Will We Get Our First Seasonal Halloween No. 1 of the Century This Year? ‘Thriller,’ ‘Dracula’ & The Spookiest Hot 100 Race Ever
Categoria: Musica
As Oct. 31 approaches, we look at the competition for the following week's No. 1 — which, for the first time, includes multiple thematically appropriate contenders for the top spot.
Por Billboard | 23/10/2026
November is only a little over a week away, which means Mariah Carey is probably getting antsy for her annual emergence from her warm-weather cocoon to declare the start of the pop music holiday season. But this year, she may have to wait a little longer than normal to make it official: We’ve got another seasonal chart race to get through first in 2026. Halloween has proven regularly impactful on the Billboard Hot 100 for nearly a decade now, ever since Michael Jackson’s horror-pop perennial “Thriller” first reentered the chart dated Nov. 10, 2018, at No. 31. It has since been joined by such other spooky season classics as Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers’ “Monster Mash” and Ray Parker, Jr.’s “Ghostbusters” as annual haunters of the listing, with The Citizens of Halloween’s “This Is Halloween” and Rockwell’s “Somebody Watching Me” also crashing the chart the past two years. However, none of those songs have ever seriously threatened the chart’s top spot upon their yearly revisits. Two of them topped the chart upon their original runs — ”Monster Mash” in 1962 and “Ghostbusters” in 1984, the former even doing so for two weeks at the end of October — and in 2025, “Thriller” became the first of the seasonal staples to return to the top 10, reaching No. 10 last November (after originally peaking at No. 4 in ‘84). This year, that might change. Not only could “Thriller” be in the mix for the post-Halloween No. 1, but so might a much newer song — one already not that far from the Hot 100’s top spot. “Thriller” has, of course, been getting progressively closer to No. 1 since 2018 — although some variability in the timing of the chart week and the release schedule has kept it from being a straight line of progress. After reaching No. 31 in 2018, it spent the next two years returning to the 40s, before jumping to No. 19 in 2021, then returning to the 20s in 2022-24, before hitting the top 10 last year. But this year, there’s reason to expect that more than just general upwards momentum will propel “Thriller” closer to the top spot. As covered extensively by writer Mikhail Grant on his Polytmus Substack earlier in the year — in an entry boldly titled “I Predict The Song ‘Thriller’ Will Go To #1 Soon on the Hot 100” — there are larger 2026 trends both within the Hot 100 and within Jackson’s own catalog to lend additional credence to the notion that the song will have a chance to truly contend for No. 1 this year. First, in 2018, when “Thriller” began re-charting, its presence on the chart was still a significant anomaly. Back then, only a few catalog hits a year generated the streaming or sales interest to return to the chart, if that, and though holiday hits were becoming a significant part of the chart’s December, Carey’s “Christmas” hadn’t yet notched a single week at No. 1, let alone 22 total . But in 2026, we now see dozens of those reentries every year, with catalog titles taking up a bigger percentage of streaming c