Horror punk
Sung. Melodic singing throughout.
In short
Punk with B-movie horror imagery, baritone vocals and mutant doo-wop choruses.
How it sounds
- Baritone vocals with vibrato, in a 1950s crooner style.
- Doo-wop vocal harmonies over punk guitars.
- Black-and-white horror-film imagery and lyrics.
Hear what that means
- Doo-wop underneath
A 1950s pop progression with horror lyrics and a proper sung melody. Take the words away and it is unusually well-written punk.
Open on YouTube - A crooner in a punk band
Faster and harsher, and Danzig is still singing rather than shouting - the tension that defines the genre.
Open on YouTube - After the Misfits
Samhain - November Coming Fire
Slower, darker and closer to deathrock, on the way to what became Danzig's own band.
Open on YouTube
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Each opens at the start of the recording.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 160-200 bpm
- Song length
- 1.5-2.5 min
- Tuning
- E standard, played simply and fast, with a guitar tone that is bright rather than heavy.
- Production
- Cheap and immediate, with the vocals mixed forward and doubled. The Misfits' records sound like 1950s pop records made by a punk band, which is exactly the joke.
- Written about
- Horror and science-fiction cinema, Violence, cartoonishly, Death, Teenage romance, subverted
What each part is doing
- Guitar Punk barre chords over doo-wop and rock-and-roll chord progressions — the fifties structures underneath are what separate this from every other punk genre.
- Bass Driving eighths, simple and loud, in punk's manner rather than rockabilly's.
- Drums Fast and straight with a heavy backbeat, occasionally slowing to a horror-film crawl for effect.
- Vocals Sung rather than shouted, with genuine melody and doubled harmony — Danzig is a crooner in a punk band, and that tension is the genre.
What it isn't
That the horror imagery is all there is. The songwriting is the reason these records survived: Misfits songs are built on 1950s pop progressions with real melodies sung properly, which is why they are covered constantly by bands with no interest in the imagery. Take the lyrics away and you have unusually well-written punk songs.
Told apart from
- Punk rock Horror punk is punk built on 1950s song structures with horror lyrics. The melodies come from doo-wop, not from the Ramones.
- Psychobilly Psychobilly shares the horror imagery and keeps rockabilly's instrumentation — upright bass, reverb, hollow-body guitar. Horror punk uses a standard punk band.
- Deathrock Deathrock is post-punk-derived, atmospheric and theatrical. Horror punk is fast, melodic and comic.
- Gothic rock The audiences overlap heavily. The music does not: goth is slow and reverberant, horror punk is fast and dry.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
The Misfits combined B-movies with fast punk in New Jersey, plus a logo — the Crimson Ghost skull — that became one of the best-selling T-shirts in history. Glenn Danzig moved on to Samhain and then to a heavier solo career. Metallica, Guns N' Roses and dozens of metal bands have covered their songs.
Descended from
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- NWOTHM 1.4 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
- NWOBHM 1.4 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
- Neoclassical metal 1.4 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim. These share no ancestor with it at all.