25 Songs That Are Truly Terrifying

Barely a year after he sang “Hellhound on My Trail,” the Delta blues guitarist Robert Johnson was dead and gone—most likely poisoned by a jealous husband, in the summer of 1938. He was just 27, but he left a handful of stark acoustic classics that can still strike a chill in anyone who hears them, from “Love In Vain” to “Come On in My Kitchen.” Johnson emerged from the Mississippi Delta with a slide-guitar style so eerie, his rivals whispered he got it from a deal with the devil. “Hellhound” is his scariest moment, from his final session, moaning and growling, “I can see the wind is risin’, leaves tremblin’ on the tree.” But in his high-lonesome guitar, you can hear every leaf on that tree shiver. As Bob Dylan recalled in Chronicles, “Johnson’s words made my nerves quiver like piano wires.”

Maybe the best-known Appalachian murder ballad is the first-person account of an apparently otherwise ordinary Tennessee fellow who inexplicably takes time out from a stroll with his sweetheart to beat her to death with a stick despite her heartbreaking protests. On the recording they made for their 1956 debut LP Tragic Songs of Life (later a country hit), Ira and Charlie Louvin harmonize with grim rectitude over a brisk, easy waltz rhythm that adds to the fatalism of its crisply moralistic ending, with the violent creep wasting away in prison. (Though really, the murderer doesn’t sound any more repentant in jail then he had when he was dumping his slain gal in the river then heading home to bed.) First recorded in its recognizable modern form in the 1920s, “Knoxville Girl” in fact drew from material that had been floating around for centuries, maybe traceable back to a real-life 17th Century killing in Wittam, England. Over the years, the titular victim hailed from a variety of towns – from Oxford, England to Wexford, Ireland – which suggests, terrifyingly enough, that just about every locale had at least one bloodthirsty woman-slayer to be sung about.

Clocking in at nearly 12 minutes, Jim Morrison’s epic “The End” is a bad trip that builds up to an insane, surprising end. The psychedelic rock epic has widely been interpreted as a goodbye to childhood innocence, and Morrison has said as much in interviews. It begins calmly, with the singer bidding adieu to his only friend, the end, before taking a lyrical tailspin into wilder verses, begging the listener to “ride the snake” and “ride the highway west.” The final section is done as a spoken word narrative retelling the story of Oedipus, with the narrator telling his father that he wants to kill him and telling his mother he wants to have sex with her, before devolving into a flurry of chaotic “fuck”s. “The End” was developed during the group’s tenure as the house band at Whisky a Go Go when one night, after Morrison had dropped acid, he improvised the song’s tumultuous ending. They were fired the next day.

The psychedelia of the Sixties translated its share of horrific fantasies into swirls of ominous sound, echoes of bad trips that spelunked into the listener’s wormy subconscious. But in its definitive form – the live version on Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma LP – “Careful With that Axe, Eugene” is less a moody freakout of a rock jam than a lysergically summoned haunted house, offering up door after door for you to open against your better judgment. At the start, Richard Wright’s organ diddles and Nick Mason’s cymbals flutter, with soft, distant moans foreshadowing doom. Then the title is whispered and before the danger it suggests has a chance to register, Roger Waters screams repeatedly with horrific derangement. David Gilmour’s guitar whips up a frenzy in response, but soon the music returns to the hushed, eerie lull that proceeded the violent interlude. Something dreadful has happened, and we’re left to imagine it.

Bahamian musician Exuma — a.k.a. Tony Mackey — conducts a literal seance in this track off his cult classic 1970 self-titled debut. Recording in a studio that had been decked out with candles, he calls out to the spirits of the dead; the band later recalled how they went into “trances,” jangling bells, weeping, finger-picking, and drumming a steady heartbeat. This is no jokey, Halloween version of communing with the dead, but a horror movie scene recorded to tape. When the track wraps up at just over seven minutes, the listener feels truly haunted.

One-hit wonders Bloodrock improbably scored a Top 40 hit with a gruesome, eight-and-a-half minute, first-person account of dying. The hard rockers’ music resembles a British ambulance siren and the lyrics describe the gory aftermath of a plane crash as a man is tended to by an EMT. He feels “something warm flowing down [his] fingers,” he tries to move his arm but when he looks he sees “there’s nothing there.” He looks for his girlfriend, and sees her face covered in blood as she looks off distantly. By the end, he offers this couplet: “The sheets are red and moist where I’m lying/God in Heaven, teach me how to die.” It ends with the sound of American sirens. “I guess maybe just the whole thing as a package [music and lyrics] is what freaked people out, and on top of that the sirens,” keyboardist Steve Hill said in a 2010 interview. “The FCC banned ‘D.O.A.’ A lot of stations didn’t play that because people were pulling over in their cars because they thought there was an ambulance behind them.”

Songs of Love and Hate might be Leonard Cohen’s most depraved album, which is saying a lot. Accounts of suicide (“Dress Rehearsal Rag”) and infidelity (“Famous Blue Raincoat”) leave an undeniable sting, but the 1971 LP’s creepiest moments come on opener “Avalanche,” which finds Cohen playing his classic role of stygian bard to perfection. Over rolling flamenco guitar and swelling strings, he portrays a hunchback living at the bottom of a gold mine: “Your laws do not compel me/To kneel grotesque and bare,” he sneers. Even as the song edges into dark obsession and, eventually, pure horror (“It is your turn, beloved/It is your flesh that I wear”), Cohen’s voice maintains a trancelike composure. No wonder gloom-rock poet laureate Nick Cave has been covering the song for more than 30 years.

Shock rock’s greatest act could add any number of songs to a list of truly frightening songs – “Dead Babies” (about child neglect), “The Ballad of Dwight Fry” (an insider’s view of going mad), “Sick Things” (sick things) – but it’s one of Alice Cooper’s at least three(!) paeans to necrophilia that remains his most chilling. There’s an unsettling frankness about the recorded version of “I Love the Dead” – Billion Dollar Babies‘ gothic and occasionally majestic closing track – that transcends satire: “While friends and lovers mourn your silly grave/I have other uses for you, darling.” It’s only onstage, where the song has served as prelude to Cooper’s nightly beheading by guillotine, where it becomes camp. In a 2014 Rolling Stone interview, Alice Cooper shrugged off the tune’s shock value. “To me, anyone taking it that seriously … yeah,” he said, trailing off. “I don’t think you can shock an audience anymore [today]. If I cut my arm off and ate it, OK, that would be shocking. But you can only do it twice.”                                    

Young’s Charles Manson-inspired thriller is the closest thing the Seventies got to a true crime podcast. He met the cult leader a handful of times through the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson, and channeled him in “Revolution Blues,” the spine-chilling track from his masterpiece, On the Beach. Young gets maniacal here, as he charges through vicious lines like “Remember your guard dog?/Well, I’m afraid that he’s gone!” and “Well, I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars/But I hate them worse than lepers and I’ll kill them in their cars!”The song was so terrifying that even Young’s bandmate David Crosby begged him not to play it — but thankfully, Young was never one to take orders.

Suicide’s Alan Vega introduces the title character, a 20-year-old factory worker struggling to support his family, in breathless gusts, like he wants to bust into “Be-Bop-A-Lula” but lives in too grim a world for such footloose pleasures. Barely halfway through this nearly 10-and-a-half-minute threnody, Frankie has killed his family and himself, but even death is no escape – “Frankie’s lying in hell,” Vega insists. And there’s no way out of Suicide’s claustrophobic no-wave either. Vega’s screams aren’t cathartic – at first they’re half-stifled with shame, then they’re full-throated bursts that collapse into sobs or are splintered into infinity by delay effects. The story of Frankie Teardrop would have been mere melodrama if set to the slashing guitar and racing backbeat of Suicide’s CBGB peers but Martin Rev’s electronic backdrop, which churns and grinds with the unsettling murmur of a home appliance that obsesses you during a bout of insomnia, instead suggests a peculiarly modern vision of damnation: not the blazing fires of the Biblical description, but a gray, wearying static of perpetual despair.

Ever the fetishists of the grotesque, English noise/art collective Throbbing Gristle hit peak body horror with standout track “Hamburger Lady” off 1978 album D.O.A: The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle. The lyrics were directly sourced (and spliced) from a written testament by artist Blaster Al Ackerman – who served as a medic in Vietnam, and later in a burn victim unit at a hospital, where he cared for a woman who was scorched from her waist to her face. “Hamburger Lady,” repeats a deadpan Genesis P-Orridge, “She’s dying, she is burned from the waist up.” Even more skin-crawling than the words themselves is the ominous, mechanical whirr of a motor, suspended against a backdrop of clinical white noise.

“Where will it ennnnnd?” Ian Curtis pleads in “Day of the Lords,” over and over. “Where will it end?” Joy Division were just kids when they recorded this song, from their classic 1979 debut Unknown Pleasures, barely out of their teens. Yet they sounded like they’d witnessed horrors they’d spend the rest of their lives trying to forget. The postpunk band came from the bleak industrial wasteland of Manchester, in Northern England. They captured the whole city’s sense of doom in the massively grim rumble of “Day of the Lords,” with a touch of synth from producer Martin Hammett. Ian Curtis chronicles his nightmares, declaring, “I’ve seen the nights filled with bloodsport and pain / And the bodies obtained, the bodies obtained.” He could be singing about war, drug addiction, childhood trauma—but it’s one harrowing sound.

“Welcome to the car smash,” howls a ferocious, 25-year-old Nick Cave. “Dead Joe” is a scuzzy fiasco about a car wreck, presumably around Christmas (per Cave’s ho-ho-ho-ing) that’s so grisly you “can’t tell the girls from the boys anymore” – an interesting metaphor for London’s post-punk scene. The song was cowritten by Cave and his then-girlfriend Anita Lane, interpolating tonal elements of American Southern Gothic into roiling, cartoonish art-rock. Although the band fell apart just a year later, the Birthday Party influenced gothic rock by incorporating disparate strands of blues and rockabilly to eerie effect.

Just another Springsteen song about a boy and a car and a girl. Except this time the driver offering to whisk his gal away from her town full of losers is Charlie Starkweather, the real-life spree killer who rampaged through the American west for two months in the late Fifties in the company of his “pretty baby,” 14-year-old Caril Ann Fugate. Bruce had given a voice to desperate souls before, but those were usually good people fallen on hard times. He’d never sung about tramps like these, and his drawl takes on an appropriately sociopathic chill, while his harmonica scrapes like a rusty weathervane atop an abandoned barn. When Charlie’s captors demand to know the reasons for his cruelty, we’re at the moment all horror movie fans recognize, where a psychotherapeutic explanation surfaces. Starkweather’s flat shrug of a rationale: “There’s just a meanness in this world.”

Although Metallica were underground trendsetters for the early half of the Eighties, they broke into mainstream consciousness in 1989 with “One,” a single about a quadriplegic solider asking to die. “When we were writing the Master of Puppets album, James [Hetfield] came up the idea – what it would be like if you were in this situation where you were sort of a living consciousness, like a basket case, where you couldn’t reach out and communicate with anyone around you,” Lars Ulrich once said. “You had no arms, no legs, couldn’t obviously see, hear or speak.” They revisited the idea in the fall of 1987, when their managers turned them onto Dalton Trumbo’s antiwar novel and movie Johnny Got His Gun, which recounted the agony of a patriotic American soldier, Joe Bonham, in World War I who awakens one day to find a landmine had stripped him of his limbs, eyes, ears and most of his mouth – yet he could still think and feel. He eventually headbangs Morse code on his pillow, asking his doctors to kill him. For Metallica, that story – set against machine-gun thrash riffs for nearly eight minutes – made for an unlikely Top 40 hit, an unforgettable music video using footage from the movie and a Grammy win.

1950s Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein is having a cultural moment thanks to the recent Netflix hit Monster: The Ed Gein Story. But true murder (and metal) nerds know that Slayer was there first with this Gein-themed ripper of their 1990 thrash classic Seasons in the Abyss. Tom Araya narrates Gein’s perspective with a spoken intro over throbbing guitars that resolve their grim riffing with two brutal solos. Araya eventually arrives at the song’s point — “in the mind of the insane/Fantasy and reality are the same” — but the horrific masterstroke comes at the end when you hear a Midwestern sounding female say, “I don’t wanna play anymore, Mr. Gein/I want out of here, Mr. Gein/ let me out NOW!”

There’s no instrumental run-up, no getting used to the weather in rapper Scarface’s brain on the Geto Boys’ musically relentless meditation on mental illness, stress and paranoia. He just starts telling you how it is: “I sit alone in my four-cornered room, starin’ at candles.” Even though this song gets credit for kick-starting the short-lived rap subgenre “horrorcore,” there’s very little that feels cartoonish on “”Mind,’” just Texas gangsters getting to the point that their lifestyle breeds hallucinations.  Bushwick Bill even informs us that his evildoer credentials are so thorough he will, in fact, steal candy from a baby: “Halloween fell on a weekend/Me and Geto Boys are trick-or-treatin’/Robbin’ little kids for bags.” The resulting song helped put Texas hip-hop on the map.

A tale told by a bog witch of the highest order. In the lead single from her 1995 album, To Bring You My Love, Polly Jean Harvey transforms into a beguiling, filicidal mother from a swampy underworld, beckoning her daughter back from the river she drowned in. The music video sees Harvey undulating to a sinister cha-cha rhythm and thrashing underwater in a red satin dress: She genuinely struggled to come up to the surface, she told Spin, thanks to the weight of her hefty black wig. The chorus plays on the otherwise innocuous “Salty Dog Blues,” an American standard first recorded by New Orleans legend Papa Charlie Jackson: “Little fish, big fish swimming in the water,” Harvey whispers, “Come back here and give me my daughter.”

Nearly every Nick Cave song is scary; few artists have dedicated themselves to the grim and macabre like the Australian Bad Seeds leader. In the mid Nineties he tasked himself with writing and recording the self-explanatory album Murder Ballads, whose songs claimed the lives of dozens upon dozens of hapless fictional victims. Its lugubrious lead track, originally planned as a sequel to Cave’s Milton-inspired soundtrack fave “Red Right Hand,” tells the unflinching story of a man who meets a “sweet and happy” girl named Joy, whom he eventually married, only to discover her one day after she “had been bound with electrical tape, in her mouth a gag/She’d been stabbed repeatedly and stuffed into a sleeping bag.” The killer also claimed the lives of the narrator’s three other daughters; by the end of the song it seems the narrator may know more than he lets on. “They never caught the man,” Cave sings. “He’s still on the loose.” 

This dramatic monologue from a nosy neighbor is set to a palette of eerie sound effects – subdued metallic clangs, low-rent electronic flutters – that would be the envy of any haunted house designer. Always a creepy dude (not for nothing did Francis Ford Coppola cast him as the bug-gobbling Renfield in his take on Dracula), Tom Waits wheezes here like he’s shining a flashlight underneath his chin to spook an edgy campfire scout troop. In fact, they way he repeatedly intones, “What’s he building in there?” – emphasizing the word “building” each time with a worried compulsion – eventually makes the narrator sound far more suspicious than the eccentric loner he’s spying on. At least until the unsettling coda, where we hear the whistling from the home of the eccentric builder for ourselves.

One of rap’s most chilling songs comes in the form of Eminem’s rhyme-for-rhyme recreation of the moment an abusive relationship turns deadly. Written and released when his relationship with now-ex-wife Kim Scott was at its most toxic, the rapper murders Kim’s husband and stepson while verbally abusing her from her home to a car to the site where he finally ends her life. He screams the entire song and even imitates Kim’s voice for moments where she refutes his statements. “If I was her, I would have ran when I heard that shit,” mentor Dr. Dre told Rolling Stone in 1999. “It’s over the top – the whole song is him screaming. It’s good, though. Kim gives him a concept.”                                     

Eminem’s revenge fantasia “’97 Bonnie And Clyde” was an upbeat yet horrifying track where the bleached-blonde MC detailed a father-daughter trip to the beach, with some hints that “Mama,” in the trunk, wasn’t exactly along for the ride willingly. Tori Amos’s reinvention for her 2001 covers album Strange Little Girls ups the American-gothic quotient with horror-movie strings, dimestore-synth beats, and a flip of the song’s perspective – her strangled delivery and parental tenderness make the monologue sound as if it’s coming from the victim as the life is being bled right out of her. “‘Bonnie & Clyde’ is a song that depicts domestic violence very accurately, right on the money,” Amos told MTV in 2001. “I did not align with the character that he represents. There was one person who definitely wasn’t dancing to this thing, and that’s the woman in the trunk. And she spoke to me. … [She] grabbed me by the hand and said, ‘You need to hear this how I heard it.'”

Johnny Cash’s cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” released a year before his death at 71, is a study in existential terror delivered by a man who knows he doesn’t have much time left, and he’s no longer glossing over life’s pain. Cash had initially been hesitant to record the song; producer Rick Rubin had to send it to him three times before he agreed to try it. But the result ended up being one of the most haunting cover songs ever recorded — even Trent Reznor had to admit after seeing the video, “that song isn’t mine anymore.” But behind Cash’s strong demeanor is an anger and fear projected onto the listener. When he sings, “I will let you down/I will make you hurt” — somewhere between an apology and a threat — it feels like your deepest anxieties about humanity, and yourself, coming to eat you alive.

Stevens’ ambitious Illinois tackled several moments from the state’s history, including the haunting tale of Seventies serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Jr. – a.k.a. “the Killer Clown” – who buried the bodies of 26 teenage boys he sexually assaulted and murdered in his home’s crawl space. “I felt insurmountable empathy not with his behavior but with his nature, and there was nothing I could do to get around confessing that, however horrifying that sounds,” he explained in an interview around the time of the album’s release, elsewhere noting that Gacy served as a foil to the more optimistic Illinois figures he had been exploring like Abraham Lincoln and Carl Sandburg. Stevens’ subdued style of musical delivery – softly singing over the muted pluck of a guitar – makes his almost tender empathy for Gacy all the more chilling.

The final track on MJ Lenderman’s now-classic album Manning Fireworks begins with some legitimate adult fears: losing your sense of humor, going on some serious benders, and the idea that moving to New York City can change the way you dress (yikes!). But then it gets actually spooky, as Lenderman admits he’s been up late at night, playing Ozzy Osbourne’s “Bark at the Moon” on Guitar Hero. He unleashes his inner wolf and lets out an ah-hoooo! paying tribute to Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London,” followed by nearly 7 minutes of chilling distortion that implies an unhinged next chapter to this guy’s story we can only guess at. By the time Lenderman sings “SOS!” you’re just as terrified as he is.