Perhaps the most disconcerting horror soundtrack is the hitherto innocuous popular song you can never listen to again without flashing back to its use in some grim context. I wonder how many memories of Singin' in the Rain have been scarred by the rape scene in A Clockwork Orange. The nursery rhyme Row, Row, Row Your Boat provides a baby monitor scare in Insidious: Chapter 2, though for viewers of a certain age it will already have been poisoned for all time by the Scorpio Killer forcing a hi-jacked busful of children to sing it in Dirty Harry.
Standards from the 1930s are a useful source of period-style spookiness. The Shining has forever contaminated a clutch of big band tunes, especially Al Bowlly's Midnight The Stars and You. Art Jarrett's Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?, introduced in the 1933 film Sitting Pretty, plays a vital role in the plot of Frank LaLoggia's underappreciated children's ghost story Lady in White (1988). Meanwhile, Harry Warren's Jeepers Creepers (lyrics by Johnny Mercer) is a particular favourite of my tapdancing teacher, and I've never had the heart to tell him I can't hop-shuffle-ballchange to it without being reminded of what happens a) between Donald Sutherland and obnoxious child star Jackie Earle Haley at the nightmarish climax of The Day of the Locust, or b) to Justin Long at the end of the all too appropriately named Jeepers Creepers. Neither of which is anything to dance about.
As for pop music, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards must have made a tidy sum in royalties from the number of times Sympathy for the Devil has been co-opted as a handy motif for vampires or demons, perhaps most notably at the end of Interview with the Vampire. Gregory Hoblit's Fallen also made good use of Jerry Ragovoy's Time Is On My Side, a song famously covered by the Rolling Stones, as a signifier of demonic possession; Azazel just can't seem to stop singing it, no matter whose body he has taken over.
Paint It Black is another Stones soundtrack favourite, best used to creepy effect as a song with special significance for the phantom in David Koepp's Stir of Echoes, an excellent ghost story which suffered at the box-office from being released in 1999, just after The Sixth Sense. Clearly the Stones, who tried so hard to be demonic in the 1960s, are the genre's popsters of choice, though in terms of real life horror (and despite what happened at Altamont) they will forever be trumped by the Beatles, whose Helter Skelter was taken to heart by Charles Manson.
But the prize for Best Use of an Otherwise Innocuous Song in a Horror Movie must surely go to Brian Yuzna's 1989 Society, which harnesses the Eton Boating Song to gloriously subversive effect in an example of "body horror" so revolting I can't bring myself to link to it here, though it's easy enough to track down if you're curious, and have a strong stomach. You have been warned.
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