This coming Tuesday is Halloween, but our illustrious editor Roman Gokhman has requested I not do yet another Halloween column. So, to fill your Halloween music needs, here are all the ones I’ve written in the past:

• Horror punk | • Horrorcore | • Horror metal | • Secretly horrifying songs
• Spooky covers | • Horror movie music | • Halloween party music
• Halloween/election | • Halloween deep cuts | • Halloween Part 1 | • Halloween Part 2

There’s 55 Halloween songs to make up for not adding five more.

But this week I’ll be honoring great actor Richard Roundtree, who died Tuesday at age 81. While he had a long and varied career full of large and small roles, he’s best known for playing John Shaft, the first Black action hero from the “Shaft” movies of the ’70s.

I love blaxploitation movies. The term was coined by Junius Griffin of the Hollywood NAACP because, in his view, the portrayals of Black people as stereotypes and criminals was exploitative, and while that may be true to a degree, Black people are rarely the villains. In most movies of them, they’re the heroes fighting for their communities. The villains are white men trying to exploit or destroy them; usually police, rich people or politicians. The right loves to say “you can’t make movies like that anymore” about any racist drivel they like, but imagine trying to make a movie now where a Black private detective beats up white cops, real estate developers and city councilmen.

And the music from these films was fantastic. Each had a theme song and they were some of the best examples of funk and soul music of the era. Here are five of my favorites.

Isaac Hayes — “Theme From Shaft”

In honor of Richard Roundtree, the one’s first, but it would be so even if he wasn’t the impetus for the column, because it’s the best example of the genre.

While Isaac Hayes sadly fell victim to Scientology’s cult late in life, he’ll primarily be remembered for composing and performing possibly the best movie song of all time. While “Eye of the Tiger” and “Danger Zone” do a good job of conveying the mood and attitude of the movies they’re from, “Theme From Shaft” is the movie. Listen to the four and a half minutes of this song and even if you’ve never seen the movie, it’ll feel like you have. Absolute classic.

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Curtis Mayfield — “Pusherman”

The soundtrack to “Superfly” may be the best ever made.

The movie starts in a way that seems to back up Griffin’s concerns about negative portrayals. The protagonist, Youngblood Priest, is a cocaine dealer. But he wants out, he’s tired of the life (hence the sad tone of “Pusherman”), and makes plans for one last big score so he can quit. Unfortunately for Priest—spoiler alert for a 50-year-old movie—the head of the drug ring he’s a part of is secretly the city’s police commissioner, who uses his officers to supply the Black people who are publicly in charge of the operation. So in the end it’s the story of cops making money by making life worse for the Black community and pushing responsibility onto them.

Decades later, the DEA informally confirmed to PBS Frontline that the CIA likely helped traffic drugs into the U.S. to fund opposition groups to Communist leaders in South America.

The Four Tops — “Are You Man Enough?”

“Shaft in Africa,” the third Shaft movie and last until 2019’s continuation with Samuel L. Jackson as John Shaft, Jr., is awful. But by that point, the franchise was popular enough that everyone wanted in on the soundtrack. The Four Tops, for example. This one rode the movie’s popularity to No. 15 on Billboard’s top chart of the time, which isn’t half bad for the era. It also got to No. 2 on the R&B chart.

Also, and most importantly, it’s a really good song.

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Joe Simon — “Theme From Cleopatra Jones”

While “Foxy Brown” starring the legendary Pam Grier is easily my favorite woman-led blaxploitation movie, its theme song is just fine; funky but generic. But the “Cleopatra Jones” theme? Now that’s a theme song.

One thing Cleopatra Jones has over Foxy Brown is that Jones is a straight-up James-Bond-style spy. If you’ve ever wished the Sean-Connery-era Bond movies starred a Black woman who works for the CIA instead of a British dude, this is the movie for you. Also, the villain is Shelley Winters, the Oscar-winning star of “The Diary of Anne Frank” and “The Poseidon Adventure,” as an international heroin kingpin named Mommy. I am not making that up and it’s as great as it sounds.

War — “Youngblood (Livin’ in the Streets)”

Yeah, that War. The band led by white Englishman Eric Burdon. But the band itself was multiethnic well before that was normal and the song is fantastic.

The movie “Youngblood” is also one of the deeper entries in the genre. A teenager slowly stops going to school and starts running with a gang run by a disillusioned Vietnam veteran, and his gang ends up in a war against a drug cartel. It paints a very unglamorous portrait of gang life and highlights the conditions that would lead someone into joining, something few movies pull off.

Watch horror movies for the next few days, obviously, but once Nov. 1 rolls around, give some of these a try. You won’t be sorry.

Follow publisher Daniel J. Willis and send column ideas to him at @bayareadata.press on BlueSky. (He has some invites if you ask nicely).