Buttkickin' Halloween Songs: "House on Haunted Hill" - Frank De Vol And His Orchestra (1959)

No lyrics here, gang. We got ourselves an instrumental. And a damn fun one for Halloween. Frank De Vol and His Orchestra took the theme song to the 1959 film House on Haunted Hill and gave it a spooky organ-driven mamba twist.

But you can’t talk about the song without a brief shout-out to the movie, so let’s pause to talk about this wondrously campy (yet still enjoyably spookifying) haunted house film. Starring none other than the inimitable Vincent Price and produced by the zany William Castle, House on Haunted Hill is one of those movies you just have to kick back and enjoy on a dark October night, with friends and potions and cauldrons and all the Halloween atmosphere you can muster.

I’m not saying it’s a great movie, but it’s a damn fun one, and you should watch it. And you can watch it for FREE. It’s in the Public Domain and you can catch it on YouTube. Here you go:

Anyway, the theme song by Frank De Vol makes for a wonderfully Halloweenish instrumental for your playlist. If this doesn’t grab you from the get-go, you need more danse macabre in your life. Is it a little dated? I’d say it’s just a product of its time. This is campy horror in black-and-white on a UHF channel in a pre-cable world, where the frights and scares and things that went bump in the night had that perfect amount of kitsch and creeps.

The more I think about it, it appears that I’m a little dated. Imma put a jack-o-lantern on my head and sulk in the corner, watching The Munsters…