Yep, Tom Petty has a Halloween song. While most think his holiday output ends with “Christmas All Over Again“, they’re dead wrong. Or undead wrong, amirite?
Tucked at the end of arguably Petty’s greatest album, Full Moon Fever, is this little ditty about checkin’ out goth chicks at the local goth club. Or is it actually about vampires dancing at a zombie zoo? Is he implying we should put zombies in cages and go visit them, like we do lions and tigers? That would be interesting.

Petty is sizing up a girl with a lunchbox purse, letting her know that she looks like Boris Karloff. I’m not sure if that’s a dig or something Tom finds attractive. Boris had a sort of brutish charm, but I’m not sure how well that would work on a lady. But hey, it was 1989, anything goes!

Sadly, it seems Tom’s just mocking the goths. He implies they’re phony, uneducated, and poor. Which may be true, but dude, they’re just trying to escape for a while, chill out. The song came out in 1989, when The Cure and other gothic pop had started becoming mainstream. I guess this was Tom’s “old man yells at cloud” moment.
Tom gave an interview towards the end of his life saying he hated the song.
I hate “Zombie Zoo.” I do not understand how that got on the record [1989’s Full Moon Fever], when I had better stuff that didn’t get on the record. What frame of mind produced that, I don’t understand. ‘Cause normally, I would have thrown that away. God knows we’ve thrown away far better. That was nearly a perfect album until the very end [laughs].
– Tom Petty to Rolling Stone, October 5, 2017
There’s no record of him ever playing the song live, so it only exists on our awesome Halloween playlists to show people “see, it’s not all Monster Mash!”