We decided to create a special Halloween Plec Picks to get you in the mood tonight, but in the end we couldn’t get it down to just one playlist. We’ll be posting up lists of our favourite Irish Halloween songs as well, and a list of genuinely creepy songs to really set the mood.

Here, though, are ten undeniable classics, the ones you know and love and would complain about in the comments section if we didn’t mention.

1. Ray Parker Jr.: Ghostbusters

Some say Parker basically stole the music from Huey Lewis and the News (and by some, we mean Colombia Pictures, who paid Lewis a settlement), which is hard to defend. But it’s even harder to stop loving this song. It is, when you get right down to it, a song about busting ghosts. Who can argue with that?

2. Bette Midler: I Put a Spell On You

A song with many, many versions, making it hard to choose just one. In the end, we couldn’t resist using the version from Hocus Pocus.

3. Bobby (Boris) Picket and the Crypt-Kickers: Monster Mash

It’s cheap, silly, American, and has nothing to do with Halloween’s roots in the Christianisation of Irish pagan traditions. Just like all the fun parts of Halloween!

4. Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue: Where the Wild Roses Grow

Nick Cave has plenty of songs that would be a good fit in any list of ‘alternative’ Halloween songs, but this duet with Kylie Minogue is such an undeniable classic that you almost forget how weird it is that Nick Cave performed a duet with Kylie Minogue. Inspired by a traditional Appalachian ballad called Down in the Willow Garden, Cave wrote the song for ‘Murder Ballads’, an entire album about, well, stories of murder.

With Cave narrating the story from the point of view of a man who becomes obsessed with and then murders a woman to prevent her beauty from ever fading, and Minogue taking over the chorus as the woman’s ghost, the song tells a much darker story than you might think if you weren’t paying attention to the lyrics.

5. Theme from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Who could resist?

6. Rocky Horror Picture Show: Sweet Transvestite

Men! Planning on cross-dressing for Halloween? Wow, go you. You shatter those paradigms.

If you’re not putting this much effort into it though, no one cares.

7. The Ramones: Pet Sematary

Written for the soundtrack to the 1989 adaptation Stephen King’s novel about an evil cemetery that resurrects the dead, ‘Pet Sematary’ may not be The Ramones’ most famous song, but it deserves a place on any list of classic Halloween tunes.

8. Rockwell: Somebody’s Watching Me

As if the paranoia of the chorus (and the rest of the lyrics) wasn’t enough, this song offers some properly cheesy spooky synth music.

9. The Addams Family Theme Tune

There was probably something genuinely subversive about the Addams Family’s depiction as a loving, functional family, whose values were just a little bit… different, back in the 1960s (and probably in the early 1990s too, after so much 1980s culture revolved around conservative backlash and nostalgia for the 50s). But even without that context, you’ve got to love them.

10. Michael Jackson: Thriller

If this list were ranked, ‘Thriller’ would probably still be here at the top. It’s not, though; we just put it here so we could throw in the proper full video. Enjoy!