It’s pretty bad. This was the first official music video ever released for a song by Misfits. I have two main problems with it.
It looks ingenious and lacks energy. It really does remind me of something like Blair Witch 2: Book Of Shadows (2000) with its Wiccan and Goth characters. They just seemed to be there because that was trendy. I was in school around that time. It was trendy. This feels like it was meant to tap into those trends rather than being their thing anymore. This doesn’t seem to have a reason to exist other than that it was popular. It doesn’t help that they show fans that don’t only in retrospect tell you this was popular at the time. These were the same kind of people you would see trolling MTV, which caused me to turn away from new music till this stuff started to fade away. It could have made up for this by being cheesy and fun like some metal videos of the 80s. It didn’t.
The integration of the Bride Of Frankenstein (1935) footage. As in it isn’t. They just cut to it here and there because she was on the cover of the single–I guess. I hate to reference it again, but take a look at The Number Of The Beast by Iron Maiden. Mallet did a good job. Run To The Hills did it even better. You could edit out the movie footage from this video, and I doubt you would miss it. You can’t say the same of those two Iron Maiden videos.
A few years later, Misfits got Romero to direct a video for their song Scream! I can’t say that song sticks with me anymore than this one will, but the video is done well-enough. I’m not sure what director John Cafiero was thinking. He seems to have only done music videos for two songs–both by Misfits. The other one being American Psycho.
Follow the link at the start for someone making fun of the video. Then watch the video and look for when lead-singer Graves walks his fingers across the top of a gravestone.
Depending on where you go, this was either directed solely by Romero, or by both him and Richard Donner. Considering I can’t find any credits for the two of them working together elsewhere, and Donner appears to have only directed two unrelated music-videos, I am going with just Romero. There is also an explanation on Wikipedia about how this video came into existence that seals the deal for me:
The music video was directed by George A. Romero, famous for his Living Dead film series. Bassist Jerry Only has expressed admiration for Romero, calling Night of the Living Dead “still to this day one of the scariest movies ever made.” At the time Romero was in Toronto filming Bruiser and needed a band to perform during the film’s final murder scene. The Misfits agreed to perform in the film and to record two songs for the soundtrack in exchange for Romero directing their “Scream” video. According to Only, “It was an even trade, we shook hands and the deal was done. Business complications soon followed and I became very unhappy with my record label and my publishing company.” No soundtrack was issued for Bruiser. The Misfits’ two songs, “Fiend Without a Face” and “Bruiser”, along with the demo version of “Scream”, were released in 2001 on the compilation album Cuts from the Crypt.
The “Scream” music video consists of black-and-white footage of the band members as zombies terrorizing a hospital along with a number of Misfits fans, interspersed with color footage of the band performing live. A promotional VHS version of the video was included for free with the purchase of a set of Misfits action figures from 21st Century toys in 1999 and 2000. The video was also included in an enhanced CD-ROM portion of Cuts from the Crypt in 2001.
With Romero’s passing yesterday, I thought I’d see if he ever did a music video. He apparently did for the legendary punk rock band, Misfits. With a little search, I can see why they would ultimately end up doing a video with Romero. They did a song called Night Of The Living Dead in 1979 and are a horror based punk rock band. They would later do songs called Land Of The Dead and Twilight Of The Dead. Their history as a horror band is chronicled over on Wikipedia.
From what I can tell, this was rather late in the game for The Misfits in the sense that they were having band overhauls including not having original lead-singer Glenn Danzig. That’s as far as I’ll go talking about the band because my knowledge about them until I did some reading right now consistened of the following:
Oh, yeah. I know of the Misfits. Much like Meat Puppets, Mudhoney, Green River and others, their names always come up when they talk about bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden. The bands that didn’t get enough attention, but if you want to know where the grunge explosion came from, then these are groups you are supposed to look at.
So, with no joke intended, rest in peace Romero. Enjoy the music video.
I didn’t find out that Martin Landau also passed away yesterday till after having written this post. Amazingly, this connects to him as well. The Misfits used to have their own record label called Blank Records. Then Mercury Records wanted the trademark to it, and exchanged studio time with the band for it. The band renamed the label, Plan 9 Records, after Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959). Rest in peace, Martin Landau.
I suppose if I asked most people what music they identified with horror, John Carpenter’s “Halloween Theme” and Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” (The Exorcist) would come up first. After that, you’d get a lot of Rob Zombie and Glenn Danzig. So right off the bat, you’re looking at an enormous variety of sounds and styles connected mainly by association. While John Carpenter’s work was intentionally composed for the film in which it appeared, “Tubular Bells” was originally a 50 minute progressive rock opus that was anything but sinister or foreboding in its full form. Misfits was a goth punk band that happened to favor horror themes. White Zombie’s horror imagery was more a matter of crudeness and vulgarity in the spirit of GWAR; their sound was a frontrunner in the emergence of industrial groove metal, and the greatest “horror” associated with Rob was the countless terrible nu metal spinoffs. A couple of “top ten horror songs” lists I stumbled upon even list Bobby Boris Pickett’s “Monster Mash” and Richard O’Brien’s “Time Warp”. I mean, “Monster Mash” is a fun Halloween song, sure, but horror? Really? And the Rocky Horror Picture Show does make me want to vomit, but we have to draw the line somewhere.
Suffice to say, “horror” music is not a genre at all. Simply associating a song with a scene or theme is enough to relate them; Huey Lewis and the News will probably make me smile and think of Christian Bale chopping people to bits in his apartment for the rest of my life. But there are definitely certain musical attributes that conjure in us a less glitzy feeling of dread than Hellbilly Deluxe. That skittering cockroach beat in the background of Halloween is completely unnerving; Carnival music is way creepier than Stephen King’s It; Black Sabbath’s appreciation for diabolus in musica virtually invented heavy metal; and it took a firm dose of the blues in 1988 for Danzig to capture a sense of the sinister that Misfits could never convey.
I don’t believe that any particular musical formula is the coalescence of evil. The music we find most haunting is derived from association too, but it connects in more subtle ways than say, the fact that a particular song appears in a horror film or mentions witches in the chorus. The real deal distorts what comforts us, denies our sense of order, and pries upon our innocence. Through a musical medium as through any other, horror focuses on shattering the lens through which we perceive reality as an ordered, logical construct. It reminds us of the real nightmares in life while nullifying our means to counteract them. It takes us to the world of the child, where emotional extremes enhance our senses of comfort and terror alike.
The carnival tune and music box are prime targets, conjuring in our minds a time when fear was more potent. The brief piano loop, the simple hum, the monotone drone–these bring us to solitude and isolation through minimalism. Effective horror themes offer no comforting symphony or rock ensemble to encase us in a nuanced world. They surround us with something singular and far from warm, or with nothing at all. The wind chimes warn of a storm; when none is coming, the darkness is all the more unnatural. The cathedral bell, a sign of fellowship on a Sunday morning, also tolls for death. A twitch, a buzz, a repeated knocking, a bit of static–things that would otherwise annoy us–exploit the close connection between discomfort and tension.
Or else we can completely overwhelm the senses with noise that strips away the familiarity which typically diminishes extreme music’s effect, leaving us a nervous wreck. When Blut Aus Nord chose to employ programmed, industrial blast beats in their 777 trilogy, they effectively eliminated the one element of the music that would have sounded too familiar to disturb. Instead, the epileptic guitar finds companionship in a persistent, unnatural clatter designed to place us permanently on edge.
Other bands have found other means to the same end. Peste Noire’s unique “black ‘n’ roll” sound enlivens a standard formula for “evil” music with a pep and a grin, giving the brutalizer a human face in the spirit of medieval sadism. Sunn O))) are inclined to drone on for ages, developing a false sense of comfort before infusing their deep buzz with a caterwaul of shrill pitches and clattering chimes. (I actually had a guy start freaking out on me at work one day when “Cry For The Weeper”, which he didn’t even notice playing, hit the 3:55 mark.)
And lastly, we can’t forget the power of lyrics to render a song gruesome. The stereotypical lines of a black metal song–nonsense about necromoonyetis and an appeal to Satanism far less disturbing than the average Christian commentator on Fox News–are pure cheese, and they entertain us in a manner similar to your typical zombie flick. But when you first heard Smashing Pumpkin’s “x.y.u.”, you probably got a feeling more akin to Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.
Horror in lyrics is something a bit the opposite of horror in sound; it strikes us most deeply when we can be convinced that there is absolutely nothing supernatural about it. There are certainly a few exceptions–Townes Van Zandt’s tall tale in “Our Mother the Mountain” chills me to the bone–but generally speaking, the real atrocities committed throughout human history far exceed the limits of our imaginations. Vlad Tepes was worse than any vampire, and from Elizabeth Bathory and Ariel Castro to Hernando Cortes and Adolf Hitler, we are flooded by examples of direct personal cruelty and dehumanized mass slaughter. When a song manages to make us think of these individuals and events beyond the safety blanket of historical narrative, an authentic feeling or horror is hard to deny.
Through the Shattered Lens 