Nothing creates the right mood for Halloween like a spooky song, but the traditional horror hit parade can start to grate after the 4,000th time. For those who have had it with “Thriller” and (god forbid) “Monster Mash,” we’ve put together a fresh list of Halloween-themed jams.

Halloween—Misfits: Just about any Misfits song will do, but as Glenn Danzig’s definitive artistic statement on the subject, this one earned its name. Its under-two-minute gutter-punk assault is so bruising it takes several listens just to get a handle on the lyrics—but as usual, the wait is rewarded.

Monster—Kanye West featuring Jay-Z and Nicki Minaj: One of the best songs on Kanye’s masterpiece My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, “Monster” is the American Psycho of music. The song messes with a different metaphor, comparing murder, mayhem and other assorted horrors to the music biz (rather than Wall Street), but the basic ideas have a lot in common. The controversial video really drives the point home, and if you ever wondered what it would look like if one of Nicki Minaj’s personas attacked another one, it’s a must see.

Devil Town—Daniel Johnston: From the reigning king of outsider music comes one of the most emotional and striking monster songs of all time. In under a minute, Johnston paints a vivid portrait of every goth’s dream hometown.

Zombie—E-40 featuring Tech N9ne, Brotha Lynch & Kung Fu Vampire: With a catchy hook (“if you’re a zombie, monster, ghoul or fiend”) courtesy of San Jose rapper Kung Fu Vampire, E-40 teams with Brotha Lynch—a horrorcore rapper longer before the word existed—and Tech N9ne to spin morbid rhymes for the perfect zombie apocalypse soundtrack.

I Am a Vampire—Future Bible Heroes: If “I Am a Vampire” had been written in the ’80s, it would have been an alternative dance-club favorite. The song takes the perspective of the eternally young, chic vampire. Sure, you have to feed off of people and avoid the sunlight, but that’s a small price to pay for an eternity of being fabulous.

Gangnam Style—Psy: OK, we’re sort of joking, but everyone’s going to be doing the dance on Halloween this year and there will be more than a few bar-hoping Psy look-alikes. You might want to learn it. It’s not hard.

Superstition—The Kills: From the moment the guitar kicks in on the Kills’ “Superstition,” it creates a sort of vague foreboding anxiety that the best horror movies conjure up in the first 20 minutes—before anything bad has happened yet. There is just something about the minimalist, dissonant sounds this duo conjures up that is just creepy. That compounded with a repetitive song about superstition, creates a scary Halloween tune, where the beast that lurks in the shadows is fear.

What’s He Building in There?—Tom Waits: What is scarier than a creepy, reclusive next-door neighbor that’s receiving a lot of mysterious packages? Tom Waits channels the fun, spooky ambience of the Disney’s Haunted Mansion (the ride, not the movie), as he narrates a brief story of a suspicious man in the neighborhood.

Mind’s Playin’ Tricks on Me—Geto Boys: Not just one of the best rap songs ever, “Mind’s Playin’ Tricks on Me” is also maybe the best ghost story ever set to a beat. It weaves layers of guilt, violence and slipping sanity together to make you remember we don’t need paranormal activity to be haunted. The nerd-rock version by Atom & His Package is as awesomely fun as the original is creepy.

I Walked With a Zombie—Roky Erickson and the Aliens: Roky Erickson led the legendary psychedelic rock band 13th Floor Elevators in the ’60s, but got diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and spent much of the next decade in a mental institution. When he returned to music, the content of his songs changed significantly. Now he was singing about aliens, Satan and monsters, and doing so in an incredibly intense, emotional manner. While most of The Evil One is powerful, screaming acid rock, “I Walked With a zombie” is a somber ballad, and by far the saddest, most emotional song on the album.

The Man Comes Around—Johnny Cash: Now that this song has been used in a bunch of scary movies, TV shows and trailers (most notably the Dawn of the Dead remake), it’s been pretty much accepted as a modern horror classic of country music. Cash meant it as a serious hymn, and it almost makes religion cool. But isn’t it always like that with the Book of Revelations?

Bela Lugosi’s Dead—Bauhaus: The 2009 horror film The Collector was the second film (after the more famous Bowie vampire flick The Hunger) to use this song almost in its entirety. It’s maybe the quintessential Halloween song by now—the weird guitar effects and insane lyric delivery by Peter Murphy make it timeless.

That’s That—Groove Ghoulies: Lead singer Kepi Ghoulie is such a monster movie fanatic, that even on this 35-second love song, he can find no better words to express his feeling than compare it to his favorite Halloween monsters, giving us the immortal line “I need you like zombies need brains.”

What’s on your Halloween playlist? Email your song title with a short description to letters@metronews.com to be considered for our readers’ picks playlist.

Devfits, a side project from Pinback singer Rob Crow that mashes Devo and Misfits songs with videos of his children acting out Devo videos, turned out to be weirder and more meticulously prepared than expected last night at the Blank Club.

Crow was the sole member of Devfits. All the music was pre-recorded and he sang the songs karaoke style while wearing a skin tight silver outfit and a creepy serial killer mask reminiscent of the the human-skin mask Anthony Hopkins’s character wore in the famous scene from the Silence of the Lambs. He sang and danced to the music with a silly swagger, which in contrast to the emotionless mask, was downright scary.

The instrumentation was a jumble of Devo and Misfits snippets, cut and pasted to create new, vaguely recognizable songs even to die-hard fans of either band. The lyrics and melodies, best I could tell, were approached the same way. The end result was a handful of offbeat dance-punk pop songs that were interesting and unique.

There were a few videos of his kid reading a semi-familiar Devo script that he was obviously too young to understand. It was hilarious. But most of the footage that played during Crow’s songs was a combination of weird archival film and new videos of Crow dancing and playing different instruments along to the music. The degree of effort Crow took to prepare this performance crossed the line from eccentric to uncomfortable.

Mid-way through the set, Crow moved out of the way of the screen so the audience could watch a nearly five-minute long interlude video of Crow sitting down in a chair with his face covered in bandages. A nurse slowly removed them, one bandage at a time, over a bed of foreboding music, which revealed Crow wearing a brand new, sci-fi mask—black nylon stretched over his head with fake eyes and a large silver collar covering the back of his head. Moments later, Crow emerged with the same motif on stage.

Devfits played a relatively short set of 30 minutes, which seemed like nothing compared to hour-long set from openers Sleeping People. Nonetheless, my hat is off to Crow. It’s not easy to create a live show this far off the beaten path.

Like so many others, I’ve been hopelessly hooked on the Misfits’ unique brand of punk for a long time. Almost a complete mythology in and of themselves, Danzig’s songs for the band impossibly blended romance and gore, pop harmony and gutter hardcore.

Unlike a lot of others, I’ve been just as addicted to stockpiling every cover version I can find of the Misfits’ songs. In honor of Rob Crow from Pinback bringing his DevFits cover band—which mashes up Misfits and Devo—to the Blank Club on Aug. 1, here’s a list of my 10 favorite Misfits reimaginings. Keep in mind, I tend to prefer covers that try a different approach rather than those that mimic the originals note for note. But I’m always on the lookout for new Misfits covers, so if you have any personal favorites, leave them in the comments sections and I’ll be sure to check ’em out.

1. The Lemonheads, “Skulls”: Maybe this cover still seems like the best because it was so completely unexpected. When it came out in 1991 on the Favorite Spanish Dishes EP, the Misfits were more of a cult band than the legend they’ve become in the last two decades. No one was doing acoustic versions of their songs yet—now, of course, they’re a dime a dozen. And certainly no one expected the golden boy of alternapop, Evan Dando, to croon “corpses all hanging headless and limp, bodies with no surprises.” Set to a single acoustic guitar, this version captures the melancholy and torch-song longing that few had even picked up on Danzig’s outwardly grotesque songwriting yet. Even after hundreds of bands have piled on with their own takes on the Misfits canon, there’s still something startling and almost touching about Dando’s version: he wants your skull, but there’s no reason he can’t be sweet about it!

2. Phantasmic, “I Turned Into A Martian”: Another unexpected and unique approach, this was from a one-off project headed by Tess Wiley, best known for her time with the Christian pop band Sixpence None The Richer. What inspired her to cover this on her 1999 album I Light Up Your Life, which was mostly covers of bland pop crap like “You Light Up My Life” and “Something About You,” is anybody’s guess. But wow, what a version. Wrapping some spooky, atmospheric guitar in the smoky blues of her native Texas, and setting it to a shuffling rockabilly beat, the song defies easy description. But somehow it gets closer to Danzig’s heart of darkness than a hundred knockoff tunes from supposedly evil metal bands.

3. Guns N Roses, “Attitude”: That’s not to say metal bands haven’t made a showing. Metallica is arguably responsible for the Misfits ever becoming famous in the first place, thanks to their groundbreaking covers of “Last Caress” and “Green Hell,” sandwiched together into three and a half minutes of fury on their Garage Days Re-Revisited EP (which was released in 1987, just four years after the Misfits called it quits). But even better was Axl and company’s take on “Attitude,” which managed to be faster and louder than the original. The covers record that it was on, 1993’s The Spaghetti Incident?, is nobody’s favorite GnR album, but this was the standout track. Slash’s guitar is incredible, but what gives this version its scary power even still is that it’s impossible to tell where Now Officially Affirmed Crazy Guy Axl is coming from on it. With Danzig, this kind of shock song always seemed pretty tongue in cheek, especially next to tunes about zombies and screwing fire hydrants, but does anyone else feel like Rose is singing it without a trace of irony?

4. Drag The River, “Hybrid Moments”: Now probably the people’s choice for best Misfits song of all time, “Hybrid Moments” therefore gets the most cover-version love, especially from indie bands. But these Colorado alt-country dudes nailed it with the honkytonk version captured on their Live at the Starlight album. Jon Snodgrass’ whiskey-soaked voice adds a sobering element of sadness, or perhaps better amplifies what Danzig had meant all along. (It’s so hard to tell in a song that starts with “If you want to scream, scream with me,” reflects on what might happen if an unspecified creature rapes you in the noggin, and then melts into “Ooh baby, when you cry, your face is momentary.”) It’s enough to make you wish Johnny Cash had covered this Danzig song instead of “Thirteen,” but even so it might not have topped this version, the first Misfits cover to make it seem like horror-punk is something to cry in your beer about. Plus, the band banter at the end is great: “That song was so scary I can’t believe I’m still in the room.”

5. Papa M, “Last Caress”: Best known for his time with Slint, Bonnie “Prince” Billy and now Interpol, David Pajo is the kind of indie rocker who likes to release a slew of solo material under lot of different names. He recorded this gentle, acoustic version of “Last Caress” sometime in the late ‘90s, and it showed up on his 2004 odds-and-ends compilation, Hole of Burning Alms. With an almost whispered vocal and a starkly plucked guitar, it took acoustified Misfits to a new level: lullaby. The use of such an approach in a song that begins “I got something to say, I killed your baby today” was, by even the most exacting hipster standards, pure genius. Pajo would go on to run the concept into the ground by doing the same thing over and over again on his 2009 Misfits covers record Scream With Me, but he still has his moments, as on his fantastic cover of “Bullet.”

Rob Crow is known for doing pretty much whatever he wants. Besides his long tenure in the popular indie band Pinback, this includes bands that only the hippest of the hip have even heard of, and for all most of us know, may or may not have existed in our own space-time coordinates: Heavy Vegetable, Optiganally Yours, Physics Thingy, Other Men, Goblin Cock (okay, the last one actually plays some pretty entertaining doom metal).

So when Crow says “I’m going to start a band that mashes up Misfits and Devo songs, and show videos of my kids recreating famous Devo videos in the background,” no one feels the need to say “that’s nuts.” It’s more like, “When do you want to tour?” And thank god, because now we have the DevFits, Crow’s band which debuted at the end of last year, and does exactly that.

Pinback fans know that the San Diego-based Crow has long been enraptured by Glenn Danzig’s siren songs of punk-horror—the last time I saw them at Bottom of the Hill, they covered “Astro Zombies,” and I’m sure he’s done many more. The question of how he’ll mash them up with Devo’s herky-jerky New Wave makes this show can’t-miss for fans of either band.

The DevFits play Wed., Aug. 1 at the Blank Club in San Jose, 9pm; $5.