Korn‘s Jonathan Davis was so excited by ORGY that he created his own record label …
With Halloween upon us for another year, we at Hysteria decided to present to you some of the most horrific, gory and flat-out disturbing music videos some of your favourite bands have dished up over the years.
Be warned; in case you didn’t notice the big bold NSFW at the top of this article, we really do mean it. Beside, these videos are best viewed at home, alone and in the dark, rather than in the office. There’s stuff here that makes A Serbian Film look like a Disney film. At the very least, there’s guaranteed to be something that’ll stay with you for some time to come. Don’t say we didn’t warn ya!
Portal – Curtain
Like an H.P Lovecraft novel come to life, the video for Curtain off 2013’s Vexovoid is a surrealist nightmare that confuses, astounds and horrifies. Where most of their contemporaries want to employ gore or blasphemy to full effect, Brisbane’s Portal instead transport you to a demonic diorama purely of the mind’s conjuring. As with their music, it’s difficult to discern what exactly is going on, but those who make the effort aren’t likely to forget what they’ve seen any time soon.
Noir Macabre – Noir Macabre
Come join Australia’s own axe-wielding homicidal maniac, Matt ‘Skitz’ Sanders, for a leisurely stroll through the forest. There, you’ll find upside-down crosses ablaze, terrified and naked prey, and gallons of blood. The fast-paced and suggestive cinematography leaves you gasping for air, giving you no chance to join the dots until it’s too late. Once Monsieur Skitz catches up with you, nothing short of a bloodbath is on the cards.
Khanate – Dead
Edited by vocalist Alan Dubin, the video for Dead depicts a suicide with the gravitas only a band as heavy as Khanate is capable of. Dead depicts the range of emotions across a man’s face during the act of suicide with harrowing realism. For maximum impact, it juxtaposes this with surreal 3D animation and clever cinematography. Rather than merely shocking, Dead horrifies the viewer on a more profound level for depicting a madness that hits close to home.
A masterstroke in editing done to horrific effect, Worlock jarringly intersperses the horrific within the benign. Spinning rooms disorient the viewer into confusing the real with fake, as crime scene footages reside amongst segments from classic horror films. Notorious as they are for shock value, Skinny Puppy have always balanced this approach with a deeper meaning and sense of ethics. If you can get past the first couple of minutes, you might just see eye to eye with them.
Marilyn Manson – Born Villain
In one of his more recent music videos, Manson teamed up with Shia LeBeouf to create what he described as “both a homage to and a mockery of the history of cinema”. Proving he’s come a long way since the decay and squalor of The Beautiful People, Manson incorporates executions, torture and uses a glass eye in such a manner that you’ll never look at Sammy Davis Jr. the same way again. Supposedly an art piece that doffs its grubby cap to Alejandro Jodorowsky, Salvador Dali and Joel Peter Witkin, Born Villain is best described Manson’s twisted mind projected in glorious and vivid technicolour. You’ve been warned.
Dir En Grey – Obscure
Continuing the theme of nightmarish surrealism, Dir En Grey pulls no punches with Obscure. It can be best described as a cross between the most demented hentai you never wanted to see and The Cell. In any case, the video succeeds in permanently ruining your enjoyment of Memoirs of a Geisha. Baby heads grow out of trees, only to be ravenously chewed apart by cannibal courtesans. Demonic geishas writhe lasciviously amongst themselves fellating robotic monster penises. For good measure, clowns, dissected bodies and amputees pop in and out of focus culminating in a nightmarish orgy of blood and excess.
Cannibal Corpse – Decency Defiled
Cannibal Corpse has long delivered some of the best horror videos, covering every aspect of the genre. There are many examples where the Buffalo quintet have succeeded in horrifying; the stark imagery of Devoured by Vermin, the suffocating claustrophobia of Encased in Concrete or the classic zombie rampage that is Kill or Become. Decency Defiled takes the horror to another level by sheer merit of being too realistic for its own good. Rather than degrading the experience, the low definition film makes the video seem like something out of true crime. That this kind of monster stalking his female prey is regularly seen in newspapers makes this video all the more chilling.
Whitechapel – Let me Burn
“The mouth of hell is open wide” bellows Whitechapel’s Phil Bozeman and it’s a fair warning. It’s another video featuring a murderous misogynist chasing his next kill, but this time there’s a twist. We won’t spoil it, but the title of the song is kind of self-explanatory. If decapitations and drills to the brain don’t make you cringe, there’s nothing like a little home dentistry to have you violently looking the other way.
Cattle Decapitation – Forced Gender Reassignment
There are simply no words adequate to describe the level of depravity, gore and sadism on offer in Forced Gender Reassignment. Despite the victims representing the universally loathed Westboro Baptist Church, only a few seconds of the torture on display is enough to leave you feeling sorry for them. Still, it isn’t exactly the worst thing out there you can see…
Nine Inch Nails- Broken
Originally, we were going to post the video Happiness in Slavery, but doing so without the twenty minutes of sadistic degradation bookending it just felt wrong! Long before torture-porn became the du jour of post-millennial horror films, the gravity of Broken’s horror was the stuff of urban legend. Commissioned by Trent Reznor to “do his worst”, Coil’s Peter Christopherson set about doing that very thing. Ultra low-quality tape footage of a torture and execution is interspersed within the more polished videos for Wish, Help me I am in Hell, Happiness in Slavery, Pinion and Gave Up. That doesn’t make it any less awful or appalling. Christopherson deliberately shot the torture footage in low quality to reflect reality in horrifically vivid detail. It was further accentuated by VHS bootlegging which degraded Broken beyond the point of no return. Be warned; you’ll likely end up the same way should you dare to view all of Broken.
