Today’s music video of the day is for the haunting piece of music that we all know from Requiem For A Dream and countless Olympic ice skating routines.
Anyone who says this is not a horror song has somehow forgotten watching Ellen Burstyn get electroshock treatment while Jared Leto loses his arm.
Enjoy!
Demons (1985, dir by Lamberto Bava)
For today’s horror song of the day, we have Demon, a track from the soundtrack for the 1985 film, Demons. This song was composed and performed by Claudio Simonetti, who is best known as the keyboardist of Goblin.
The music video, incidentally, was directed by Michele Soavi, who also appeared in Demons as the mysterious masked man handing out free movie tickets.
As we already mentioned, today would have been the 102nd birthday of the pioneering indie director, Edward D. Wood, Jr!
Today’s song of the day is the theme from Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic of the director. In my opinion, this remains Burton’s finest film. Burton also directed the musical video below while the great Toni Basil choreographed. And, best of all, the dancer is named Lisa Marie!
To quote Alice Cooper himself:
“This is my tip-of-the-hat to early Rolling Stones. Like in 1964/65 when their songs were very Chuck Berry orientated. They just feel so good, in the pocket. This song was begging to be in the live show. We’ve done it in four different continents now and no one had ever heard it. By the second chorus, the whole audience is singing ‘I’ll Bite Your Face Off.’ It’s the perfect little 3 minute hit single.”
I’ll Bite Your Face Off was the first single to be released off Welcome 2 My Nightmare, Alice Cooper’s 26th studio album and a follow-up to Cooper’s 1975 album, Welcome To My Nightmare. Each song represents a different aspect of a bad dream. In I’ll Bite Your Face Off, Alice dreams about being introduced to the devil.
The video was filmed at several different live venues. One of these performances was at the 100 Club in London, where actor Johnny Depp joined the band on guitar.
Enjoy!
The lesson of this video is don’t try to bury Messiah Marcolin.
Marcolin was the lead singer of the Swedish doom metal band, Candlemass. In this video, for their song Bewitched, Messiah Marcolin not only comes back to life and rises from his own coffin but he uses his powers of awesome singing to create an army of brainwashed zombies. This would be scary, except for the fact that Messiah Marcolin spends most of the video looking like this:
And this.
He does somehow manage to entrance a cute girl about halfway through the video.
I guess that’s the power of Swedish doom metal.
This video, which has been called one of the most enjoyably bad metal video of all time, is significant for being the first video to have been directed by Jonas Akerlund. From working with Candlemass, Akerlund went on to direct videos for everyone from U2 to Jane’s Addiction to Beyonce to The Rolling Stones to almost everyone else who has ever had a hit song.
Even if you did not already know it, you could probably guess who directed this video. Everything from the back lighting to the color filters to the fog machine to the leather jackets and the gang of shirtless body builders identifies this video as being the work of Joel Schumacher.
This video, which was filmed in Balboa, California, was made during Schumacher’s Lost Boys/Flatliners phase. His infamous Batman films were still several years away. INXS guitarist Kirk Pengilly has gone on record as disliking this video because he felt that, unlike the other videos that INXS was doing at the time, it was “too American.” He was probably right. The video’s mix of strippers, bikers, yuppies, and rent boys feels more appropriate for a film adaptation of a Bret Easton Ellis short story than an INXS song. Even if it isn’t an ideal INXS video, Devil Inside is still probably one of the better entries in Joel Schumacher’s filmography. If I have to choose, I will always pick this video over watching Batman and Robin.
With the video’s help, Devil Inside was one of INXS’s most popular songs in America, reaching the number two spot on the Billboard Hot 100. By comparison, it peaked at #6 in the band’s native Australia and only reached #47 in the UK.
And so the first four days of Horrorthon come to a close. Why not celebrate with an AMV?
Song: Thriller by Michael Jackson
Anime: Aria the Scarlet Ammo, Dance in the Vampire Bund, Everyday Life with Monster Girls, High School of the Dead, Interviews With Monster Girls, Rosario + Vampire, Rosario + Vampire Capu 2
Creator: mmcmahan11
Past AMVs of the Day
Today, we have the video for Radiohead’s Burn the Witch. Through the use of stop motion animation, Burn the Witch tells a disturbing little story, one that deals with an inspector who comes to a seemingly idyllic English village and who eventually ends up getting trapped in a wicker man. If any of this sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve seen either the original Wicker Man or the remake starring Nicolas Cage. The video for Burn the Witch is actually a bit more positive than the film that inspired it. In the video, the inspector escapes at the end. Neither Edward Woodward nor Nic Cage were quite as lucky.
As for the song itself, it deals with the dangers of groupthink and blind obedience to authority. Since Radiohead’s music has always possessed a libertarian streak, that’s certainly not a shock. The video condemns not only those who would demand blind obedience but also on those who are foolish enough to give it. First released in 2016, this video easily predicted much of what would happen in 2020s, from the COVID hysteria on down.
Of course, with The Wicker Man theme, it’s also perfect for October!
Enjoy!
Shock, shock horror, horror, shock, shock horror
I’ve always liked this song and it feels like exactly the right choice for the first music video of our October horrorthon! The story behind this song is actually rather sweet. The lead singer of Space knew that his father didn’t care much for the music that he was producing so he wrote this song as a tribute to the type of music that his father did like. The end result was one of the band’s biggest hits.
The video has a certain James Bond feel to it. And by that, I mean this song would be great for one of the Sean Connery/Roger Moore films. Not the Daniel Craig films. The Daniel Craig movies suck. I’ll never get over what they did the world’s greatest secret agent.
Enjoy!
A side project of Love and Rockets, the Bubblmen only released one single and video but they later made cameo appearances in the videos for Love and Rockets’ No New Tales To Tell and Yin and Yang (The Flowerpot Man).
The Bubblemen Are Coming was issued by Beggars Banquet Records and came with three additional tracks, Bubblemen Rap, Bubblemen Rap (Dub Version), and Bees. The video perhaps achieved its greatest exposure when it was featured on an episode of Beavis and Butthead, where it really freaked out Beavis.
