Snapshots #367: A Top Twenty Songs Named After Horror Movies

Darkness falls across the land

The midnight hour is close at hand

Creatures crawl in search of blood

To terrorize y’all’s neighborhood

And whosoever shall be found

Without the soul for getting down

Must stand and face the Hounds of Hell

And rot inside a corpse’s shell

The foulest stench is in the air

The funk of forty thousand years

And grizzly ghouls from every tomb

Are closing in to seal your doom

And though you fight to stay alive

Your body starts to shiver

For no mere mortal can resist

The evil of the SNAPSHOTS!

AH HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAA

Thank you, Vincent. This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.

It's Halloween this week, and when I started looking for songs that share their names with horror movies, I hit a bumper bundle. But did you guess them all?

20. Bad jingles get me in such a tizzy. 

"Bad jingles" was an anagram...

J. Geils Band - Fright Night

19. Lost inside Outwood Golf Course.

In case you're wondering, Outwood is just down the road from where I work in Leeds. Fortunately, I've never spotted u-two while driving through there...

U2 - The Fly

18. Ttttttttttttthhhhhhhhhhhhhhhiiiiiiiiiiiiiiissssssssssss iiiiiiiiiiiisssssssssssss ttttttttttttttttthhhhhhhhhhhhheeeeeeeeeeee ccccccccccccccllllllllllllluuuuuuuuuuuuueeeeeeeeeee.

Slow Readers Club - Lost Boys

17. The Haiti dollar hides a silly secret. 

The Haiti dollar, Silly Billy.

Billy Idol - Eyes Without A Face

16. Boopadoop.

Named after Chic Young's Blondie comic strip: her surname was Boopadoop.

Blondie - Island Of Lost Souls

15. Noughties boy band, aphrodisiac, Ian Astbury.

Noughties boy band = Blue.

Aphrodisiac = Oyster.

Ian Astbury = The Cult.

Blue Öyster Cult - Nosferatu

14. Frippette?

She's married to Robert Fripp...

Toyah - Alien

13. They're ghosting you.

The Phantom Band - The Howling

12. Can you hear them?

The Sonics - Psycho

11. ...is a V. smarmy DJ mix.

..."is a V. smarmy DJ" was an anagram...

Sammy Davis Jr. - The Candyman

10. A wing and a guitar.

A Fender is what we Brits would call the wing on a car... and it's also a type of guitar.

Sam Fender - Poltergeist(s)

9. Just desserts.

The Sweet - Hellraiser

8. Read one section of your home. 

Chapterhouse - Don't Look Now

7. This guy, and another four droplets.

A tough one this, and probably not one you could guess from the clue alone... but once you worked out the theme... maybe?

Anyway, the photo above is Bernie Nee, the singer on the track below. The rest of the Blobs were session musicians, so no photo exists of the "band" itself...

The Five Blobs - The Blob

6. Bitten by a green bird that wishes it could fly.

Orville might have wished he could fly, but he could at least peck.

Orville Peck - Dead Of Night

5. Used to make soup for Alice and the Queen.

Then the Queen said to Alice, "Have you seen the Mock Turtle yet?"

"No," said Alice. "I don't even know what a Mock Turtle is."

"It's the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from", said the Queen.

(From Alice In Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.)

The Mock Turtles - Wicker Man

4. A carpenter and a great hangman. 

The Great Hangman is a cliff. Richard was a Carpenter.

Cliff Richard - Carrie

3. Chest, pea, dough.

Chestnut, peanut, doughnut...

Nut - Scream

2. What do Jennifer Anniston, Julie Andrews and Jane Austen cook their eggs in?

In the J.A.pan, of course!

Japan - Halloween

1. Lad-ra-doodle.

It's not often you see Damon Gough without his hat on...

Badly Drawn Boy - The Shining

Not Number One because it's my favourite song... but it is my favourite horror film.

Such a bounty of horror-film-related songs did I find, that there will be more to share later in the week... and a much less scary Snapshots will be back next Saturday. 

Positive Songs For Negative Times #58: My Covid Diary (Part 1)

Sam had two birthday parties to go to that Sunday, but he also had a really bad cold.

Or at least, we thought it was just a cold. I feel like a very bad parent now that when, earlier that weekend, he'd woken me up in the middle of the night saying he felt really hot, my response was "you're wearing your winter pyjamas: take them off and you'll be fine".   

Anyway, we were wary of sending him to the party if he was infectious, so we decided to each do a lateral flow test. I've been doing them twice weekly for the past year and a half anyway, so I'm pretty used to them. For Louise and Sam, it was a different experience...

Ten minutes later, the results all looked negative. Louise texted various parents to say that we'd all done tests, everything looked fine, we'd be OK for the parties. As we started to get ready, Louise went to throw the tests in the bin... which is when we noticed the second lines.

Two lines, one on C and one on T, means a positive result. Sam and I both had two lines. Louise only had one. She did a second test and still only had one. But it was clear the parties were off.

I booked myself a PCR test at a walk through test site. I didn't initially want to take Sam along since he'd freaked out enough about doing the lateral flow test. I figured I'd pick up a home PCR test pack and bring that back for him to do. But when I got there, they were all out of home test kits, so we all ended up going back that afternoon.

(Test sites appear to be largely staffed by teenagers. Apparently the catering and hospitality industry is really struggling to hire teenage waiters and bar staff this year, because they're all working for the NHS.)

My PCR test came back positive at 7am the following morning.

Louise and Sam had to wait quite a while longer...

Rick Anthony is the lead singer of The Phantom Band. He also releases solo material under the pseudonym Rick Redbeard. I've been listening to his 2016 album Awake Unto quite a bit over the last couple of weeks. Very mellow and chilled, with shades of Richard Hawley, particularly on the track below...