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Let the Cure, Korn and Nine Inch Nails give you nightmares this holiday, in Bigger Than the Sound.
By James Montgomery

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The Cure’s Robert Smith


Photo: Michael Tran/FilmMagic

If you’re like me, you’ll probably be spending Halloween hiding in your closet from pagans (seriously, have you ever seen the Nic Cage version of “The Wicker Man”?!?) and the day after Halloween cleaning up the eggs those pagans decided to throw at your house.

Even without the egg-tossing polytheists, Halloween is totally terrifying. The apples stuffed with razorblades, the candy corn, the sexy Ghostbusters — it’s like every childhood trauma rolled into one miserable, macabre holiday. And while, in previous years, I’d spend the night quaking in my Snuggie, this Halloween is gonna be different. Rather than hide from my fears, I’ve decided to embrace them (my mom says it’s OK).

So to thoroughly up the spooky, I’ve created a list of the scariest albums ever made. It wasn’t easy (seriously, I could’ve included every black-metal album ever made or Avril Lavigne’s The Best Damn Thing), but rather than focus on visceral screams, I went for ephemeral chills. These are psychological thrillers — dense, raw, positively horrifying albums, guaranteed to turn your Halloween into a total fright-fest.

Oh, and I’ve discovered that these albums also go nicely with the inevitable November 1 egg-scraping too. Anyway, enough talk: Let the nightmare begin (cue thunderclap, Vincent Price cackle and ominous rolling fog).

The Cure, Pornography (1982)
The darkest album by a band who practically turned black into a primary color, Pornography opens with Robert Smith bleating, “It doesn’t matter if we all die,” and, really, it’s all downhill from there. Forty-five droning, claustrophobic minutes of fear and futility, with the occasional foray into such sunny topics as shame (the terrifying title track) and existential dread (the single “The Hanging Garden”), it’s beyond scary, mostly because it’s so totally, nakedly real. Not surprisingly, the band imploded while touring behind this album and reconstituted (as a duo) for the uncharacteristically poppy “Let’s Go to Bed” single later that year, which must represent one of the most dramatic about-faces in music history. And while their music since then hasn’t always been cheery, it never approaches the depths they hit with Pornography.

Geto Boys, We Can’t Be Stopped (1991)
The fourth album by the legendary Houston crew is often credited with starting the mutant genre dubbed “horrorcore,” and yet, it’s more terrifying than anything that’s followed since, mostly because it doesn’t rely on gimmickry to make its point. From its infamous cover — an actual photo of Boys member Bushwick Bill being wheeled on a gurney, his right eye shot out after an argument with his girlfriend — to the bleak, often horrific lyrical content (songs like the classic “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” or “Chuckie”), Stopped is unblinking in its honesty and its depravity. It’s realer than 10,000 Gravediggaz discs or anything by those Insane Clown Posse yahoos.

Korn, Korn (1994)
This is by far Korn’s best album, drawing from the pummel of acts like Pantera and the lyrical hiss of acid-rap icon Esham. Sure, there’s also plenty of goofball scatting (and the occasional bagpipe), but there’s an oddly spooky level of subtlety throughout, starting with the cover (solitary girl on a swing set, shadowy figure approaching) and running right through songs like “Shoots and Ladders,” “Clown” and “Daddy,” which detail various cruelties of childhood and adolescence. Clearly, high school was no picnic for lead yowler Jonathan Davis, and the end result was the musical equivalent of torture porn — only with the bloodiest moments thrust inward.

Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral (1994)
Recorded (partially) in the house where the Manson Family murdered actress Sharon Tate, sampling guttural squeals from “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” featuring the infamous phrase “I wanna f— you like an animal,” Spiral represents Trent Reznor at his most depraved, his most dark, his most visceral. This is an album about painful pleasures of the flesh and the terrifying notions of power and hatred they arouse. Of course, it all ends with “Hurt,” which is basically all those things rolled into one.

Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven (2000)
A post-apocalyptic, 87-minute double album that’s darker, dronier and more terrifying than you could possibly imagine. Broken down into four suites, each with subsections of varying lengths, Fists is actually closer to a symphonic piece than a rock album, taking listeners on a dizzying journey through the bleak and bombed-out spaces of North America, barren expanses dotted by buzzing towers and soot-covered mountains, the silence only occasionally broken up by ghostly field recordings (messages from an AM/PM gas station, Murray Ostril’s laments over the Coney Island of his youth) and booming, hissing strings that appear out of nowhere. Hard to imagine Cormac McCarthy listened to anything but this album when he was writing “The Road.”

And one extra-spooky bonus album:

Beyoncé, I Am … Sasha Fierce (2008)
The crazy eyes! The unhinged pelvis! The “Single Ladies” video! The “Diva” video! The Sasha Fierce glove! I maintain that Beyoncé is crazier than any superstar on the planet, and one day, she’s going to listen to the voices in her head. It will be terrifying in ways I can’t even begin to fathom.

Questions? Concerns? Hit me up at BTTS@MTVStaff.com.

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