At Cinema Runner, film is our first love, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have an intense fondness for music as well. In an effort to share our love of the musical medium, we’re launching a weekly feature dedicated to songs written for and/or featured on the soundtracks of some of our favorite films. Well, and also sometimes not so great movies, but as long as the tune is worthwhile or at least has an interesting video, what does it matter? Besides, who run Boombox-town? We do! Your own personal Dr. Dealgoods. Welcome to Beyond Videodome, where two ears enter and then they bleed! Care to spin the wheel?
Today’s (Topical) Tune-age…
Slipknot’s “My Plague”
Since I don’t have an older brother and really had no music-loving cousins or anyone else (outside of my parents) to absorb new musical groups from as a child, movies constantly informed what I was exposed to and would eventually grow to love. Much of my early discovery of bands I loved as a teen came from scooping up the soundtracks to films that I enjoyed in the theater. As a result, my love of horror cinema very much led to my eventual love of hard rock and heavy metal.
As luck would have it, my teenage years still fell within the era in which genre cinema tended to have rock and metal-filled soundtracks. While I came to slightly older soundtracks like The Crow and Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight later on, I was all-over the rip-roaring discs for films like The Matrix, Scream 3, and the one that inspired today’s selection, 2002’s Resident Evil. Produced by Marilyn Manson and Marco Beltrami, this was a winner of a release to my then-16-year-old ears and I ate it up like a zombie at a brain buffet.
The songs that I loved the most on it was one I was already familiar with: “My Plague” by Slipknot. The track had already been a favorite of mine off of their 2001 album, Iowa. I had actually discovered the band on the soundtrack for 2000’s Scream 3, which had showcased their now standard tune “Wait & Bleed”. The Resident Evil soundtrack actually held a brand new remix of the song, labeled “My Plague (New Abuse Mix)“, which strangely enough is NOT the version of the song featured in the Resident Evil footage-filled video that followed around the time of the film’s release…
Looking at the video now, I’m prone to giggle. The song is edited for content, of course, as it had to be suitable for constant rotation on MTV and VH1 at the time. That along makes me smile a bit, but what really sends me into a tiny fit is the editing of the film clips meshed against the live footage. Whoever put this video together clearly wanted it to be filled with money shots from the film. The problem there is that Paul W.S. Anderson’s first time at bat doing an adaptation of this popular video game series churned out a pretty violent and gory sci-fi horror actioner. As a result, much like the editing for language, these clips are edited for content. The cuts away from violence and grue are so quick at time in the video that it is often hard to tell what the hell is going on in it.
The video itself was directed by Matthew Amos (with Simon Hilton co-directing). Amos was also responsible for Slipknot’s live videos for Iowa sister tunes “People = Shit” and “The Heretic Anthem”. The live concert footage of the band used in all three videos actually hails from the performances that can be found on the band’s Disasterpieces DVD. I haven’t had the pleasure of viewing that particular DVD, but I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that it is far more engaging than the music video above.
Slipknot’s flirtations with the film industry don’t end here, however. As you can imagine, they’ve appeared on many a soundtrack over the years due to their popularity. That very same year (2002), however, the band actually appeared on screen in the atrocious Rollerball remake performing another Iowa track, “I Am Hated”. No video was filmed for the song, but it did appear on the film’s soundtrack. As for their cameo…
The band also famously has a video aping The Shining (which you can see below), plus band member Shawn “Clown” Crahan actually directed his first feature last year, .
