Music
The most terrifying music video ever is 20
An urban wasteland filled with marauding children in creepy masks… we go inside Aphex Twin's Come To Daddy to find out why it still haunts our dreams, two decades on.
Released in October 1997, Come To Daddy – the latest EP by Cornish electronica wizard Aphex Twin – hit shelves. The title track was terrifying enough – a brilliantly hideous splattercore drum’n’bass that found James himself growling “I want your soul!” like the devil himself.
But it came with a music video, courtesy of director Chris Cunningham, that took the song itself and transformed it into pure nightmare fuel. An old lady walks her dog through a dilapidated housing estate when she comes upon a discarded TV broadcasting a terrifying, distorted face. Immediately after, she is set upon by a gang of children, each sorting the unmistakable, beaming visage of Richard D James – and just when she thinks she’s escaped, there’s something more hideous lurking in the depths of the estate…
Read on for five facts about the song and video that you might not know…
1. The song started as "a joke"
Aphex Twin has always fostered a bit of a pranksterish persona – he once DJed out with sandpaper – but coming on the heels of his critically acclaimed Richard D James album, a mix of hyper-detailed drum’n’bass rhythms and haunting melodies, Come To Daddy was a bit of a left turn. James himself claimed it started as a joke. “Come To Daddy came about while I was just hanging around my house, getting pissed and doing this crappy death metal jingle," he told Index magazine. "Then it got marketed and a video was made, and this little idea that I had, which was a joke, turned into something huge. It wasn't right at all.”
2. It was shot on the same council estate as Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange
Director Chris Cunningham shot the video at Thamesmead, a 1960s housing estate in the London borough of Greenwich and Bexley. The estate’s foreboding brutalist architecture has made it a destination of choice for filmmakers looking for “urban decay” vibes, and Stanley Kubrick shot many scenes of his controversial A Clockwork Orange in the area. Much of Come To Daddy was filmed around the Tavy Bridge Shopping Centre, which was demolished in 2007.
3. CGI? No thanks
Chris Cunningham started his career sculpting prosthetic heads for director Ridley Scott, and his work on Come To Daddy relies more on prosthetics than effects. The masks worn by the children in the video were sculpted from silicon, using photos of James’ face as a guide. “Quite well done, except they didn't give me any eyebrows. And they're not my teeth,” James told an interviewer. The effect, as we don’t need to tell you, is deeply sinister.
4. The old woman in the video really went through a lot
“When she came to casting we had her be really scared but I don’t think she realised she was going to have a wind machine pointing at her face,” Chris Cunningham told Pitchfork. “She had me in stitches. I had to look away when we were filming her scene because I was laughing so much.”
That video will always be the total personification of an absolute nightmare to me
5. Twenty years on, it's still a cultural touchstone
Most recently, Aziz Ansari used the track to soundtrack a particularly intense babysitting scene in Master Of None. In an interview with Pitchfork, Ansari and the show’s musical director Zach Cowie talked of their love for Aphex Twin. “It made us both laugh. We're both very big Aphex Twin fans. And he shows up a couple times in the series. Growing up as a kid watching "120 Minutes", that video will always be the total personification of an absolute nightmare to me.“
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