Marilyn Manson / Nightmare Revisited / 1993
This Is Halloween
gleeful, theatrical menace
A communal chant that turns a town's October ritual into a liturgy, with monstrous townsfolk introducing themselves one by one before the crowd folds back into a group scream of welcome. Originally written for a stop-motion film, the song works as a piece of invented folklore: a place defines itself entirely through the performance of fright.
ritual and belonging performance of fear community identity otherness as civic pride seasonal myth-making
Who's speaking
A collective town-voice narrates in first person plural, periodically handing the microphone to individual monstrous residents who speak in first person singular; the implied audience is an outsider being given a tour, addressed directly as "you."
What happens
The song opens as an invitation to visitors, then widens into a town-wide anthem before narrowing to a sequence of individual monsters announcing their methods of fright. It closes by crowning a central figure as king of the town, returning to the communal chant that opened it — a loop rather than a resolution.
How it's built
The song is built like a parade: a recurring call-and-response chorus bookends a series of verses each voiced by a different character, so the structure mimics the town's own population being introduced to the listener. There's no bridge in the conventional sense — instead the chant simply intensifies and multiplies near the end, degrading the title phrase into a chopped, repeated syllable before the full crowd reasserts itself for the finale.
Section by section
Opening invitation
“Wouldn't you like to see something strange”
The song begins as a direct pitch to an outsider, establishing the town as a kind of attraction that wants to be witnessed rather than feared away from.
First chorus
The chorus functions as a civic chant more than a chorus in the pop sense — it names the town, assigns it an action, and invites universal participation, setting the pattern the rest of the song will follow.
Under-the-bed verse
The first monster's introduction plays on childhood bedroom fears, specific and bodily, establishing that the terror here is domestic and intimate rather than abstract.
Catalog of monsters
“I am the shadow on the moon”
A sequence of riddling self-definitions accumulates into a kind of census of the town's population, each figure defined by a sensory trace rather than a full identity, reinforcing the idea that this place is made of fragments and tricks rather than solid citizens.
Crowning the king
“king of the Pumpkin Patch”
The song resolves not with narrative closure but with a coronation, suggesting the whole piece has been building toward communal deference to a single figurehead whose authority is purely ceremonial.
Craft
- anaphora
- Repeated self-introductions beginning with the same phrase give each monster a ritual formality, like townspeople reciting a civic oath rather than threatening anyone.
- personification
- Inanimate seasonal objects are given voice and menace, collapsing the line between decoration and inhabitant so the whole setting feels alive and complicit.
- apostrophe
- The repeated direct address to an unnamed visitor turns the listener into a character within the song, implicated in the town's performance rather than observing it from outside.
- synecdoche
- Monsters are reduced to a single striking feature — fingers, teeth, a mask — building an inventory of fright through fragments rather than full descriptions.
Reading it
Read straightforwardly, the song is a piece of children's-film world-building: a parade of friendly monsters performing fear as civic duty, with no actual threat intended toward the listener. A second reading, invited by this particular performer's history of adopting shock-horror imagery as persona, treats the song as a meta-commentary on performed menace — monstrosity as costume, identity as spectacle, and the audience's scream as the applause the town actually wants. Both readings coexist comfortably; the lyric itself supports the gentler one, while the context of this recording nudges toward the second.
Context
The song is a cover of a track originally written by Danny Elfman for the 1993 film this metadata references, built around an ensemble of stop-motion monster characters narrating their own introductions. The listing here under Marilyn Manson and a release titled Nightmare Revisited suggests this is a cover version recorded for a tribute/covers compilation revisiting that film's soundtrack, which would place the actual recording later than 1993 — I'm not confident about the exact year or details of that release.
Listen for
- the shift from plural town-voice to individual monster voices and back
- the way the title phrase gets chopped down to a bare syllable near the end, as if the word itself is decaying into pure chant
- the coronation moment near the close that gives the song a sudden sense of hierarchy
- how the chorus's rhythm mimics a children's rhyme despite the macabre imagery
About Marilyn Manson
Marilyn Manson is an American rock band formed by namesake lead singer Marilyn Manson and lead guitarist Daisy Berkowitz in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 1989. Originally named Marilyn Manson & the Spooky Kids, they gained a local cult following in South Florida in the early 1990s with their theatrical live performances.
1989 - present / United States
Full biography and catalogue