The 50 best Halloween songs of all time

42. “Zombie,” by The Cranberries: So, nine entries in, we have arrived at the third and worst category of Halloween song, which is a Song By A Mainstream Artist That Is Actually Just A Mainstream Song, But The Theme Of It Is Plausibly A Concept That You Would Associate With Halloween If You Were Making A Word Cloud. This, to me, is cheating, but this is the stuff of which most Halloween playlists are made, because a lot of these songs are, understandably, better than most deliberately written Halloween novelty songs. But Christmas doesn’t need to do this! You don’t see people at Christmas listening to “Red” by Taylor Swift on the grounds that red is one of the top two Christmas colors! Anyway, this is a good song, but it loses points for not in fact being about zombies. It’s about, like, the metaphor.