Buttkickin' Halloween Songs: "Get Out Of My House" - Kate Bush (1982)

Woman let me in!
Let me bring in the memories!
Woman let me in!
Let me bring in the Devil Dreams…

This one should have come a lot sooner, I swear…

Get Out Of My House, the final track on Kate Bush’s terrific 1982 album The Dreaming, is probably the closest I’ve heard to an 80s art rock track that was written by actual angry phantasms, or something. Based on the Stephen King novel The Shining, the song just is beautifully creepy and hauntingly evocative, with constant screaming and moaning underneath the lyrics and chorus.

You can picture the entire scene of the novel (or movie, if you prefer, and I do): slow pans down long, creepy hallways, isolation turning the mind’s eye inward from where we always avert our gaze, ghosts roaming the property in madness, anger, and vengeance, totem animals coming to life in cacophanous rage and muderous excitement, and of course strangers that need to be disposed off, lest anyone try to disrupt the hotel’s macabre sense of order.

Even if you disregard the callbacks to The Shining, the song itself is just a marvel of mood and raw, haunted excess. The allegory has well been established about the house representing the soul, turned inward, closed off, haunted only by vulnerability and the refusal to allow any mortal souls to roam inside its confines.

Either way, Get Out Of My House is as terrifying as it is a beautiful piece of the macabre — supernatural or otherwise.

I will not let you in.
I face towards the wind.
I change into the Mule.
I change into the Mule…