"(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is a song by American rock band Blue Öyster Cult from the 1976 album Agents of Fortune.

The song, written and sung by lead guitarist Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser, deals with eternal love and the inevitability of death.

Released as an edited single (omitting the slow building interlude in the original), the song is Blue Öyster Cult's highest chart success, reaching #7 in Cash Box and #12 on the Billboard Hot 100 in late 1976.

The song is about the inevitability of death and the foolishness of fearing it, and was written when Dharma was thinking about what would happen if he died at a young age.

[9] "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" was written and sung by Dharma and produced by David Lucas, Murray Krugman, and Sandy Pearlman.

[11] The riff was recorded with Krugman's Gibson ES-175 guitar, which was run through a Music Man 410 combo amplifier, and Dharma's vocals were captured with a Telefunken U47 tube microphone.

Recording engineer Shelly Yakus remembers piecing together the separate vocals, guitar and rhythm section into a master track, with the overdubbing occurring in that order.

[23] Writing for PopMatters, James Mann called it a "landmark, genre-defining masterpiece" that was "as grand and emotional as American rock and roll ever got".

The publication wrote that the song's charm "lies in the disjuncture between its gothic storyline and the sprightly, Byrdsian guitar line that carries it.

[41] Red Hot Chili Peppers performed a segment of the song on May 22, 2014,[42] as the conclusion of a drumming contest between Ferrell and the band's drummer, Chad Smith.

As in the SNL sketch, Ferrell played cowbell for the rendition, which appeared on an episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

In the 1978 film Halloween, the song plays in the car when Jamie Lee Curtis's and Nancy Kyes's characters, Laurie Strode and Annie Brackett, are being stalked by serial killer Michael Myers.

[47] In the 1994 book The Discworld Companion, by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs, the family motto of Mort of Sto Helit is revealed to be "Non Timetis Messor", dog Latin for "don't fear the reaper".

In 2010, Hubert Chesshyre designed Pratchett's coat of arms, which features the motto "Noli Timere Messorem", a corrected Latin translation of "don't fear the reaper".

The slasher nature of the scene, as well as the film's setting in 1979, suggests an intentional homage by director Ti West to Halloween.