Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Halloween Horrors


I recently stumbled across an amazing web site dedicated to halloween music... including downloads! So I downloaded about one hundred hours of music and started digging in! There's tons of monster movie soundtracks from the Universal days up through the mid-70s plus lots of unique finds.

One nice treasure, for me in particular, is a record my family had called "Halloween Horrors." The first side is a spooky story about an old southern mansion, complete with tons of sound effects. While the adult me finds it amusing the kid me, as well as my brothers, found it pretty creepy stuff! Side two of this album is fifty or so sound effects that you can use to make your own scary tale, including every sound used on the first side. I don't recall that we ever made a scary tale but perhaps we tried and it was such a let down that I've erased it from my memory. It was a blast hearing these again after so many years, remembering things like how we laughed at the kitten sound effect. Ooooo.... scary kitten!

Of note is a snippet of violin music that was strategically used on side one. Years later I finally found out that this was from Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Minor, a piece that isn't particularly frightening unless Romantic composers creep you out.

The web site? Right here at Universalhorrorsounds.blogspot.com. The links to download the files are in the comments section.

Enjoy!

1 comment:

Elephantschild said...

I heard a theremin over the store's canned-music system at Micheal's yesterday. Weird.