Spooky Nintendo Tunes for Your Halloween Playlist

Happy Halloween Eve!

I recently wrote a column for Zelda Universe about the theme for Kilton’s Shop in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and the melodic and orchestral techniques used that make it one of the creepiest pieces in the Zelda repertoire.

It would be a shame, though, not to talk about some of the other pieces that make up Nintendo’s wealth of spooky music.

To cap off this Hallowtide, I want to take a look at a few of my favorite spooky Nintendo tunes and why they’re so bone-chilling.

Mansion Theme (Luigi's Mansion, 2001)

The premise of Luigi’s Mansion, Nintendo’s whimsical foray into the horror game genre, is charmingly silly: equipped with a souped-up vacuum cleaner, Luigi goes on a Ghostbusters-esque mission to exorcise a haunted mansion he won in a contest he never entered and to save his twin brother, Mario, from King Boo.

Like The Castle of Otranto (1759), Dracula (1897), and The Haunting of Hill House (1959), Luigi’s Mansion contains the trappings of Gothic classics—a decaying estate with secret passageways, paranormal beings, and doors and portraits that move of their own volition.

The main theme of Luigi’s Mansion, which plays throughout the mansion’s corridors, similarly draws on elements of Gothic music. The theme is orchestrated with the organ, the harpsichord, and the theremin.

"Mansion" by Kazumi Totaka and Shinobu Tanaka

The organ and harpsichord have a long history in the music of horror films as a symbol of the Gothic. In her book on Gothic music, Isabella van Elferen explains that both keyboards are often a signifier for a supernatural threat, like the ones presented by Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean and the vampire Lestat in Interview with the Vampire. (The harpsichord is also featured heavily in the 1965 The Addams Family episode “Lurch and His Harpsichord,” though to more comedic effect.)

Similarly, synthesized sounds have long haunted horror soundscapes as phantoms of the human voice. The theremin in particular evokes ghosts, aliens, and other supernatural beings.

The rhythm of the bass line also follows an almost Jaws-like structure. It begins slowly, with a lot of space between notes, before ramping up the pace as the music becomes more suspenseful.

Most apparent in the orchestration, though, is the humming of Charles Martinet, the voice actor for the Mario Brothers and their palette-swapped antitheses Wario and Waluigi from 1991 to 2023. Through Martinet’s shaky humming, Luigi’s Mansion directly communicates Luigi’s horror.

Luigi Humming in "Mansion"

Shifty Boo Mansion (Super Mario 3D World, 2013)

The Super Mario series (1985–) has included ghosts and Gothic mansions even before Luigi’s Mansion, beginning with Super Mario World (SMW) [1999]. The music accompanying SMW’s Ghost Houses resembles the bewitching opening to Mussorgsky’s tone poem Night on Bald Mountain (1867). The Ghost House cue features a high, chromatically wandering line harmonized in tritones underpinned by a low minor variation of SMW’s overworld theme. Adding to the horrific atmosphere are long synth tones that droop in pitch like ghostly wails.

"Ghost House" by Koji Kondo

This cue is textbook spooky, but what I find more compelling is the music for Shifty Boo Mansion in Super Mario 3D World (3D World) [2013] which is set to a lush waltz. The Super Mario association between ghosts and the waltz goes back at least to Super Mario 64 (1996). Within the haunted mansion level Big Boo’s Haunt lies a merry-go-round on which Mario confronts the mansion’s ghost proprietor. As Mario approaches the merry-go-round, music fades in that evokes the waltz music of late 19th-century circuses. It isn’t particularly dissonant or spooky, but placed in juxtaposition against the horrific mansion, it produces an uncanny effect—not to mention the association of circuses and creepy clowns.

"Merry-Go-Round" (from Big Boo's Haunt) by Koji Kondo

The ghostly waltz of 3D World leans less on carnival connotations and more on the expressiveness of waltzes of the Romantic period. In particular, Shifty Boo Mansion’s waltz resembles a slow, melancholic waltz like Chopin’s Op. 69, no. 1. Its melody is based primarily on a descending chromatic figure with suspensions marking the ends of phrases. The waltz might have been rendered completely mournful if not for the inclusion of plucky synthesizers, the theremin, and the harpsichord. In conjunction with this Gothic orchestration, the mournful quality of the melody seems to communicate the unfinished business that tethers Boos to their haunted mansions.

"Shifty Boo Mansion" by Mahito Yokota

Fan art of the Shadow Temple (Ocarina of Time) by Tom Garden.

The Shadow Temple (The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, 1998)

Unlike Shifty Boo Mansion, where the horror of the haunted mansion is lessened by the cartoonish visuals of the Mario series, Ocarina of Time’s Shadow Temple is downright terrifying. The temple, tucked behind a graveyard, is a site in which the royal family of Hyrule carried out horrible tortures and executions away from the public eye. Skeletal remains are scattered throughout every nook and cranny of the temple along with guillotines, bloodstained surfaces, various torture devices, and the Stygian “Ferry to the Other World.” The enemies of the temple are just as horrifying and play on body horror tropes. They include zombies, mummies, disembodied hands, a bloodied mass with a skeletal face and severed arms (pictured below), and so on. And mind you, this is all included in a game that was rated E (for Everyone) by the ESRB.

An enemy known as Dead Hand grabs Link by the head.

Like the temple’s visual design, the sound design also plays with common horror signifiers.

"Shadow Temple" by Koji Kondo

A drum beat and wind drone lay the foundation for the Shadow Temple cue over which other sonic elements are spread. The wind drone helps to create a sense of space and atmosphere within the dark, cavernous rooms of the Shadow Temple. The drum beat, provided by a synthesized djembe, lays down an almost dancelike groove.

The drumming becomes more significant when the player reaches the end of the temple where the player faces off against the dungeon’s boss atop a massive drum. The boss, aptly named Bongo Bongo, takes the form of a decapitated body with a pair of giant, disembodied hands. Between attempts to swipe, crush, and grab Link, the hands play the drum on which Link stands, bouncing him in the air. As Tim Summers points out in his companion to the music of OoT, the implication here is that Bongo Bongo has been the source of the djembe beat throughout Link’s time in the Shadow Temple.

Other elements of the Shadow Temple cue play into common horror film tropes. For starters, running through the entire cue is a sort of call-and-response between bass vocal synths and alto vocal synths that slide uneasily between dissonant pitch intervals. Even deeper vocal samples that resemble chants are woven interstitially as the piece continues. Put together, the vocal synths and samples blur the line between song and chant in a way that evokes the trope of the demonic choir. Link’s fairy companion Navi points these voices out when the player approaches certain skeletons or demonic portraits, saying “I can hear the spirits whispering in this room.”

Bongo Bongo and Navi’s integration of these sonic elements into the diegesis of the Shadow Temple make the score all the more unsettling. The drums and voices haunt Link as he makes his way through a place that the ghostly presences call the site of “Hyrule’s bloody history of greed and hatred…”

Perhaps the only non-diegetic part of the score is our Gothic harpsichord, which meanders around the chromatic scale, layering more crunchy dissonance into the overall sonic architecture.

K.K. Dirge (Animal Crossing series, 2001–)

A final, maybe most upsetting, example comes in the ordinarily cutesy Animal Crossing series (2001–). In each game of the series, the player has the opportunity to hear live concerts from K.K. Slider, a guitar-playing Jack Russel Terrier. Afterward, the player can purchase vinyl records of K.K.’s songs to play at home. Most are relatively upbeat, like “K.K. Bubblegum” and “K.K. Bossa,” but one stands out as their complete opposite.

The live version of “K.K. Dirge” resembles its namesake genre. It has a funeral march pulse, an entirely static harmony, and a lamenting melody. On its own, it’s already very eerie.

K.K. Slider's performance of "K.K Dirge" in Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020)

The “aircheck” version of the song, the recording that plays from the in-game vinyl, is about 1,000 times more spooky and borders on disturbing.

"K.K." Dirge (Aircheck)

This version opens with ghostly, wavering sine waves that lend a theremin-like otherworldliness. The same funeral march pulse is kept, but low, haunting vocal synths replace K.K.’s relatively bright singing voice. A barrage of Sci-Fi-ish synthesizer tones buffers a modulation up by half-step. The suddenly piece ends with two loud bangs, like the Grim Reaper knocking at the door.

Spooky!

Bibliography

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Elferen, Isabella van. Gothic Music: Sounds of the Uncanny. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012.
Link, Stan. “Horror and Science Fiction.” In The Cambridge Companion to Film Music, edited by Mervyn Cooke and Fiona Ford, 200–15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Summers, Tim. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: A Game Music Companion. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2017.

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