Videodrone #14: Down In It

Videodrone is a weekly feature looking at music videos from the last half century. 

Down In It (1989)

It's not often when a young band's video shoot turns into a murder investigation, but that's exactly what happened when Nine Inch Nails filmed the 1989 clip for their first single, "Down In It."

Trent Reznor was (and is) the mastermind behind NIN, recording the majority of the instruments on the band's debut album Pretty Hate Machine. Based in Cleveland, the band's sound was electronic, featuring tons of synths but also incorporating heavy industrial and rock elements. It was angry, visceral and exciting. 

Reznor was recording a video for "Down In It" in the warehouse district of Chicago. It was low budget, but full of trippy effects, with Reznor being chased by band members Chris Vrenna and Richard Patrick through various locations. The climax features Reznor falling off the top of a building, with the final scene showing his lifeless body on the ground as Vrenna and Patrick stood over him. 

In this pre-drone era, the band used a camera attached by a rope to helium balloons to fil the final scene, but the rope snapped and the camera floated away. The camera eventually ended up in a cornfield in eastern Michigan, where a farmer found it and handed it over to local police. They turned it over to Chicago police after noticing the city's distinctive L trains in the background. Chicago authorities couldn't find any evidence of a murder matching that location and turned the case over to the FBI. After watching the footage, FBI agents began investigating whether it was evidence of a cult killing or a snuff film, noting that the "body" appeared to be rotting in the video.

Flyers were distributed looking for leads and an art student who worked for H-Gun Productions, the company that filmed the video, recognized the "victim" as Reznor and informed the FBI that he was very much alive. This was in September 1990, a year after the video was filmed. 

Chicago police announced that there was no body, after all, and in March 1991, the tabloid "news" show Hard Copy aired a sensationalistic report about the whole thing (see below). It's really a classic of the era, with reporter Rafael Abramovitz editorializing about Reznor's nose rings, interviewing the Michigan cop who initially investigated the footage, and talking to Reznor and the production crew about it. Reznor found the whole thing amusing, which seemed to annoy Abramovitz, who chided him for wasting a year's worth of police work that could have gone into solving real crimes. The band's label, TVT Records, took full advantage of the publicity, including clips from the Hard Copy report in the press kit for the UK release of the album. Some British journalists wondered if the whole thing was a publicity stunt, but Reznor insisted it was a just a stupid accident.

As it turned out, when the video was aired on MTV, the network refused to air the final shot of Reznor's body, which was covered in corn starch to give it that "freshly dead" look. 

Pretty Hate Machine was eventually a huge success, going triple platinum, but it had a slow build. Released in October 1989, it entered the Billboard 200 in February 1990 but continued to gain momentum over the next few years. NIN was part of the first Lollapalooza lineup in 1991, which is when I started seeing quick late-night TV ads for it. 

The band's rise coincided with the alternative rock explosion of the early '90s. NIN's videos for songs like "Closer," "Hurt" and "The Perfect Drug" were in constant rotation and often pushed the boundaries of what censors would allow. But it was that first video that put NIN on the map in more ways than one.