Last Updated on September 23, 2025 by Maggie Boccella
Halloween has countless visual hallmarks – Jack O' Lanterns, piles of bite-sized candy bars, costumed children roaming the streets in search of said candy bars, and, of course, the droves upon droves of scary movies and TV specials. When it comes to sonic signifiers of the season, many horrorhounds of a certain age will fondly recall listening to spooky songs to celebrate Halloween. While the mind will generally go to old standbys such as Bobby “Boris” Pickett's eternal classic “Monster Mash“ or Michal Jackson's “Thriller,“ there was once a much more vast treasure trove of eerie audio to indulge in – everything from cheesy tunes about various silver screen monsters, to haunted house soundscapes full of canned screams and rattling chains, much of it meant to be background audio for various local haunts to amp up the atmosphere.
There was something magical about those novelty records and tapes, the way their strange noises and mischievous melodies provided you with the first half of a bridge that your imagination completed, taking you to a world where the supernatural was as real as anything else you knew to be true as a kid. Like many forms of physical media, Halloween novelty records seem to have faded away… until now.
One person who's doing his damndest to keep the tradition of scary sounds on wax alive and well is Joe Pleiman, who records under the moniker Dewmar Campfire Recording Company. Pleiman is a skilled musician and sound engineer with decades of experience working in the entertainment industry. Hardcore Adult Swim fans might recognize one of the credits on Pleiman's resume: sound editor on season one of Assy McGee, a truly deranged comedy (even by Adult Swim's standards) about a detective that was literally a walking, talking, gun-and badge-toting butt. He was also the main sound designer for the PBS children's cartoon Wordgirl.
Speaking to FANGORIA over Zoom, Joe says that the impetus to start Dewmar Campfire came after losing his job a few years back: “I'd just gotten laid off and I was like, ‘I need a thing.' And no one has done a new scary sound record in a while.“ An avid collector of Halloween records and tapes, he felt compelled to start putting out records in the tradition of the old novelty albums many of us grew up listening to.
Dewmar Campfire's first release in 2023, Sinister Sounds of Halloween Horror, was my gateway into Joe's discography. After discovering it on the shelves of NYC's Generation Records, I took it home and was immediately immersed in the hyperspecific world Joe and his collaborators had put together. A mix of eerie instrumentals (“The Scary Dream”, “Sinister Song), moody soundscapes (“Storm of Evil,” “Abandoned Mansion With Too Many Doors”) and spoken word skits that manage to be deeply creepy and goofy in equal measure (“Witch Shenanigans”, “The Grinding Machine”, “Trapped in the Record”).
It's also something of a concept album, as the liner notes claim that the record's contents come “from an old tape found beneath floorboards of a long abandoned barn, just outside of the town of Underwood in rural Western Ohio…“ The copy goes on to tell the story of a family that vanished from the farm sometime in the sixties, never to be heard from again. As immersive as these concepts can be though, Pleiman maintains that the backstories for his albums are really meant to be a sort-of metatextual explanation for the deliberately lo-fi, recorded-on-tape quality he goes for with his records: “Because I did it all on tape, and it had this old quality to it, I might've been worried that people might get [the record] and not understand why it sounded so old.”
The cover to Sinister Sounds… (art by Lindsay Daniele)
The album's opening track, ominously titled “The Scary Dream,“ is a genuinely unsettling audio collage of otherworldly moans and groans, rattling chains, and out of tune piano keys plinking irregularly against howling winds and distorted laughter. Every time you feel like you've adjusted, a new layer of creepiness wanders in, making the listener feel as though they're being forced to float through the haunted house that this track builds from the ground up, taking in every one of its horrors. At sixteen minutes and thirty-five seconds, the track's ability to stay engaging throughout is in and of itself a major accomplishment.
On “Sinister Song,“ a shorter but no less disquieting piece of music, Pleiman layers several dueling piano tracks, each one at the same maddening pace but all of them discordant from each other, like a haunted piano getting its dust-covered ivories tickled by multiple musical phantoms. Balancing the scary with the silly, Pleiman also gifts us with gloriously ridiculous gag tracks like the album's penultimate piece,” The Grinding Machine,“ which makes use of harsh metallic grinding sounds and the voice of a bizarrely nonchalant man admonishing somebody for grinding away his body – “Hey! That was my left leg, stop it.” It's a bizarre bit that oscillates between being ridiculous and casually horrific, perfect for when you're decorating your place with plastic skeletons and rubber severed limbs.
Another thing that makes Dewmar Campfire records stand out, aside from the quality of the music and sketches pressed onto the vinyl themselves, is the amount of creativity and attention to detail that Joe puts into the packaging and presentation of his work. Bother Sinister Sounds and Spooken Words feature excellent cover art by artist Lindsay Daniele, and the former also features an “activity sheet“ insert, complete with spooky madlibs prompts, arts and crafts projects, and recipes for seasonal treats like “Banana Ghosts!”
In 2024, Pleiman put out two more records under the Dewmar Campfire Record Co. name. The first came in August: An '80s flavored concept album titled Yamahalloween, which had a less overtly sinister backstory than Sinister Sounds, but an equally fun concept behind it (as quoted from its bandcamp page):
“The year is 1989. The American wing of a major Japanese Music Instrument company runs a print ad, inviting users of their products to submit homemade recordings of original Halloween songs for a ‘Yama-Halloween' album. Hundreds of hopeful musicians, songwriters, and home recording enthusiasts send in tapes. But the album is never released. Until today… available now, for the first time ever, only on wax!”
Presenting the album as a compilation of amateur songs culled from a long-forgotten Yamaha promotional campaign, Pleiman delivers eighteen tracks of pure synthesizer-based Halloween fun. Songs like “Dead!“, “Basketballoween“, and “I'm Under Your Bed“ all incorporate the sounds of simple keyboard riffs, 808 drum loops, and fuzzy amateur vocals from both children and adults, giving the music an authentically cheesy '80s analog feel. Pleiman totally nails the tone and feel of the era he's evoking, making songs that truly feel like submissions from nonprofessional songwriters that nonetheless are incredibly catchy. “I thought the concept was so ridiculous,“ Joe adds, “but I think some people thought it was real, which is cool…[It gives it] a kind of a Blair Witch-y thing.”
The second record, released in September, was Spooken Words for Halloween Night, a tribute to countless old school narrative audio records like Alfred Hitchcock Presents Ghost Stories For Young People and horror legend Vincent Price's recently reissued Witchcraft & Magic. Each track on the album is a creepy monologue about everything from “The Creepiest Part Of The House“ –where a seriously disturbed woman breaks down the mutated contents of a neglected refrigerator– to the playfully threatening “I'm Gonna Grab Your Foot“, which features a deep, distorted voice taunting you about all the things you'll never do after he takes your precious foot. They're all backed by eerie foley and disquieting ambient music, perfectly setting the atmosphere without overpowering the vocals.
It's impossible to listen to any of these records and feel yourself being swept up in the dark magic of the Halloween season, to feel that childhood thrill when ghosts and goblins still felt as real as the pile of leaves you jumped in, or the cheap latex monster mask you pulled tight over your face before setting out on a trick-or-treating expedition around the neighborhood.
The one downside of Joe's small-scale operation is that he's only able to press small batches of his records, so as of this writing, only Spooken Words for Halloween Night is still available for purchase via the Dewmar Campfire bandcamp page. However, a recent partnership with indie record distributor Light In The Attic might be changing that.
Those of you now eager to get your hands on the next seasonal release(s) from Joe Pleiman and co. won't have to wait very long: Dewmar Campfire's records (yes, they're dropping two in one year again!) are currently available for preorder, and will be shipping out in late September, according to Light In The Attic's website. First, there's Halloween Hellscape – which Joe says was born from a desire to make an album that “was just horrifying, just really scary.“ He backs this up by telling me that side A will be one long track titled “Symphony of Screams“ – “It's got tons of screaming and horrifying, slightly indescribable sounds,” he explains with a smirk, all but convincing me to smash that preorder button.
The second album, The Spooky Scary Band Plays Scary Spooky Music, was put together during sessions between Pleiman and many of his fellow musicians. It was inspired by Joe's recent acquisition of a slightly out-of-tune harpsichord, one of the staple instruments of classic horror soundtracks. Judging from the sampler video poster to Dewmar's YouTube page, this album promises to be brimming with monstrous music that'll set the mood at any Halloween party (thrown in a haunted house, naturally.)
In addition to making music for the spookiest of seasons, Joe also hopes to make and release some more experimental soundscapes. “I love abstract audio as well…something like ‘Revolution 9′ off The Beatles' White Album is always something that's really excited me.“ Given how strange and heady Joe's work can get when he's keeping it within the realm of Samhain-centered shenanigans, one can only imagine what his version of spaced-out electronic albums like Music To Freak Your Friends and Break Your Lease might sound like. He even recently released a 7-inch single, simply titled Zelda, which is a cool little track Pleiman made back in his college days that went semi-viral in the 2000s era of file-sharing on Napster.
In a world that seems hellbent on pushing A.I. slop onto the masses, the handmade audio art of Dewmar Campfire Record Co. reminds us that one of the things that makes Halloween so fun is the way it sets our imaginations into overdrive, how the simplest canned sound effect or discordant piece of music can conjure all sorts of haunting visions. And with Halloween around the corner, it's just about time to dust off that turntable and get those grim grooves spinning.
Be sure to follow Dewmar Campfire Record Co. on bandcamp and YouTube, as well as their official website. You can also find their latest releases via Light In The Attic.
