifference, and badassery. But it wasn’t her looks or style I wanted. It was her mind — spongy and juicy and delicious.
And the beat goes on
A mallet in one hand, sword in another, she marched toward me with cool confidence. And before I knew what hit me, she tumbled around and around in my vision before my severed head landed on the tarmac.
And the beat goes on
I never knew her name. It didn’t matter because even as she raised her sword and sliced it through my rotting skull, her favorite song kept pounding a rhythm while I hungered for her brain.
All You Zombies – The Hooters
I have always liked The Hooters, as they are a pretty local to me band, and you have to route for the hometown musicians. This song doesn’t really talk about zombies as a bunch of undead people hungry for brains, but how people follow people blindly. It’s a symbolism of how people conform to society. The song tells a story and really drives home the meaning of zombies.
Zombified – Falling in Reverse
The marching tone just really gives me the vibe of brainless people following everything blindly, and sadly in todays world this is often the truth with a huge part of the population in this world. I think you could say this song is kinda like the soundtrack to the horror movie we’re living in and I just love the use of monster-and-zombie-symbolism here
Dead Man’s Tale – Terje Rypdal
Deep in the heart of the foreboding forest, in a familiar log cabin he thought he would never see again, Ash found himself once more facing the relentless onslaught of evil.
As the undead slowly climbed out of the cellar trap door, Ash raced across the room stumbling upon a giant rubber chicken. With a twisted grin, he quipped, “Time to roast this sucker!” Using the rubber chicken as a flail, he swung it with surprising agility, knocking zombies left and right. “Who’s the real poultrygeist here?” he laughed, relishing the absurdity of his situation.
Ash stumbled upon a peculiar device: a modified vacuum cleaner that shot out plungers with incredible force. Grinning devilishly, he yelled, “Suck on this!” With each blast, plungers stuck to zombies, rendering them immobile. “Guess you’re all stuck in a tight spot,” he chuckled, admiring his ingenuity.
Thrown out of the cabin window into the yard he grabbed a can of spray paint and a lawnmower. “Let’s paint the town red!” he exclaimed, attaching the spray can to the lawnmower. As he mowed down a horde of zombies, vibrant red paint splattered everywhere. “Looks like they’re redecorating the afterlife!” he joked, reveling in his newfound zombie-slaughtering technique.
Ash spotted his girlfriend, seemingly unharmed amidst the chaos. “I’ve got you now!” he exclaimed, rushing towards her. They embraced, relief washing over him. Little did he know that the infection had already taken hold.
In the dying light, he looked into his girlfriend’s eyes, whispering, “We made it out alive, baby.” But as he held her close, he noticed a subtle change in her gaze. Her eyes, once warm and loving, turned cold and vacant. With a sudden, horrifying realization, he muttered, “No… no, it can’t be.”
In a swift, unexpected movement, his girlfriend sank her teeth into his neck. gasping his strength waning as he collapsed to the ground. Weakly, he managed one last quip, “Well, I guess love bites after all.” And with that, he succumbed to the infection, joining the ranks of the undead, his girlfriend at his side, both now part of the very menace he had fought so hard against.
I Could Always Eat Your Brain – Harley Poe
It’s the translucent silkiness of the lamb’s brain bites with truffle aioli and caviar that gives me pause, makes me think that not all is right.
I’m at another listless Halloween party thrown by someone whose name escapes me. My steps are irregular but oddly rhythmic. I catch glimpses of myself in reflective surfaces—mirrored walls, iPhone screens, the vacant stares of others—and something feels off, as if I’m watching a film adaptation of myself, directed by someone who has only read a two-line synopsis.
Everyone here is pretending to be someone. Everyone looks palatable.
Oh, look. There’s Liv. She’s resplendent, talking to a buzzard about a screenplay that will never get made. She’s the reason for my hunger, I think, the cavernous yearning that began when I woke up in a dumpster behind the Hollywood Roosevelt, the last face I saw before getting knocked out cold by a vintage bowling ball at the end of a date at The Spare Room.
Perhaps it’s the remnants of humanity that keep my musings verbose, even if my vocal cords can only muster a guttural grunt. People don’t listen anyway, too engrossed in their Instagram stories. The party winds down. Or maybe it winds up. Parties here are asymptotic, approaching something that resembles fun but never quite reaching it.
Before I can get close, Liv takes off. I lumber after her.
Night after night, I am inexplicably drawn to the same neighborhoods, the same parties, the same swanky cocktail lounges we used to frequent.
I arrive at what used to be our favorite restaurant, one where reservations are booked months in advance, but ghouls and specters walk right in. The maître d’ doesn’t even blink. Liv’s already here, laughing with someone who looks like a food critic but smells like an undertaker. I take a seat at the bar because that’s where you sit when you’re not quite part of the narrative but can’t stop reading it either.
Tonight’s special is sweetbreads with a golden turmeric reduction. Liv glances at the menu and then at me, connecting some grotesque dots. She gets up, hesitating as she walks past the bar. Our eyes meet and there’s a flicker of recognition. Her brow furrows in what can only be described as disgust, and she turns her head as if to erase the moment we’ve just shared.
“I thought you were dead,” she says.
The waiter sets down the sweetbreads. I can’t speak, but my fork moves almost autonomously, cutting a slice and lifting it to my lips. It’s every flavor at once—bitter, sweet, sorrowful, orgasmic.
The hunger is satiated, but only momentarily.
Zombie – The Cranberries
- I’ve heard a terrorist bomb – blowing up a party close to where we lived
- I’ve had to look for bombs under a car
- I know what it’s like to hesitate before you turn the key in the ignition
- I know what it’s like to stop 30 feet from the checkpoint so that – if they do find an explosive – the guards might survive.
I know what it’s like to see a father cry over the babies he recently delivered that were murdered for a cause.
Zombie – I don’t know the etymology – and sure I could look it up but – fuck if it isn’t about brains – one way or another – brains to be eaten – brains to not have – to be – ultimately – brainless.
She’s so fucking angry – and I get it – ‘cos I’m fucking angry too – the hate – the framing of the other as a non person – it’s all so fucking predictable and repetitive – have we not learned?
One Hundred Years – The Cure
One Hundred Years was the first song I immediately thought about.
Everything screams so loud of hopeless, fouled creatures wandering aimlessly. Those creatures happen to be everyday life’s humans.
To start from the musical part, the relentless drum machine incipit reminds me of repetitive limping steps, which brainlessly need to replay themselves. The distorted guitar is so sour that I can almost smell the decaying pieces of flesh. Then, the 2 notes the bass plays echoing desperately without any glimpse of escape from this condition.
And finally Robert Smith’s voice and the lyrics: the desperate lament of someone who sank so deep with the only realization that there is no way back up and absolutely no sense in living. Human beings are incessantly destined to fall “one after the other, over and over”, so let’s give up hope altogether and wander in the life of the “living”. Memories of lost loves, happiness and visions of a senseless world appear just momentarily, to leave right after and never come back.
Hunting Humans – Misfits
There’s only a few of us left. Mitch gave in to his wounds early this morning and we had no choice but to do what had to be done. It was that or face the consequences. I’m growing so tired of hunting humans. Especially ones that were my friends.
The worst part of all of this is our trust in each other grows more strained by the day. Rami says they saw Jane Asylum creeping out of the barricade a few hours ago and has some strong ideas as to where they suspect she might have been going. I don’t know who to believe anymore.
I just want to go back home.
What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse – The Black Dahlia Murder
My truck blurred down Rock-A-Way Road. I had almost reached downtown Senoia Georgia (where The Walking Dead was filmed) before I clued into what the radio announcer kept repeating. “Stay inside. Lock all windows and doors. Check all loved ones for bite marks…” I slammed on the brakes as a couple hard-partying hippies jaywalked in front of me. Looking at them closer, I realized whatever coated their gaunt mouths didn’t look particularly vegan. I glanced in my rear-view mirror as the local Negan impersonator leapt into my truck bed uninvited. He tapped the glass with his replica of the baseball bat Lucille. “Step on it pal; those aren’t impersonators!” I let the fourth wall know that it should feel free to unbreak itself any second now as I stomped the accelerator.
Blind Evolution – Trash Talk
“The thing about zombies is they’re not one-size-fits-all. I mean, you have your run of the mill slow walking zombies. Pretty PG-level if you ask me. Then you get more serious with the runners. Still avoidable, if you know where they are. THAT’S the thing: I heard those suckas can sneak up on you cause they’re not groaners. And you never know what triggers them, especially now that communication from the CDC has been disabled. Evolution’s a bitch.”
I took a bite from the freshly prepared smothered and covered hash browns as I surveyed the empty Waffle House. Surprised to find it open, one last stop before crossing into unknown zombie territory. Gifting my daughter one last good meal before we transitioned to a diet of MREs and canned foods.
The cook/waitress kept her back to me as I went on about my plans to survive the pandemic, I didn’t need eye contact, just a warm body that wouldn’t cry everytime I mentioned the “Z” word.
Where IS my daughter? It’s been a while since she went to the restroom.
“Ma’am, we’re the only one’s here, right?”
The cook/waitress puts down her frying pan and slowly turns to face me. Her pupils are missing. A scream from the restroom.
Evolution’s a bitch…
This playlist is part of our 13 Playlists: The Best Halloween Music For Your Halloween Party compilation.
Love strange, macabre and slightly offbeat playlists? Check out: 15 Great Songs for your Vampire Ball, Exit Songs For Your Funeral, Music to Question Existence, Music to a Strange Night, Liminal Space, Music to Scry To,
Want more musicto playlisticles like 11 Great Tracks for Zombie Fest ’23? Check out our previous playlisticles: Exit Songs For Your Funeral, Songs About Hating Your Job, Groove in Green, 16 Top Cover Songs, 10 Songs to Stargaze, 6 Songs for the Future, Sounds like David Bowie, 7 Misheard Songs, Censored, 15 Great Songs for your Vampire Ball, 11 Powerful Songs in Flim, 7 Top Cowbell Songs,
