Written by Caine Blackthorn
Halloween: the one night a year when corpse paint counts as skincare and you can blast metal without scaring the neighbors. We’ve brewed up twenty perfect pairings, one metal track, one horror flick, and one snack to complete the ritual.
Feast of the Damned: 20 Cursed Pairings of Metal, Horror & Sinful Snacks
1. Band/Song: Opeth – Ghost of Perdition
Film: Crimson Peak (2015)
Snack: Dark chocolate truffles with chili heat
Why it works: Victorian ghosts, doomed love, and riffs that sound like candlelight bleeding.
2. Band/Song: Benighted – Scars Film: The Phantom of The Opera (1925)
Snack: Rare steak and a glass of red so dark it could double as stage blood.
Why it works: Both are tragedies in disguise. beauty twisted by obsession, elegance drowned in madness. Phantom hides his face; Julien hides his soul behind blast beats.
3. Band/Song: King Diamond – Halloween
Film: Trick ’r Treat (2007)
Snack: Candy corn, the most cursed sugar on earth.
Why it works: Both are pure Halloween theater camp with chaos, and a wink from something that might actually bite. King croons like Sam stalks: with style, menace, and a grin full of razor blades.
4. Band/Song: Carach Angren – The Resurrection of Kariba
Film: The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988)
Snack: Rum punch with a slice of lime. Sweet, tropical, and faintly cursed.
Why it works: Both descend into the fever dream where folklore and the dead blur together. Carach Angren’s orchestral horror and Craven’s voodoo visions feel like the same ritual performed under different moons.
5. Band/Song: Ghost – Year Zero
Film: The Exorcist (1973)
Snack: Spicy deviled eggs, temptation in canapé form.
Why it matters: Both revel in blasphemy with a grin. The Exorcist terrified the faithful; Ghost seduces them. It’s liturgy turned spectacle with incense, Latin chants, and the faint smell of sulfur wafting from the kitchen.
6. Band/Song: Hooded Menace – Pale Mascarade
Film: The Masque of the Red Death (1964)
Snack: Red velvet cake — decadent, doomed, impossible to stop eating.
Why it matters: Both worship death through beauty. Hooded Menace drag doom through candlelit halls while Price’s masquerade crumbles under plague and pride. It’s elegance rotting in real time with slow, luxurious decay set to riff.
7. Band/Song: Rob Zombie – Living Dead Girl
Film: Return of the Living Dead (1985)
Snack: Rare burgers fresh off the grill cooked rare, messy, unapologetically alive.
Why it matters: Camp and carnage in perfect sync. Rob turns necromancy into pop art; Return makes punk kids into zombies. Both are sleazy, stylish, and grinning through the gore. The undead with better taste.
8. Band/Song: The Great Old Ones – In The Mouth of Madness
Film: In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
Snack: Squid ink ramen. Black, swirling, and vaguely sentient.
Why it matters:This is cosmic horror eating itself. The band channels Lovecraft through blast beats and Carpenter’s film makes insanity contagious. By the final bite, you’re not sure if you’re enjoying dinner or being rewritten by it.
9. Band/Song: Type O Negative – Black No. 1
Film: Interview with the Vampire (1994)
Snack: Red wine and dark cherries, elegant decay in a glass.
Why it matters: Both drip with gothic excess. Velvet, vice, and a hint of rot. Peter Steele and Lestat share the same curse, too beautiful for daylight, too damned to stop savoring it.
10. Band/Song: Slayer – Dead Skin Mask
Film: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Snack: Barbecue pulled pork. Preferably eaten with your bare hands under questionable lighting.
Why it matters: This is grindhouse gluttony at its purest. Slayer’s riffs hit like Leatherface’s saw teeth. Crude, relentless, and gleefully grotesque. Both remind you that horror isn’t meant to be clean. It’s supposed to stick to your fingers.
11. Band/Song: Wednesday 13 – House By The Cemetary
Film: House by the Cemetery (1981)
Snack: Cold pizza served at midnight with a side of bad decisions.
Why it matters: Both are love letters to B-movie horror. Gory, campy, and too self-aware to die. Wednesday 13 turns schlock into swagger, and Fulci’s film bleeds atmosphere from every frame. It’s punk horror at its most deliciously rotten.
12. Band/Song: Gravediggaz – 1-800-Suicide
Film: I Spit On Your Grave (1978)
Snack: Flaming hot revenge chili that burns going down, but it’s earned.
Why it matters: Both are raw nerves turned art. Gravediggaz birthed horrorcore by laughing in the face of pain and I Spit On Your Grave took trauma and made it terrifyingly unpretty. It’s the sound and sight of survival clawing its way out of the dirt.
13. Band/Song: Lordi – Would You Love a Monsterman?
Film: Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988)
Snack: Cotton candy that that looks suspiciously like a cocoon.
Why is matters: Both turn horror into a circus of grotesque, glittery, and impossible not to grin at. Lordi’s monster glam and the Klowns’ campy carnage share the same gospel: terror can have perfect hair and a killer hook.
14. Band/Song: Helloween – Mr. Torture
Film: Hellraiser (1987)
Snack: Chocolate dipped strawberries spiked with cayenne pepper. Sweet, seductive, and slightly dangerous.
Why it matters: Both grin through the agony. Helloween delivers sadomasochism with a power metal wink, while Hellraiser turns desire into damnation. It’s hooks, riffs, and chains. Ecstasy dressed as torment.
15. Band/Song: Exmortus – Psycho Theme
Film: Psycho (1960)
Snack: Buttered popcorn eaten nervously, one stab at a time.
Why it matters: Both are masterclasses in precision and panic. Hitchcock used violins like knives; Exmortus turns them into guitars. It’s elegance meeting insanity. Proof that even murder has rhythm.
16. Band/Song: Electric Wizard – Funeralopolis
Film: The Wicker Man (1973)
Snack: Smoked corn on the cob charred and pagan.
Why it matters: Doom riffs for ritual flames. Both celebrate the beautiful stupidity of worshiping things that will kill you.
17. Band/Song: Cradle of Filth – Her Ghost in the Fog
Film: The Others (2001)
Snack: Vanilla sponge cake dusted with powdered sugar. Ghostly and deceitfully innocent.
Why it matters: Atmosphere first, blood later. Dani shrieks like a Victorian séance; the film whispers back in candlelight.
18. Band/Song: Emperor – I Am the Black Wizards
Film: The VVitch (2015)
Snack: Rotten apple crumble, sweet sin gone sour.
Why it matters: Old magic, new malice. Emperor’s symphonic frost mirrors the film’s Puritan rot, rebellion dressed as revelatio
19. Band/Song: Bathory – Woman of Dark Desires
Film: Countess Dracula (1971)
Snack: Blood splattered cupcakes soaked in red wine, decadent, dripping, faintly blasphemous.
Why it matters: Both pay tribute to the legend of Elizabeth Bathory, beauty preserved through blood and damnation. Quorthon’s riffs sound like the castle doors closing; the film lingers on what happens when vanity turns vampiric.
20. Band/Song: Black Sabbath – Black Sabbath
Film: The Omen (1976)
Snack: Charred marshmallows — soft in the middle, burnt like prophecy.
Why it matters: This is where evil got its soundtrack. Sabbath invented dread as music and The Omen made it cinematic scripture. Both whisper the same truth. Sometimes the devil doesn’t need to hide, he just needs a riff.
The candles have burned to stubs, the amps are still humming, and the air tastes faintly of sugar and sin. Twenty pairings later, your ears are ringing and your teeth ache from too much noise and candy. The mark of a proper Halloween feast of the damned.
So raise your glass (or cauldron) to the monsters who riffed before midnight and the ones still playing past the graveyard gates. May your snacks be cursed, your vinyls warped, and your neighbors forever terrified of your playlist.
Until next October… keep it loud enough to wake the dead.
If this feast fed your dark little heart, wander deeper. Dive into our weekly columns: Metalhead Horoscopes for your cosmic riff forecast, Seven Deadly Songs for the week’s fiercest new releases, Deep Cuts for hidden metal gems, and World Metal Weekly to explore global heavy scenes worth worshiping.