Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Andrew Sanford | News | October 30, 2025
Getting into the Halloween spirit this year has been difficult. I don’t know why! I’ve tried my best and made a point to consume as much horror content as I can, be it audiobooks, music, shows, or movies. My theme for things I watched was Stephen King television adaptations, so lots to work with. The neighborhood I live in has been decked out with spooky decorations. Both my kids have watched Universal monster movies with me. It’s been a lot of fun, but it still doesn’t feel right. My favorite holiday hasn’t felt the same this year, and I’m desperate for a way to bring that heartfelt excitement back. I think I know the way.
One of my favorite pandemic discoveries was a musician named Nick Lutsko. He went viral with a hilarious song about going to the RNC, and I quickly became a big fan. Like many others, Nick was trapped at home and was creating art to pass the time. He would craft songs about everything from a potential third Gremlins film to a hilarious yet depressing recap about 2021. In addition to being very funny, he’s also an incredible musician, but it was a trilogy he released that resonated with me the most.
Five years ago (Jesus), Lutsko dropped an unofficial theme for Spirit Halloween. The emergence of a Spirit Halloween in your neighborhood means two things: Halloween is around the corner, and a gym or department store has closed. The spooky stores take up shop in abandoned buildings with (presumably) cheap or short-term leases and offer up an array of spooky or sexy costumes, decorations, and candy. They’re magical places that become barren hellscapes by the end of October.
What Lutsko did was write up a theme for the store that not only feels perfect in tone for the spooky season, but also features Lutsko’s genuine excitement and enthusiasm for Halloween and the store itself. He’s being silly, yes, but he’s clearly skewering something he loves. He also ends the song by railing against Jeff Bezos for killing all of the stores, which Spirit Halloween wears the hollowed husks of like a hermit crab looking for a new shell. But he didn’t stop there.
The premise of the Spirit Halloween Theme is that Nick was hired to write a theme for them. That led to them hiring him to write another song! Unleash Your Spirit came out shortly after the Spirit Halloween Theme and shows Lutsko purchasing a bunch of Spirit Halloween products to fill his house with. However, led by a bald mannequin/puppet that looks suspiciously like a certain Amazon CEO, the decorations revolt against Nick and lock him in the basement as he’s attacked by a different strange bald man, first introduced in the RNC song.
What’s amazing about this song is that it begins to work in more of the lore around Lutsko’s performances. His songs would often make references to his Grandmother, and this one does as well, while also bringing back a man under his stairs who may or may not be one of the people currently in charge of the FBI (it’s been an insane five years). The song also demands that you get ready for Halloween, something I am desperately in the mood for at the moment.
The quality of the song and the video is also excellent. Lutsko is no slouch, and while the first theme is a fantastic work of art, there’s only so much you can do, visually, with a cellphone camera. Unleash Your Spirit takes things to the next level, and it only makes sense that he would seek to up the ante again. Lutsko was enlisted by Spirit Halloween again the following year, giving us Spirit Halloween Planet.
Clad in a purple suit and armed with a green screen, Lutsko showed us a world covered with Spirit Halloween and run by himself (and Beetlejuice, but in name only). Directed by visual effects artist Brielle Garcia, this final piece of Lutsko’s Spirit Halloween trilogy is the best yet. Not only is it hilarious, but the song absolutely slaps. It starts with a slow build, during which my sons and I will often hold hands and sway back and forth in a circle, and then rocks out with some infectious beats, making it clear that the world would be better were it Halloween year-round.
I saw Lutsko in concert in 2023, and Spirit Halloween Planet brought the house down. Everyone was jumping and singing along. It was an incredible experience. The video is also a massive achievement. It shows what can happen when you give talented people the funds and room to be themselves. What you get is an engrossing piece of art that will resonate long after Spirit Halloween ceases to be (Jeff Bezos spares no one).
Lutsko’s lore continued to grow throughout the year, and the references to Beetlejuice and Lutsko’s Grandma feel even crazier for a production of this scale that was a work-for-hire piece for such a large company. The fact that Lutsko never loses his sense of self in any of these videos or songs, even after Spirit Halloween started to pay him, speaks to his confidence as an artist. The company knew what it was getting, though, and would even play the songs in its stores for a few years, though Lutsko has pointed out recently that they have stopped.
Regardless, these are the perfect songs to get you in the mood during these last days of October. Crank them up as loud as you can and bask in the artistry of someone who clearly loves Halloween. It’s infectious! My kids know all the words to these songs, and seeing them enjoy them as much as they do has given me a much-needed boost. I may not be fully out of my funk yet, but that could be because I’m getting older and something inside of me is dying, but I’m just going to try not to think about that.
