For a period of time in the 90s, you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing that. It was one of the original memes, thanks to both the song and the video that was made to promote it. The video, which was inspired by photographs of a Brazilian gold mine, was filmed in a quarry near Simi Valley. While the extras dressed like miners and were meant to represent the Biblical lepers who asked Jesus to heal them, the band goes for a glam rock look. It pays to be in the band.
This video was directed by Samuel Bayer, who has done music videos for everyone who is anyone.
Fear of the Dark, a song about a man who is scared of the dark, was based on the a very real fear that is held by Iron Maiden founder/bassist/songwriter Steve Harris. The song served as the title track for Iron Maiden’s ninth studio album and it’s gone on to become one of the band’s best known songs.
The video was directed by Samuel Bayer, who was another one of those music video directors who worked with everyone and who made a huge cultural impact even if most of the people who enjoyed his work never learned his name. Among the other videos that Bayer directed: Garbage’s Only Happy WhenIt Rains, Melissa Etheridge’s Come To My Window, LL Cool J’s Father, and Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Though he had retired from the band to pursue a solo career, Dee Dee Ramone wrote Poison Heart and gave it to Ramones. The story has always been that Dee Dee gave them the song as a way to thank the band for bailing him out of jail. I don’t know if that story is true or not but it does have a ring of truth to it. Print the legend, to quote The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
The song appeared on the soundtrack for Pet Semetary 2 and the video is clearly inspired by that song, with the child being forcefully dragged through the cemetery while the band performs in what appears to be an underground tunnel.
This video was directed by Samuel Bayer, who has done videos for just about everyone.
“Hey, you guys! The 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street is on TV!”
“Alright! I NEVER MISS A ROONEY MARA HORROR MOVIE!”
Indeed, way back in 2010, there a lot of hype accompanying the release of the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street. It came out at a time when a lot of classic horror films were being rebooted for no particular reason. Halloween got a reboot. Friday the 13th got a reboot. Texas Chainsaw Massacre has gotten a reboot. So, it was just kind of expected that Nightmare on Elm Street would get a reboot, bringing the story into the modern age and making the story less problematic and blah bah blah.
And yet, for all the hype that accompanied the Nightmare on Elm Street reboot, it was pretty quickly forgotten. If I remember correctly, it failed to live up to box office expectations and, as a result, there was never a sequel to this reboot. Jackie Earle Haley never got a second chance to play Freddy Krueger and, to be honest, that’s probably for the best. Haley’s a great actor who deserves better than to be typecast as the actor who played the second best version of Freddy Krueger. No matter how good a performance Haley could have given in any of the hypothetical sequels to the Nightmare reboot, he would have been overshadowed by Robert Englund’s definitive interpretation of the character.
Today, the movie seems to be best remembered as one of the films that Rooney Mara made before she was cast in the title role of David Fincher’s rehash of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Mara plays the role of Nancy, the sleep-deprived teenager whose friends are all having nightmares and dying in various grotesque ways. In Nightmare on Elm Street, Rooney Mara is even more boring than usual but then again, the same can be said of just about everyone else in the movie, with the exception of Jackie Earle Haley and Clancy Brown. The majority of the actors just go through the motions. It’s as if they decided that, since they were appearing in a horror movie, they didn’t really have to make any sort of effort to do anything interesting with their characters. One need only compare the performances of Heather Langenkamp and Rooney Mara to see why the original Nightmare On Elm Street remains a classic while the remake has been forgotten.
Of course, another reason why the reboot has been forgotten is because it’s not really that scary. The original Nightmareis still scary. The original can still give you nightmares. Robert Englund’s performance still holds up. The death of Tina is still terrifying. The scene where Nancy looks at the gray streak in her hair and says that she looks like she’s in her 20s is still funny. Nightmare on Elm Street still holds up. The reboot, however, falls flat in the scares department. I think part of the problem is that the dreams are too obvious in the reboot, In the original, the waking world would segue so effortlessly into the dream world that you were always kept off-balance. In the remake, the dreams are too easy to spot and they’re too dependent on CGI to be convincing as a actual nightmares.
The remake does do one interesting thing. There are several scenes in the film that seem to be designed to hint that maybe, in life, Freddy was actually innocent of the crimes for which was accused and that he was just set on fire because he was a convenient scapegoat. That’s an intriguing idea and it certainly would have brought a whole new dimension to Freddy and his quest for revenge. Just imagine how much of a mind-screw the film would have been if it had been revealed that Freddy had actually been framed by one of the same adults who later set him on fire. Unfortunately, after making you think that the movie might actually do something unexpected, the film then reveals that Freddy actually was guilty and the whole story becomes a bit less interesting. Revealing that Freddy was just a somewhat slow handyman who was wrongly accused would have brought some subversive life to this film but this reboot has no interest in being subversive.
This was one of Tom Petty’s final songs and it’s also one of his best. This somber song features Petty looking back on his own past and forgiving his father, with whom he had a difficult relationship while he was growing up.
The video was shot on location in Los Angeles and simply features a man driving while thinking about the past. Of course, in the video, that man is played by Sir Anthony Hopkins, who grew up not in Los Angeles but in Wales. However, Hopkins has spoken of having a similarly difficult childhood to Petty’s.
This video was directed by actor Sean Penn, who was a friend of Petty’s, and Samuel Bayer. Bayer has directed several music videos but will probably always be best known for directing Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Today’s Harry Dean Stanton video is doubly-sad. That’s because we not only have the recently departed Stanton.
We also have Justin Pierce four years before his suicide. You would know him from Kids (1995).
Talia Shire shows up in the video as well.
I don’t know anyone else in the video other than lead-singer David Lowry. Thank goodness for Wikipedia. I knew of Cracker because of the song Low. I knew of Camper Van Beethoven because of the song Take The Skinheads Bowling. But I would have never noticed that Lowry fronted both bands even though it’s obvious to me now listening to this song and Take The Skinheads Bowling.
I wish I could at least find out who this lady is…
that is doing her best Rob Halford.
Heading Out To The Highway by Judas Priest (1981)
She is prominently featured, but all I could find is that Harry Dean Stanton did two more music videos than I originally thought. It never fails. I’ll do them as well.
The video was directed by Samuel Bayer of…
Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana fame. Did Lowry ask for the Cobain treatment? In addition, I know Bayer directed Bullet With Butterfly Wings one year prior to this one. Still, was Goth-Stanton something people were clamoring for?
I mean he looks like Lars Ulrich in Until It Sleeps.
Until It Sleeps by Metallica (1996)
Yes, that one was also directed by Bayer. And if you are thinking he probably directed some videos for Garbage and Hole based on the woman I couldn’t identify, then you’d be right.
The casting director on this one was Crystal Lujan. Her music video credits alone are close to 100. She has done some acting too. I guess she was one of the cult members in that unfortunate Clive Barker movie with Scott Bakula, Lord Of Illusions (1995).
I’ve been told by more than one person that this song basically is me. At first, I assumed they were just saying that because both Shirley Manson and I have red hair and people always tend to assume that all redheads are alike. But then I actually listened to the song and I was like, “I’m only happy when it rains? I’m only happy when it’s complicated? My comfort is the night gone black? Yeah, I guess that does kinda sound like me…”
And then I watched the video, which is basically Shirley singing and dancing in a dilapidated warehouse while the other members of the band destroy stuff in the background and I immediately had flashbacks to when I was going to college and me and my friends would spend the occasional weekend exploring an abandoned and/or condemned building. And I was like, “I guess this song basically is me!”
This video was directed by Samuel Bayer. Bayer has directed close to a 100 videos, for everyone from Maroon 5 to P!nk to Nirvana. Bayer directed Nirvana’s famous Smells Like Teen Spirit video. And, just by doing quick check, I see that Val has actually reviewed two other videos directed by Bayer: Zombie by the Cranberries and No Rain by Blind Melon.
As a kid, this music video was simple and uplifting. It’s about a little girl who is laughed off stage because she is dressed like a bee and can’t really dance. She wanders around meeting more and more people who don’t really understand her. Then after reaching her lowest, she finds a place with others like herself. Recently I read a comment on the music video. There is another way you can think of it.
A little girl is laughed off stage because she is dressed like a bee and can’t really dance. She wanders around meeting more and more people who don’t understand. Then after reaching her lowest, she finds peace in killing herself. She opens a pair of heavenly gates with other people in an Elysian field like place that is filled with other people the world rejected to the point where they severed their ties with the harsh world as the music video depicts.
Personally, I think it is a bit of both. It is meant to be uplifting in that it does show the little girl eventually finding a place filled with people who accept her for who she is. I also think it is a cautionary tale about how people who are different from some sort of non-existent norm can be so marginalized by the world that they are pushed to an extreme limit where we lose them. They may find a wonderful place where they are with others of their kind, but what makes them unique leaves the world devoid of what they had to offer.
The fact that lead singer Shannon Hoon died three years later of a cocaine overdose lends credence to this interpretation. The timing of the lyrics and the lyrics themselves also point towards this as well. It’s bittersweet.
Samuel Bayer of Smells Like Teen Spirit directed the video.
Heather DeLoach played the little girl. She has done a handful of things over the years such as Camp Nowhere (1994) and The Beautician and the Beast (1997).
Jeremy Stuart edited the music video. He did a handful of music videos. I couldn’t find an entry on IMDb for him seeing as his name is rather generic.
If you haven’t seen it, then watch it. This music video premiering in September of 1991 was the 90s equivalent of The Beatles going on Ed Sullivan.
I’ve been a fan of Nirvana for a long time now, but I have never been a fan of this music video. According to Wikipedia, director Samuel Bayer figures he was hired because he would make a “not corporate” music video seeing as it was the first one he was hired to do and he felt his test reel was lousy. Also according to Wikipedia, the extras doing their thing wasn’t staged. They got pissed off sitting around all day, so Cobain and Bayer let them act out their frustration and filmed it. The janitor was played by Tony De La Rosa. The last shot of the close-up on Kurt’s face was his idea along with a few other edits he did for the final version that was shown on MTV. I’m glad he did seeing as I can’t think of anything more visually iconic about Nirvana than Kurt’s face screaming in close-up.
I like to imagine Nirvana performing at a high school like how it must have looked when Dead Kennedys performed at my old high school in 1982. Or, how it would have looked had they shown up in Frederick Wiseman’s documentary High School (1968).
High School (1968, dir. Frederick Wiseman)
There’s other information out there about the music video, but the important thing to know going into watching this is context. This was a major break visually and audibly from what was going on prior to the release of the album Nevermind.
Wow. That was a pretty terrible music video. Again, I thought I was done with Ministry, but I apparently had The Cranberries’ Zombie picked out to spotlight after 4 Non Blondes’ What’s Up. If you don’t know, The Cranberries were very much a college rock band with their album Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? before moving on to the album with Zombie on it. The first album has the songs you have most likely heard such as Dreams and Linger. Good stuff, but nothing like the go for the jugular songs such as Zombie or Salvation. Too bad this video doesn’t go for the jugular. I started watching it, and just wanted to take Dolores O’Riordan away and wash that gold stuff off of her.
Let’s talk about the director of this music video for a moment because he is the one behind some of the best known music videos of the era. Samuel Bayer directed Smells Like Teen Spirit, No Rain, and Bullet With Butterfly Wings to name a few of the more than 70 music videos he has done. He is also the director of the 2010 version of Nightmare On Elm Street. According to IMVDb, he made a music video as recent as this year for the group Jesse & Joy. What happened here?
It’s a simple song about the IRA. Why is it getting Heart-Shaped Box in my Cranberries? The kids around her look like those creatures from the music video for Schism by Tool. The best parts are when it is simply the band performing while intercut with black and white footage of the streets with soldiers on them. Simple! But no, we need O’Riordan panted gold and kids on the street who look like they are laughing at times. Not because that’s what they are supposed to be doing, but I believe because of what they were being asked to do. That’s great considering I would imagine the group intended this song to be taken quite seriously. Heck, this came out only a year after In The Name Of The Father (1993).
I guess this is what the music video for Steve Perry’s Oh Sherrie might have looked like if they had stuck with the one they were filming at the start of the actual video. It’s ridiculous and unnecessarily artsy just to be artsy. If this were a feature film, then I would say skip it, but this is only about five minutes. So behold, one of the worst music videos I have done a post on.
Through the Shattered Lens 