The Cheeriest Spooky Theme Around

I've been hunting down Halloween music for giving out candy tonight, and one piece that keeps coming up in my searches and on the local stations is Charles Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette.

Gounod wrote it to make fun of a critic of his --and by all accounts the critic instantly realized the piece was about him-- but it wasn't particularly "Halloween-y" back then.

Then along came Alfred Hitchcock.

Were it not for ol' Alfred using Funeral March of a Marionette as his theme music for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, we probably wouldn't even have this piece in the Halloween lexicon. 

Still, I wonder just how many kids nowadays have ever seen an episode of the series from The Master of Suspense; it's not nearly as iconic as The Twilight Zone, which has marathons on some cable channels around the Christmas and New Year's holidays, or The Outer Limits, which was revived and had another run from the mid-90s to early 2000s.

Happy Halloween, everyone!