COLLECTOR GUIDE
Certified Strange: The October List That Goes Beyond Horror
Jeffrey Smith
5 Minutes Read
October doesn't really belong to horror. It belongs to atmosphere.
There's a version of Halloween that's all chainsaws and slashers, and that version has its place. But the month itself, the smell of it, the way the light changes and the days get short and the air gets a particular kind of weight, that belongs to something bigger. It belongs to darkness as a feeling. To stories told after midnight. To the sounds that live at the edge of what's comfortable.
This is the October listening list for people who understand that. Five titles, all preserved and sealed at the source by Alliance Authentic, all earning their place in a Certified Strange collection for reasons that go further than genre.
Elvira, Mistress of the Dark: Elvira #131 (Limited Edition)
The Queen of Camp, Certified Strange
Elvira isn't scary. That's exactly the point.
Since 1981, Cassandra Peterson's alter ego has been the reigning hostess of horror, appearing on late-night television, in films, and across decades of pop culture with the same formula: maximum cleavage, maximum wit, zero actual menace. Elvira knows the movies she's presenting are ridiculous, and she loves them anyway. She is, in the truest sense, the ambassador between horror and everyone who came to it through laughter first.
This Handmade by Robots limited edition figure captures her in knitted vinyl form, a detail that is either deeply ironic or deeply affectionate, and probably both. She belongs on a shelf in October the same way she belongs on a television screen at midnight: as a reminder that the dark side has a sense of humor about itself.
Shop the Elvira #131 Limited Edition at Alliance Authentic
Dressed In Black: Goth Divas From The Dark Side 1941-2025
Darkness as a Lineage
This is not a horror record. It's something more interesting: a document of what happens when women decide to live inside the dark instead of running from it.
Curated and annotated by Cathi Unsworth, author of Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth, this double LP spans more than eighty years of women who wore black before it was fashionable and made music that sounded like the thing underneath your floorboards. Siouxsie Sioux. Lydia Lunch. Diamanda Galas. Their names are invoked here not as nostalgia but as lineage, as a tradition of women who used sound the way other people use locks on their doors.
In Unsworth's own framing, this is music that emerged from "the dark end of the 1970s," from strikes and bombs and political dread, music that "flirted with the fetishist and taboo, drawing on horror and science fiction imagery." That is to say: music that understood what October is actually about before most people figured it out.
Five copies, individually numbered, preserved from the pressing source. This is a short run for a record that deserves a long shelf life.
Shop Dressed In Black at Alliance Authentic
Ghostbusters Original Soundtrack
Welcome to the Paranormal Party
The Ghostbusters soundtrack is one of the most purely fun records of the 1980s, and it absolutely belongs in October.
Here is the case: Ghostbusters is a movie about three scientists who trap the dead for money, culminating in a hundred-foot marshmallow man destroying Manhattan and a Sumerian god descending on an apartment building in the form of a giant Destructor. By any reasonable measure, this is a horror premise. Ray Parker Jr.'s theme just made sure it didn't feel like one.
The soundtrack, with its synthesizer gloss and its perfect blend of disco funk and cinematic score, is the sound of the supernatural made safe and celebratory. It's what October sounds like when the candy outweighs the fear. And on vinyl, the way Ray Parker Jr.'s bass hits, the way Elmer Bernstein's orchestral cues sit in the quiet of the room, it earns its place in a collection built around the eerie and the atmospheric.
Shop the Ghostbusters OST at Alliance Authentic
The Goonies Original Soundtrack
Adventure Sounds Like This When the Lights Go Out
The Goonies is not a horror movie. It is, however, a movie about children descending into tunnels beneath a dead pirate's ship, solving booby traps set by a skeleton, and befriending a man who has been kept in a basement by his own family. The darkness is always right there, just outside the frame.
Dave Grusin's score is the thing that keeps it from tipping over. Joyful and propulsive on the surface, it carries an undercurrent of genuine menace, the kind that lives in caves and abandoned spaces and the places adults told you not to go. Listen to it in October and you remember what it felt like to be a kid who thought something was under the stairs. That feeling is a kind of horror, even if the movie never commits to it.
This is one for the collectors who understand that the dark doesn't always announce itself.
Shop The Goonies OST at Alliance Authentic
Alexandre Desplat: Frankenstein (Soundtrack from the Netflix Film)
Horror meets literature
This one earns its place on genre alone, but what makes it Certified Strange is the approach.
Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein is the third collaboration between del Toro and composer Alexandre Desplat, following The Shape of Water and Pinocchio, and it treats Mary Shelley's source material the way it deserves: as tragedy first, horror second. Desplat's score opens on a seven-note motif for Victor Frankenstein accompanied by ghostly choral voices and a low electronic pulse. The creature's own themes are, in Desplat's hands, tender and searching. A waltz scores the building of the experiment. A four-note figure on plucked strings represents the monster with unexpected delicacy.
This is horror scored like grief. It's the rare film score that would work just as well as a concert piece, and it arrives on a white and red splatter pressing that looks, on a shelf, exactly like it sounds.
One of just 6,000 units in the retail first pressing. Alliance Authentic holds 10, individually numbered, sealed at the source.
Shop the Frankenstein OST at Alliance Authentic
Sealed at the Source. Certified Horror.
Every title in the Certified Horror collection was moved directly from the pressing supply chain into preservation before it reached retail. Uncirculated. Unhandled. Documented. Each comes with an embedded NFC chip: tap it with any smartphone to access a full provenance chain from pressing source to you.
October is the right time to own something that lives in the dark and lasts.
Jeffrey Smith
Passionate advocate for music and vinyl culture. Not as angry as Henry Rollins.
FIND YOUR FOREVER COPY
Some records are more important.
Preserve the ones that matter most.
Curated
Numbered
Limited
Certified Uncirculated
NFC-Secured
BE FIRST TO KNOW WHEN
PRESERVED RECORDS ARRIVE
Get alerts for new preserved records, curated drops and collector updates.
CURATED COLLECTIONS
LEARN
COLLECTOR GUIDE
Certified Strange: The October List That Goes Beyond Horror
Jeffrey Smith
5 Minutes Read
October doesn't really belong to horror. It belongs to atmosphere.
There's a version of Halloween that's all chainsaws and slashers, and that version has its place. But the month itself, the smell of it, the way the light changes and the days get short and the air gets a particular kind of weight, that belongs to something bigger. It belongs to darkness as a feeling. To stories told after midnight. To the sounds that live at the edge of what's comfortable.
This is the October listening list for people who understand that. Five titles, all preserved and sealed at the source by Alliance Authentic, all earning their place in a Certified Strange collection for reasons that go further than genre.
Elvira, Mistress of the Dark: Elvira #131 (Limited Edition)
The Queen of Camp, Certified Strange
Elvira isn't scary. That's exactly the point.
Since 1981, Cassandra Peterson's alter ego has been the reigning hostess of horror, appearing on late-night television, in films, and across decades of pop culture with the same formula: maximum cleavage, maximum wit, zero actual menace. Elvira knows the movies she's presenting are ridiculous, and she loves them anyway. She is, in the truest sense, the ambassador between horror and everyone who came to it through laughter first.
This Handmade by Robots limited edition figure captures her in knitted vinyl form, a detail that is either deeply ironic or deeply affectionate, and probably both. She belongs on a shelf in October the same way she belongs on a television screen at midnight: as a reminder that the dark side has a sense of humor about itself.
Shop the Elvira #131 Limited Edition at Alliance Authentic
Dressed In Black: Goth Divas From The Dark Side 1941-2025
Darkness as a Lineage
This is not a horror record. It's something more interesting: a document of what happens when women decide to live inside the dark instead of running from it.
Curated and annotated by Cathi Unsworth, author of Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth, this double LP spans more than eighty years of women who wore black before it was fashionable and made music that sounded like the thing underneath your floorboards. Siouxsie Sioux. Lydia Lunch. Diamanda Galas. Their names are invoked here not as nostalgia but as lineage, as a tradition of women who used sound the way other people use locks on their doors.
In Unsworth's own framing, this is music that emerged from "the dark end of the 1970s," from strikes and bombs and political dread, music that "flirted with the fetishist and taboo, drawing on horror and science fiction imagery." That is to say: music that understood what October is actually about before most people figured it out.
Five copies, individually numbered, preserved from the pressing source. This is a short run for a record that deserves a long shelf life.
Shop Dressed In Black at Alliance Authentic
Ghostbusters Original Soundtrack
Welcome to the Paranormal Party
The Ghostbusters soundtrack is one of the most purely fun records of the 1980s, and it absolutely belongs in October.
Here is the case: Ghostbusters is a movie about three scientists who trap the dead for money, culminating in a hundred-foot marshmallow man destroying Manhattan and a Sumerian god descending on an apartment building in the form of a giant Destructor. By any reasonable measure, this is a horror premise. Ray Parker Jr.'s theme just made sure it didn't feel like one.
The soundtrack, with its synthesizer gloss and its perfect blend of disco funk and cinematic score, is the sound of the supernatural made safe and celebratory. It's what October sounds like when the candy outweighs the fear. And on vinyl, the way Ray Parker Jr.'s bass hits, the way Elmer Bernstein's orchestral cues sit in the quiet of the room, it earns its place in a collection built around the eerie and the atmospheric.
Shop the Ghostbusters OST at Alliance Authentic
The Goonies Original Soundtrack
Adventure Sounds Like This When the Lights Go Out
The Goonies is not a horror movie. It is, however, a movie about children descending into tunnels beneath a dead pirate's ship, solving booby traps set by a skeleton, and befriending a man who has been kept in a basement by his own family. The darkness is always right there, just outside the frame.
Dave Grusin's score is the thing that keeps it from tipping over. Joyful and propulsive on the surface, it carries an undercurrent of genuine menace, the kind that lives in caves and abandoned spaces and the places adults told you not to go. Listen to it in October and you remember what it felt like to be a kid who thought something was under the stairs. That feeling is a kind of horror, even if the movie never commits to it.
This is one for the collectors who understand that the dark doesn't always announce itself.
Shop The Goonies OST at Alliance Authentic
Alexandre Desplat: Frankenstein (Soundtrack from the Netflix Film)
Horror meets literature
This one earns its place on genre alone, but what makes it Certified Strange is the approach.
Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein is the third collaboration between del Toro and composer Alexandre Desplat, following The Shape of Water and Pinocchio, and it treats Mary Shelley's source material the way it deserves: as tragedy first, horror second. Desplat's score opens on a seven-note motif for Victor Frankenstein accompanied by ghostly choral voices and a low electronic pulse. The creature's own themes are, in Desplat's hands, tender and searching. A waltz scores the building of the experiment. A four-note figure on plucked strings represents the monster with unexpected delicacy.
This is horror scored like grief. It's the rare film score that would work just as well as a concert piece, and it arrives on a white and red splatter pressing that looks, on a shelf, exactly like it sounds.
One of just 6,000 units in the retail first pressing. Alliance Authentic holds 10, individually numbered, sealed at the source.
Shop the Frankenstein OST at Alliance Authentic
Sealed at the Source. Certified Horror.
Every title in the Certified Horror collection was moved directly from the pressing supply chain into preservation before it reached retail. Uncirculated. Unhandled. Documented. Each comes with an embedded NFC chip: tap it with any smartphone to access a full provenance chain from pressing source to you.
October is the right time to own something that lives in the dark and lasts.
Jeffrey Smith
Passionate advocate for music and vinyl culture. Not as angry as Henry Rollins.
FIND YOUR FOREVER COPY
Some records are more important.
Preserve the ones that matter most.
Curated
Numbered
Limited
Certified Uncirculated
NFC-Secured
BE FIRST TO KNOW WHEN PRESERVED RECORDS ARRIVE
Get alerts for new preserved records, curated drops and collector updates.
CURATED COLLECTIONS
LEARN
COLLECTOR GUIDE
Certified Strange: The October List That Goes Beyond Horror
Jeffrey Smith
5 Minutes Read
October doesn't really belong to horror. It belongs to atmosphere.
There's a version of Halloween that's all chainsaws and slashers, and that version has its place. But the month itself, the smell of it, the way the light changes and the days get short and the air gets a particular kind of weight, that belongs to something bigger. It belongs to darkness as a feeling. To stories told after midnight. To the sounds that live at the edge of what's comfortable.
This is the October listening list for people who understand that. Five titles, all preserved and sealed at the source by Alliance Authentic, all earning their place in a Certified Strange collection for reasons that go further than genre.
Elvira, Mistress of the Dark: Elvira #131 (Limited Edition)
The Queen of Camp, Certified Strange
Elvira isn't scary. That's exactly the point.
Since 1981, Cassandra Peterson's alter ego has been the reigning hostess of horror, appearing on late-night television, in films, and across decades of pop culture with the same formula: maximum cleavage, maximum wit, zero actual menace. Elvira knows the movies she's presenting are ridiculous, and she loves them anyway. She is, in the truest sense, the ambassador between horror and everyone who came to it through laughter first.
This Handmade by Robots limited edition figure captures her in knitted vinyl form, a detail that is either deeply ironic or deeply affectionate, and probably both. She belongs on a shelf in October the same way she belongs on a television screen at midnight: as a reminder that the dark side has a sense of humor about itself.
Shop the Elvira #131 Limited Edition at Alliance Authentic
Dressed In Black: Goth Divas From The Dark Side 1941-2025
Darkness as a Lineage
This is not a horror record. It's something more interesting: a document of what happens when women decide to live inside the dark instead of running from it.
Curated and annotated by Cathi Unsworth, author of Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth, this double LP spans more than eighty years of women who wore black before it was fashionable and made music that sounded like the thing underneath your floorboards. Siouxsie Sioux. Lydia Lunch. Diamanda Galas. Their names are invoked here not as nostalgia but as lineage, as a tradition of women who used sound the way other people use locks on their doors.
In Unsworth's own framing, this is music that emerged from "the dark end of the 1970s," from strikes and bombs and political dread, music that "flirted with the fetishist and taboo, drawing on horror and science fiction imagery." That is to say: music that understood what October is actually about before most people figured it out.
Five copies, individually numbered, preserved from the pressing source. This is a short run for a record that deserves a long shelf life.
Shop Dressed In Black at Alliance Authentic
Ghostbusters Original Soundtrack
Welcome to the Paranormal Party
The Ghostbusters soundtrack is one of the most purely fun records of the 1980s, and it absolutely belongs in October.
Here is the case: Ghostbusters is a movie about three scientists who trap the dead for money, culminating in a hundred-foot marshmallow man destroying Manhattan and a Sumerian god descending on an apartment building in the form of a giant Destructor. By any reasonable measure, this is a horror premise. Ray Parker Jr.'s theme just made sure it didn't feel like one.
The soundtrack, with its synthesizer gloss and its perfect blend of disco funk and cinematic score, is the sound of the supernatural made safe and celebratory. It's what October sounds like when the candy outweighs the fear. And on vinyl, the way Ray Parker Jr.'s bass hits, the way Elmer Bernstein's orchestral cues sit in the quiet of the room, it earns its place in a collection built around the eerie and the atmospheric.
Shop the Ghostbusters OST at Alliance Authentic
The Goonies Original Soundtrack
Adventure Sounds Like This When the Lights Go Out
The Goonies is not a horror movie. It is, however, a movie about children descending into tunnels beneath a dead pirate's ship, solving booby traps set by a skeleton, and befriending a man who has been kept in a basement by his own family. The darkness is always right there, just outside the frame.
Dave Grusin's score is the thing that keeps it from tipping over. Joyful and propulsive on the surface, it carries an undercurrent of genuine menace, the kind that lives in caves and abandoned spaces and the places adults told you not to go. Listen to it in October and you remember what it felt like to be a kid who thought something was under the stairs. That feeling is a kind of horror, even if the movie never commits to it.
This is one for the collectors who understand that the dark doesn't always announce itself.
Shop The Goonies OST at Alliance Authentic
Alexandre Desplat: Frankenstein (Soundtrack from the Netflix Film)
Horror meets literature
This one earns its place on genre alone, but what makes it Certified Strange is the approach.
Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein is the third collaboration between del Toro and composer Alexandre Desplat, following The Shape of Water and Pinocchio, and it treats Mary Shelley's source material the way it deserves: as tragedy first, horror second. Desplat's score opens on a seven-note motif for Victor Frankenstein accompanied by ghostly choral voices and a low electronic pulse. The creature's own themes are, in Desplat's hands, tender and searching. A waltz scores the building of the experiment. A four-note figure on plucked strings represents the monster with unexpected delicacy.
This is horror scored like grief. It's the rare film score that would work just as well as a concert piece, and it arrives on a white and red splatter pressing that looks, on a shelf, exactly like it sounds.
One of just 6,000 units in the retail first pressing. Alliance Authentic holds 10, individually numbered, sealed at the source.
Shop the Frankenstein OST at Alliance Authentic
Sealed at the Source. Certified Horror.
Every title in the Certified Horror collection was moved directly from the pressing supply chain into preservation before it reached retail. Uncirculated. Unhandled. Documented. Each comes with an embedded NFC chip: tap it with any smartphone to access a full provenance chain from pressing source to you.
October is the right time to own something that lives in the dark and lasts.
Jeffrey Smith
Passionate advocate for music and vinyl culture. Not as angry as Henry Rollins.
FIND YOUR FOREVER COPY
Some records are more important.
Preserve the ones that matter most.
Curated
Numbered
Limited
Certified Uncirculated
NFC-Secured
BE FIRST TO KNOW WHEN PRESERVED RECORDS ARRIVE
Get alerts for new preserved records, curated drops and collector updates.
CURATED COLLECTIONS
LEARN
COLLECTOR GUIDE
Certified Strange: The October List That Goes Beyond Horror
Jeffrey Smith
5 Minutes Read
October doesn't really belong to horror. It belongs to atmosphere.
There's a version of Halloween that's all chainsaws and slashers, and that version has its place. But the month itself, the smell of it, the way the light changes and the days get short and the air gets a particular kind of weight, that belongs to something bigger. It belongs to darkness as a feeling. To stories told after midnight. To the sounds that live at the edge of what's comfortable.
This is the October listening list for people who understand that. Five titles, all preserved and sealed at the source by Alliance Authentic, all earning their place in a Certified Strange collection for reasons that go further than genre.
Elvira, Mistress of the Dark: Elvira #131 (Limited Edition)
The Queen of Camp, Certified Strange
Elvira isn't scary. That's exactly the point.
Since 1981, Cassandra Peterson's alter ego has been the reigning hostess of horror, appearing on late-night television, in films, and across decades of pop culture with the same formula: maximum cleavage, maximum wit, zero actual menace. Elvira knows the movies she's presenting are ridiculous, and she loves them anyway. She is, in the truest sense, the ambassador between horror and everyone who came to it through laughter first.
This Handmade by Robots limited edition figure captures her in knitted vinyl form, a detail that is either deeply ironic or deeply affectionate, and probably both. She belongs on a shelf in October the same way she belongs on a television screen at midnight: as a reminder that the dark side has a sense of humor about itself.
Shop the Elvira #131 Limited Edition at Alliance Authentic
Dressed In Black: Goth Divas From The Dark Side 1941-2025
Darkness as a Lineage
This is not a horror record. It's something more interesting: a document of what happens when women decide to live inside the dark instead of running from it.
Curated and annotated by Cathi Unsworth, author of Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth, this double LP spans more than eighty years of women who wore black before it was fashionable and made music that sounded like the thing underneath your floorboards. Siouxsie Sioux. Lydia Lunch. Diamanda Galas. Their names are invoked here not as nostalgia but as lineage, as a tradition of women who used sound the way other people use locks on their doors.
In Unsworth's own framing, this is music that emerged from "the dark end of the 1970s," from strikes and bombs and political dread, music that "flirted with the fetishist and taboo, drawing on horror and science fiction imagery." That is to say: music that understood what October is actually about before most people figured it out.
Five copies, individually numbered, preserved from the pressing source. This is a short run for a record that deserves a long shelf life.
Shop Dressed In Black at Alliance Authentic
Ghostbusters Original Soundtrack
Welcome to the Paranormal Party
The Ghostbusters soundtrack is one of the most purely fun records of the 1980s, and it absolutely belongs in October.
Here is the case: Ghostbusters is a movie about three scientists who trap the dead for money, culminating in a hundred-foot marshmallow man destroying Manhattan and a Sumerian god descending on an apartment building in the form of a giant Destructor. By any reasonable measure, this is a horror premise. Ray Parker Jr.'s theme just made sure it didn't feel like one.
The soundtrack, with its synthesizer gloss and its perfect blend of disco funk and cinematic score, is the sound of the supernatural made safe and celebratory. It's what October sounds like when the candy outweighs the fear. And on vinyl, the way Ray Parker Jr.'s bass hits, the way Elmer Bernstein's orchestral cues sit in the quiet of the room, it earns its place in a collection built around the eerie and the atmospheric.
Shop the Ghostbusters OST at Alliance Authentic
The Goonies Original Soundtrack
Adventure Sounds Like This When the Lights Go Out
The Goonies is not a horror movie. It is, however, a movie about children descending into tunnels beneath a dead pirate's ship, solving booby traps set by a skeleton, and befriending a man who has been kept in a basement by his own family. The darkness is always right there, just outside the frame.
Dave Grusin's score is the thing that keeps it from tipping over. Joyful and propulsive on the surface, it carries an undercurrent of genuine menace, the kind that lives in caves and abandoned spaces and the places adults told you not to go. Listen to it in October and you remember what it felt like to be a kid who thought something was under the stairs. That feeling is a kind of horror, even if the movie never commits to it.
This is one for the collectors who understand that the dark doesn't always announce itself.
Shop The Goonies OST at Alliance Authentic
Alexandre Desplat: Frankenstein (Soundtrack from the Netflix Film)
Horror meets literature
This one earns its place on genre alone, but what makes it Certified Strange is the approach.
Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein is the third collaboration between del Toro and composer Alexandre Desplat, following The Shape of Water and Pinocchio, and it treats Mary Shelley's source material the way it deserves: as tragedy first, horror second. Desplat's score opens on a seven-note motif for Victor Frankenstein accompanied by ghostly choral voices and a low electronic pulse. The creature's own themes are, in Desplat's hands, tender and searching. A waltz scores the building of the experiment. A four-note figure on plucked strings represents the monster with unexpected delicacy.
This is horror scored like grief. It's the rare film score that would work just as well as a concert piece, and it arrives on a white and red splatter pressing that looks, on a shelf, exactly like it sounds.
One of just 6,000 units in the retail first pressing. Alliance Authentic holds 10, individually numbered, sealed at the source.
Shop the Frankenstein OST at Alliance Authentic
Sealed at the Source. Certified Horror.
Every title in the Certified Horror collection was moved directly from the pressing supply chain into preservation before it reached retail. Uncirculated. Unhandled. Documented. Each comes with an embedded NFC chip: tap it with any smartphone to access a full provenance chain from pressing source to you.
October is the right time to own something that lives in the dark and lasts.
Jeffrey Smith
Passionate advocate for music and vinyl culture. Not as angry as Henry Rollins.
FIND YOUR FOREVER COPY
Some records are more important.
Preserve the ones that matter most.
Curated
Numbered
Limited
Certified Uncirculated
NFC-Secured
BE FIRST TO KNOW WHEN PRESERVED RECORDS ARRIVE
Get alerts for new preserved records, curated drops and collector updates.
CURATED COLLECTIONS
LEARN