It’s the most ‘horrorible' time of the year!
That’s right Halloween is upon us again and here at Maniacs we’re super stoked for the spooky season and all of the scary things that are surfacing. You could say it unleashes the ‘devil in I’ and as metal fans, we suspect that most of you will feel the same way. So in honour of the deep connection between metal and Halloween, we’ve compiled this list of the scariest metal videos we’ve ever seen.
These clips are full of fun things that go bump in the night, as well as jump scares and some things that are best left undescribed. So a content warning before you press play, once you’ve watched these you may never scream the same way again.
Oh, and this probably goes without saying these are very much NSFW! Now in no particular order let the ordeal begin!
Get Ready To Scream! These Are The 13 Scariest Metal Video Clips
Avenged Sevenfold - A Little Piece Of Heaven
Oh, this is cute, we're starting things out nice and gentle with a little bit of animation from Avenged Sevenfold, I mean what could possibly be scary about that?
Meshuggah - Bleed
Meshuggah present a disturbing blend of mysterious meditating overlords, creepy living trees and an undead bride in a nightmarish accompaniment to one of their signature tunes. This is the clever type of creepy that sticks with you long after you've watched it.
Dir En Grey - Obscure
Japanese band Dir En Grey delivers pure nightmare fuel in this masterpiece of psychological horror. One of two videos in this list to get banned from YouTube (we found a workaround, for you), Obscure is as off-the-wall as it gets with yokai courtesans worshipping a demonic penis, a crudely sewn together naked dancer, graphic violence and a whole lot of gore. This is an intense watch and very NSFW.
Job For A Cowboy - Tarnished Gluttony
This one is seriously hard to watch. According to vocalist Jonny Davy this is clip is a "Lovecraftian spin on the old biblical tale of Abraham and Isaac.”
That explanation does not at all prepare you to watch child's corpse being carried into the woods, cut open and having the internal organs replaced with a big squid before being placed into the ocean to presumably be consumed by some form of ocean predator. Brutal.
Nine Inch Nails - Broken
One of those underground cult hits that were spread around the metal underground via tape traders, this short film accompaniment to Nine Inch Nails Broken EP has lived in the minds of metalheads seemingly forever. Offering up grisly fake snuff-film footage, self-immolation for sexual gratification and a litany of other nasty things, this is some dark and truly impactful, horrific shit.
Portal - Curtain
Mysterious Aussie death metal veterans Portal serve up some unsettling imagery in this vivid reimagining of Edgar Allen Poe's The Conqueror Worm. The vintage horror treatment works a sort of horrible magic on your mind, lulling you into a false sense of security where you think "This can't be that scary" and then all of a sudden corpses are hanging, people are plummeting to their deaths and creepy skeletal faced marionette puppets are behind it all!
Rob Zombie - Living Dead Girl
Can't make a list based on the crossover between metal and horror without including at least one video from the king of the metal/horror paradigm, so here is Rob Zombie doing Rob Zombie-style horror things. Not 'scary' horror but 'freakshow' horror and yet it remains somehow creepy anyway. Big Night Of The Living Dead vibes here.
Aphex Twin - Come To Daddy
While not strictly a 'metal' act, this track from Aphex Twin leans heavily on the industrial metal side of their sound, which is good because this video is too freaky to leave off of this or any other list of scary film clips. As anyone who has ever watched a horror film can attest, children are frightening, they're even more frightening when there is tons of them doing creepy shit and they all have Richard James' face! This video is scary enough before the slender demon monster creation jumps out of the TV and screams into an elderly woman face. WTAF, Richard!
Rammstein - Mein Teil
Speaking of industrial metal/horror crossovers, Rammstein turns in the most controversial and creepiest clip of their career on Mein Teil. The video shows the bonkers true story of Armin Meiwes and Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes, who followed through on a plan to chop off Brandes' penis and cook it, after which Meiwes killed him. With that as the basis, this video was never going to be anything other than horrific to watch but Rammstein still goes all-in on the concept, incorporating fellatio from an angel who has her wing eaten by Till and drummer Christoph dressed as Meiwes mother walking the rest of the band on leashes through a German street.
Metallica - One
Sometimes in horror, the simplest, most true-to-life ideas are the scariest. The first-ever video clip from Metallica, One incorporates large chunks of the movie Johnny Got His Gun, to tell a haunting tale of a man trapped inside a body yielded nearly useless by the horrors of war. The idea of being a prisoner in your own body is one that frightens most people immensely, and this video plays on that fear expertly. There are few scenes truly as horrible as the one where the doctors are standing around the poor soul, talking about him as if he isn't there, all the while he's screaming internally for death. The bit where he uses Morse code to express 'kill me, kill me, kill me' is one of the most haunting things you'll ever see/hear.
TOOL - Schism
This slot could arguably have been given to any Tool video, they're all creepy as hell, but this one for Schism just gets in over its friends for execution in the horror stakes. Anthropomorphized aliens deconstructing their own bodies amidst an ominously barren backdrop is the stuff of an acid trip going horribly wrong. We don't know what it means or how it can be, but this alien torture porn has lived rent-free in our nightmares since we first saw it.
Ice Nine Kills - Assault and Batteries
The clip for this Child's Play track from the slasher-core king's Ice Nine Kills is a horror buff dream, faithfully incorporating elements of the Child's Play series into the band's own narrative, with the transition of vocalist Spencer's character Andy from child to a serial killer (complete with Chucky'esque mask) and the inevitable bloodshed that follows presented in typically over the top, B-grade horror style.
Slipknot - The Devil In I
Slipknot performs in an asylum, intercut with the band members tearing themselves and each other apart in varying gruesome ways. This clip directed by Shawn Clown Crahan peaks with the brutal stabbing murder of Alessandro Venturella and Jay Weinberg, but packs plenty of fright before then. This is horror the highly stylised kind and it fits the song perfectly.
The "wow, that is seriously fucked up" and no longer exists on the internet seemingly anywhere bonus round.
CW: EVERYTHING
Cattle Decapitation - Forced Gender Reassignment
This video is so genuinely horrifying that we seriously advise against watching it. Featuring gruesome scenes of mutilation and torture, this not-so-thinly-veiled attack on the Westboro Baptist Church is as full-on as they come. As horrific as viewing gets if you can’t stomach blood, blasphemy, or on-camera genital mutilation. You have been seriously warned.
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