Lana Del Rey / Season of the Witch (From the Motion Picture "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark") - Single / 2019
Season of the Witch (From the Motion Picture "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark")
woozy, uneasy, softly menacing
This is Lana Del Rey's cover of Donovan's 1966 psychedelic classic, recorded for the horror anthology film it lends its title to. She largely preserves the original's paranoid, hazy lyric while slowing the arrangement into something more spectral and melancholic, turning a druggy 60s warning song into a ghost story mood piece.
paranoia surveillance and being watched cultural anxiety altered perception dread disguised as whimsy
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator reporting fragmented observations — what's seen through a window, over a shoulder — to an unspecified listener; the voice is passive and slightly disoriented rather than commanding, which makes her seem more like a witness caught inside the phenomenon than someone explaining it.
What happens
There isn't a plot so much as a mounting sense of strangeness: the speaker notices multiplicity and disguise in herself and others, then feels observed in turn, and the chorus arrives again and again as an unexplained diagnosis for all of it — something in the air, some seasonal shift, is responsible. Nothing resolves; the song ends dissolving into wordless repetition and hissed exhalations of the title word.
How it's built
Verse-chorus form borrowed intact from the original, but Del Rey's version leans into the hypnotic, incantatory quality of the repeated instruction and chorus, especially in the extended outro where the lyric breaks down entirely into repeated fragments and vocalizations, mimicking a kind of trance or possession.
Section by section
Opening verses
The speaker's description of seeing multiple selves and multiple sights through a window establishes a fractured, almost hallucinatory point of view before any chorus arrives, setting the tone of quiet disorientation that Del Rey's hushed delivery amplifies far beyond the original's breezier reading.{
First chorus
“must be the season of the witch”
The phrase works as a shrug dressed up as an explanation — vague enough to cover anything strange, which is precisely what makes it eerie rather than informative. Del Rey delivers it like a resigned confession rather than an accusation.
Second verse
The turn toward being watched by a stranger mirrors the earlier self-observation, suggesting that the uncanny feeling described in the first verse has now become external and threatening, aimed back at the speaker.
Beatnik line
“beatniks are out to make it rich”
This one topical, almost satirical aside momentarily grounds the song in a specific cultural moment — countercultural figures being absorbed into commerce — before the song retreats back into its vaguer, more atmospheric dread.
Extended outro
The steady collapse of language into isolated repetitions of the title word suggests possession or incantation completing itself, turning the cover into something closer to ambient horror-film scoring than a pop song.
Craft
- refrain as incantation
- The recurring diagnostic phrase functions less like a sung hook and more like a spell or chant, reinforced by the song dissolving into pure repetition of a single word by the end.
- ambiguous imperative
- An instruction to gather up loose ends is left unexplained, functioning as ominous ritual language rather than practical advice, which contributes to the song's dreamlike unease.
- mirrored perception
- The window-gazing and over-the-shoulder glance set up a symmetry where the observer becomes the observed, dramatizing paranoia as a two-way street.
- vocal texture as meaning
- Del Rey's breathy, layered ad-libs and sighs do interpretive work that the sparse lyric leaves open, adding a haunted quality absent from the more upbeat 60s original.
Reading it
Read straightforwardly, the song is a mid-60s expression of unease about rapid cultural change — shifting identities, surveillance, commodification of rebellion — with the witch metaphor standing in for an unnamable, ambient strangeness in the air. In Del Rey's hands, recontextualized for a horror film, that ambiguity becomes closer to literal supernatural dread; the same lines that once satirized social anxiety now read as a slow-building ghost story, with the outro's incantatory repetition suggesting actual ritual rather than metaphor. Both readings coexist because the lyric never specifies, and the arrangement is what tips the balance toward the eerier interpretation here.
Context
Donovan's original 1966 recording was a touchstone of psychedelic pop and has been covered widely (notably by Vanilla Fudge and Joan Jett). Del Rey's version was recorded specifically for the 2019 horror film Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which reframes the song's ambiguous unease as more overtly ghostly, fitting her broader catalog's interest in vintage Americana filtered through melancholy and dread.
Listen for
- the shift in tempo and texture from Donovan's brighter original to Del Rey's slowed, hazier arrangement
- the layered breathy ad-libs during the chorus that add a ghostly double-voice effect
- the way the outro strips the lyric down to a single repeated word, functioning almost as sound design rather than singing
- the tonal whiplash of the beatnik line amid otherwise vague, atmospheric imagery
About Lana Del Rey
Elizabeth Woolridge Grant, known professionally as Lana Del Rey, is an American singer-songwriter. Her music is noted for its melancholic exploration of glamour and romance, with frequent references to pop culture and 1950s–1970s Americana.
b. 1985 / United States
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