Spooky season is finally upon us, and with it comes pumpkin spice-flavored everything, 31 Nights of Halloween on Freeform, and, of course, costume-planning. Now thanks to TikTok—the Gen-Z video app that popularized “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X—we also have a new supernatural song to herald in the most holy of haunted #szns.
Halloweenies everywhere should rejoice, because not only is it an objective bop—there’s also an accompanying skeletal boogie-down. Every other video on my TikTok “For You” feed is of someone in skull makeup shuffling à la “Party Rock Anthem” to this song, which is appropriately titled “Spooky Scary Skeleton.”
Originally called “The Skeleton Dance,” it was featured in one of Walt Disney’s 1929 Silly Symphony animated shorts, which was produced by Disney himself and animated by famed special effects technician Ub Iwerks. A video of that version has been viewed over 30 million times on YouTube. In 1996, singer-producer Andrew Gold recorded his own version of the song on his album “Halloween Howls: Fun & Scary Music.”
A techno-remix of Gold’s song is what’s going viral on TikTok right now, but as Paper Mag points out, it was first popularized in YouTube gamer culture.
A TikToker with over 571,000 followers named Maddi Winter has one of the most creative skeleton videos to date, with over 3 million likes. She spent 12 hours producing her version of the shuffle dance, claiming to have “hand-drawn” 350 over the clip of her dancing.
There’s tons of other great ones out there, too. Some even break down, in slow motion, how to do the shuffle. Below are a few favorites.
This is the kind of energy we need for #SpookySzn.