The Massive Attack music video inspired by two classic cult horror movies
What makes a good music video? Often, they work as the perfect medium to pay homage to something, perhaps a film or a pre-existing music video, and in the case of Massive Attack’s captivating ‘Voodoo in My Blood’ video, several cult classics served as primary inspirations.
Taken from their 2016 EP Ritual Spirit, ‘Voodoo in My Blood’ features Young Fathers on vocals, with strangely surreal lyrics seeming to allude to some kind of possession, especially the phrase “I’m yours, I’m yours”. The track builds with uncertainty, and there’s this tension at play that’s so addictive, you hardly know where it’s going to take you.
It’s only fitting, then, that director Ringan Ledwidge was influenced by Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession, the once-banned divorce-themed horror which contains an iconic subway scene featuring Isabelle Adjani at her most unhinged.
Released in 1981, the movie came a few years after the successful divorce drama Kramer vs Kramer, but here, things were cranked up to violent new levels. Adjani starred opposite Sam Neill as a warring couple, their breakup set against the backdrop of a divided Berlin.
Things turn surreal and increasingly violent as the pair attack each other, while Adjani’s character even keeps a strange monster in her room, this addition forming a uniquely fantastical side to the film. It’s horrific yet so outstandingly acted that you can hardly blame people for becoming obsessed with it in all of its bleakness and vision of life as one full of endless pain and battle.
In the ‘Voodoo in My Blood’ video, Rosamund Pike stars as the Adjani-esque character, wearing a similar blue dress as she walks into an underground station tunnel. In Possession, Adjani begins to break down, seemingly possessed, and in the subway tunnel, she thrashes her body and her bags of groceries against the walls and the floor before spewing liquids. Here, Pike similarly contorts her body, throws it around, and drags herself along the floor. It’s as gross as it is strangely evocative.
Discussing the project with Dazed, Ledwidge explained, “I must have discovered the film when I was about 12, and it absolutely blew my mind. That particular scene in the film is insane. It’s so riveting yet so disturbing at the same time, it’s so original and different and…strange. It’s still to this day a film I’ll implore anyone I see to go and watch it.”
Besides Possession, the film also drew from 1979’s Phantasm, which sees similar mysterious silver balls target its characters. Here, with a HAL-like red censor in it, the ball pricks Pike in the eye before possessing her, with Ledwidge explaining, “I’d been thinking a lot about technology, about how it’s very seductive and sexy, but also very benign until you engage with it, and how that engagement takes over your life. In a funny way, it is sort of like possession.”
With Pike leading the video, not long off the back of Gone Girl, it’s hard not to be hypnotised by her movements yourself, which are as unpredictable as the tension building in the track.
