Sounds To Make You Shiver! "Sounds To Make You Shiver! Bloodcurdling! Terror! Horror!" (Pickwick, SPC-5101, 1974)

One of the more common 1970's Halloween sound effect records to still turn up, this has connections to some of the other Pickwick titles I've already posted. I've mentioned Wade Denning a few times, but Frank Daniel seemed to have been equally involved in making the world a better place through spooky records; he did the cool artwork for this title as well as for the back cover of Famous Ghost Stories, and both sides of Sounds of Terror, for which he also takes the sole writing credit. Thanks Frank!

Compared to those other two Pickwick titles, Sounds to Make you Shiver! seemed less intense to my ears as a kid (though there's enough female moaning on here that I was commanded by a childhood friend's parents to take it off when I brought it along for a sleepover party). In keeping with a somewhat standard format of the day, one side has a "story in sound" ("...designed primarily for general scaring"), while the other has many of the same sound effects banded out individually and touted in the liner notes as "ideal for background noises that will give extra authenticity to mystery play or skit. Just play the record on cue in the wings and the audience will shiver and love it". While this sort of audio double-dipping smacks cynical grown-up me as a cost saver, I know that when I was a kid I really did love being able to easily queue up and play something along the lines of "Witch Laugh" or "Screams & Groans" while, you know, doing shit like phoning up people at random in the middle of the day. These days I've found that a lot of side one is still pretty good stuff to mix in as a layer of sound underneath spooky songs, just as long as you make sure to stay away from the dreaded "guy pretending to be a cat" section. Man, oh man.


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