Halloween Obsessed: Haunted Attractions, Music From the Documentary Series: Episode 2 Music Review

Perfect for the season!

The perfect soundtrack for the entire month of October has to be the newly released album Halloween Obsessed: Haunted Attractions, Music From the Documentary Series: Episode 2 by composer Chris Wirsig. This is the score for the docuseries about Americans who simply cannot get enough of Halloween, which has won the coveted Audience Award at the Silicon Beach Film Festival in Hollywood, among many other festival honors. The second episode of this award-winning series explores Haunted Attractions around the US. The score is a deliciously creepy evocation of many genres of music and variations of horror. For the history of haunted houses, Wirsig leans into the classical sounds of harpsichords, spine-tingling and creepily erudite. For haunted attraction shows that go year around, Wirsig composes eerie adaptations and plays on Jingle Bells for the holiday season, Celtic melodies for St. Patrick’s Day, and hauntingly romantic Valentine’s Day themes. What I love about this score is how much richness and variation and multiplicity it finds in the themes of Halloween, the spooky and the terrifying and the eerie. There are swelling melodies that are bombastic and epic and wouldn’t be out of place in a Pirates of The Caribbean adventure movie, as well as pulsating electronic dance bangers I could easily picture in a dark gothic rave. There are moments of quiet piano fingering tenderness that unexpectedly blossom into full blown paranoia. It’s an incredibly dynamic score that shows how much an inspired composer can do with a single theme. Chris Wirsig has composed for producer/director Linda Palmer on multiple projects, and their seamless workflow really shines here in a sublimely creative marriage of subject and music.

Halloween Obsessed: Haunted Attractions Music from the Documentary Series: Episode 2 can be found on Spotify, Youtube Music, Bandcamp, and more.

Halloween Obsessed the series can be streamed on Amazon and Tubi.

(Listen to the soundtrack below)

(Watch the video below)