This content originally appeared in the 2023 issue of Spooky Little Halloween—The Magazine. Select photos are courtesy of LVCRFT.
It was an acronym I’d seen floating around the Internet, but it took me a few times to realize LVCRFT was the name of a band, much less that they were a spooky band I might really enjoy.
I figured, like a lot of bands that Halloween lovers gravitate towards en masse, their music was something dark or less melodic than my pop-rock lovin’ heart would enjoy regularly.
But then season three of “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” was teased with a song called “Straight to Hell” by Sabrina Spellman and…LVCRFT. I was hooked. I dove into their catalog and was pleased to find that not only was there a lot of pop influence in their music—it was thoroughly centered around a love of Halloween and horror.
Had I finally found THE Halloween band I’d always wanted for my playlists? It certainly seemed like it.
Fast-forward a few years to 2023, and now I can count Amanda Warner (she/her), aka DeepKutz, and Evan Bogart (he/him), aka Lil’ Punkin, as spooky acquaintances in my online Halloween world—enough so that they agreed to be our very first guests when Mike from All Hallows Geek and I launched our podcast, By Pumpkin’s Light.
Here’s an outtake from the interview to get to know LVCRFT.
Q&A with LVCRFT
HOW DID LVCRFT START?
EVAN: It was a conversation we’d been having that it would be so cool to do something in this space. There was this songwriting camp in a spooky castle on the coast of Denmark that I attended. I was there in a session with a writer named Sarah Barrios, who became Scary Ana Grande—you’ve heard her sing a lot of our songs, including “Skeleton Sam”.
Her and I were in this writing session one night, and we heard this track that a producer was playing. It sounded scary and spooky. He was like, ‘You want to write to this?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, only if we write about Halloween!’ Sarah and I ended up writing this song about Halloween, and then I was immediately on the phone Amanda saying, ‘We gotta make a Halloween music album!’ LVCRFT was basically born overnight.
Amanda and I dove in and planned what it was going to be like. Come the top of that next year, we got the core Slasher Seven together, and that’s where “This Is Halloween Volume 1” was born. “Skeleton Sam” was the first song we wrote on day one.
AMANDA: I just remember we kind of like locked eyes on it and locked brains. We had a crew of people in LA that would go to all the spooky stuff Hollywood—[Universal’s Halloween] Horror Nights, Reign of Terror, see every horror movie that came out.
Evan and I are [the types of] personalities where if we’re into something, we’re all in. Like, we’re at 120%, we’re driving as fast as the car goes. I would almost say there’s camaraderie where we’re trying to one-up [each other on] the weirdest thing we could find.
We felt so much in love with the culture, and it clicked—why isn’t there new Halloween music and why aren’t we doing it?
LVCRFT DJing at Midsummer Scream 2022
WHERE DO YOU FIND YOUR INSPIRATION?
AMANDA: We’re on our fifth album, and I remember someone saying, ‘Yeah, but how many songs can you write about Halloween?’ And I was like, ‘Baby, spooky never sleeps!’ It’s amazing, we never run out of ideas.
EVAN: Every time I think we have, we haven’t. But I also think we’re really deep into the lore now. We’re so inspired. We started off thinking about how we were going to create the Halloween soundtrack for the next generation and had this debate about what is Halloween music? So “This Is Halloween Volume 1” was kind of like tongue in cheek, like a “Now [That’s What I Call Music]” compilation—it was a joke.
But Halloween is all these different sounds. It’s so many different vibes. Halloween is so inclusive of so many different genres and cultures. I think we wanted our first album to embody a really wide, diverse range of what Halloween sounds are—and even then, we couldn’t cover all of the different sounds. We had to stop at some point.
Listen to this full Q&A on By Pumpkin’s Light
HOW HAS YOUR MUSIC EVOLVED SINCE LVCRFT STARTED?
EVAN: We went into the sequel, and it was like, ‘Okay, how do we expand on [Volume 1]?’ In the meantime, all these people in the music industry, all these songwriters and artists and producers, came to us and they were like, ‘Oh my god, that Halloween thing you guys did last year! That was so much, can we be a part of this?’
We expanded our coven, and we ended up doing a lot more songs [with] a lot more writers and a lot more artists. We wrote our first EP, “Dia De Los Muertos”, and we dropped our first songs [in the off season] because there was just so much content.
As we got into the album last year (2022), we were like, ‘Man, how do we really start carving out the space and doing something super unique and different and paying homage to the things we love about horror—but in an audio way?’ That’s where we started moving, evolving into something like “Scream Warriors” where we were thinking, ‘What if we were able to create the scare? How can we create jump scares as music?’
Basically, our whole premise was how do we make the scariest thing ever. As we come into this year (2023), we’re embracing a whole other aspect of horror movies and entertainment and applying that to audio.
Me with Skeleton Sam at Midsummer Scream 2023
TELL US THE STORY BEHIND SKELETON SAM.
AMANDA: Being a metal lover, I think of him like our Eddie from Iron Maiden—a character you know and think of, like The Cramps with their iconic imagery or Alice Cooper. The list goes on.
I also think none of us want to be the forward-facing person in LVCRFT because we’re a collective. Because we’re also horror buffs, Skeleton Sam is your host to LVCRFT. He’s your guide, your Twilight Zone Guy, and I think it fits into all the horror tropes—tropes being a good thing.
EVAN: This year’s album will dive even deeper into the lore and background of Skeleton Sam. We feel like people have really resonated with both the song and the figure, so we wanted to dive even deeper into his story and provide an album that focused on what people love about the song and character.
WHAT MAKES A GOOD HALLOWEEN SONG?
AMANDA: Halloween music has a sonic imprint. It sounds like a world, and there’s so many little subgenres. There’s psychobilly with The Cramps and all the offshoots. There’s White Zombie, Pantera—that zone. There’s synthwave, 80s music which is an endless soundtrack. Even pop. It’s a vibe, and it has to have a sinister sonic imprint.
To me, there’s always a lyric. The lyrics have to be in this world, but what I’ve learned is like it doesn’t need to be on-the-nose like “Purple People Eater”. It’s so much bigger than that, and I think you’re seeing really big artists that are being really successful taking on spooky as part of their branding and going in a really big way with it.
WILL WE BE ABLE TO SEE A LVCRFT CONCERT SOON?
EVAN: A lot of us [in the Slasher Seven] come from the live performance space. A lot of us toured or have performed live before. I don’t think we ever envisioned LVCRFT as a live performance project. It was something where we were creating with these songs.
But as we’ve evolved, we’ve been asked to do DJ sets—like last year at Midsummer Scream. We brought Sam, and Amanda was up there DJing. Coming out of that, we connected with 13th Floor, and they asked us if we would come in and build something out with them for Shaqtoberfest (Halloween festival in Long Beach, CA).
And then we got asked by Haunt O’ Ween (immersive Halloween experience in Woodland Hills, CA) if we would curate music for them. We’re like, ‘This is kind of like starting to starting to evolve into something where we’re curating, where we’re doing more live performances, which we all know how to do.’
Then we were really caught off-guard when we got asked to do some late night and morning show performances and realized this is evolving quicker than we thought it was going to.
So yes—there will be more of a live component to LVCRFT going forward, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up doing late night [shows] this year.
