As you know, around the FEARnet community, Halloween isn't just a special time of year... we like to think it's the only season when the rest of the world finally starts thinking the way we do. Like you, we tend to hang with people who feel the same way (since most of them don't give us “that” look and quickly walk the other direction). So when we got an email from the creators of this horror hip-hop concept album, we knew we had a hot Halloween hookup on our hands.

7 Killings in 2 Weeks is the twisted creation of horror filmmaker D.W. Bucks and music producer Big Foot Lee of Feet 1st Productions. Having first worked together on the trailer for Bucks' film Destined to be Ingested, the pair hit it off and set off in search of a new music project.

The answer came when Bucks treated Lee to a screening of Ed Wood's Plan Nine from Outer Space. The glorious crapulence of that flick so inspired him that he went home and laid down a track that very night, pairing audio samples from the film with his own beats, and from there both men concocted a devious plan: to create an EP comprised solely of old-school beats and camp-classic horror & sci-fi samples – which they decided to release for free as a Halloween gift to the world.

Drawing on a background as a heavy metal drummer, Lee joined forces with DJ 4-D Witch to craft deep, gut-rumbling and brutal beats – creating them from scratch rather than drawing on samples or loops – and added orchestral stabs, synth effects and string washes for atmosphere. On top rides a non-stop barrage of vintage movie samples from cult classics like Brainiac, Mark of the Vampire and H.G. Lewis's Blood Feast (the album takes its title from a newspaper headline in that film). The end result is a clean, tight, bass-bumping mix that still retains a vintage, analog feel.

The next step was finding the perfect promotional art, and Bucks searched high and low for just the right artist. He found him in David Fisher, who shuffled several professional projects around to make room for this ambitious labor of love. The end result of Fisher's contribution is a melange of vintage grindhouse poster art (adorned with the image of an axe-wielding Joan Crawford from Strait-Jacket) and hyper-stylized pulp imagery.

The tracks lurking within this lurid package are jam-packed with rapid-fire, interlocking, sometimes overlapping dialogue excerpts, and even feature tightly edited cut-ups of the films' own musical scores. Since the beats were arranged specifically to support the film soundbites, and not the other way around, there's none of the “grafted-on” feeling that you often encounter with a lot of sample-heavy horror music.

Each track has a unique feel and vibe: “Mark of the Vampire” has a sensual, Gothic feel, “Plan Nine” is all juicy horn blasts and quotes from the awesome Criswell, and my personal fave “Blood Feast” uses a sweet, DJ Shadow trip-hop vibe to set up some brilliantly-edited layers of samples that actually make H.G. Lewis's crap dialogue (“It has not been served for five... thousand... years!”)  sound like beat poetry.

Call me a nutjob – and I think most of you already do at this point – but I'm tempted to put these tracks on an endless loop for the entire month of October. Who knows, you might be tempted to do the same.

All seven tracks will be available for download on Halloween via the official MySpace [www.myspace.com/7killingsin2weeks], but you can get your grubby claws on one of the 1000 limited-run CDs right now, for nothing more than the cost of shipping. Check out the page to hear some samples and find out how to order.