Muse – Supermassive Black Hole
2006 · Directed by Floria Sigismondi
796K Likes
Best comments
1.“Every time I listen to this, I can't help but picture a bunch of vampires playing baseball...”
More comments
- 2.“Great video quality, considering the camera was more than 50 million light-years away from the studio when they shot this.”
- 3.“My neighbours love this song so much, they threw a brick through my window so they could hear it better.”
The story
Floria Sigismondi has a recurring dream: a dark room full of mirrors, filled with masked dancers. Muse let her film it. The band plays in black, wearing cloth masks printed with their own faces, while dancers in bright full-body suits (faces covered too) dance around them. A girl holds up a book with a hole in it, the band passes through, and at the end the suits unzip to show beings made of outer space. Flashes of a black circle stand in for the black hole itself.
Sigismondi was already the go-to for beautiful nightmares – Marilyn Manson, the White Stripes, the Cure. Matt Bellamy liked her Blue Orchid video, and she shot this one in Los Angeles.
The song was a hard left turn for Muse. Bellamy said it grew out of nights dancing in New York clubs, and he pointed to Belgian bands like Soulwax and dEUS, plus a little Prince, for mixing R&B rhythm with alternative guitar. It hit number four in the UK, their best chart showing up to then. Then Twilight put it under the vampire baseball scene, and a whole new generation found it. Falsetto, funk and vampires in the rain. Somehow it all fits.
