If you've seen this movie, I challenge you to hear this song without picturing a head rolling down a flight of stairs. Staring Bette Davis, Olivia de Haaviland and Joseph Cotton, there is a bit part by Bruce Dern. This movie also featured the final screen role of early film star Mary Astor (she played Ruth Wonderly alongside Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon).

I'm sure I had heard the Bobby Vinton song "Blue Velvet" as a kid, but from 1986 on I was never able to remember a time when that song didn't impart seedy creepiness involving a nitrous oxide mask.

A version of this happy tune, written by Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer, was performed by Louis Armstrong in the 1938 film Going Places, for which the song was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. While that movie had horse races, there were no out-of-hibernation demons with mad sewing skills. I'm willing to bet "Jeepers Creepers" now summons up more many images of a trenchcoat-wearing monster than a galloping horse.

Free Bird (Lynyrd Skynyrd) in end scene of

The Devil's Rejects (2005)

Rob Zombie accomplished many things in this movie, not the least of which was to breathe new life into such an over-played song. While I had easily heard "Free Bird" hundreds of times since being a kid with a vinyl copy of Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd, Zombie's use of this ultimate classic rock anthem in the final scene of The Devil's Rejects amazingly made it fresh and new, as if I was hearing it for the first time. That's a remarkable feeling.

While this song was expressly written for the title rat in the movie Ben, sequel to 1971's Willard, it made my list because I knew the song way before the movie. Willard is about a maladjusted misfit who learns to control rats, and Ben is about Ben, rat survivor from Willard. I remember being a kid when someone told me the song was about a rat. I also remember thinking they were messing with me. Willard was remade in 2003 staring Crispin Glover.