THE VIDEO Iron Maiden, "The Number of the Beast," The Number of the Beast, 1982, Capitol
SAMPLE LYRIC "Six! Six, six! / Tha nummmberrrr of the beeeeeast! / Six! Six! Six! The one for youuu and meeeeeee!"
EXCESSIVELY DETAILED DESCRIPTION As per many Iron Maiden videos, this video opens with a clip from an old movie, in this case, The Wolfman, which, unlike most of the movies they use (a) is not silent and (b) I've actually seen in its entirety. Of course, it's been a while, so I'll have to look it up and verify my basic plot description: As I remember it, a man travels to a town that has itself a little werewolf problem. He gets bitten by it, and his only hope is to find this old gypsy woman who can cure him. Possibly, I think she meets an untimely end before he finds her.
[Okay, I looked it up, here's what really happens in a nutshell: A British expat returns home to claim his lordship, falls for a girl, buys a cane with a wolf's head on it from her, and saves her friend from a werewolf – which does manage to bite him first – by clubbing it to death with his cane. Werewolfiness ensues, and a gypsy woman does indeed dispatch much useful info.]
I'm not sure what part of the movie the clip they use is from – I want to say the end, but I'm not sure. Anyway, in this clip, the wolfman is wandering around in the fog in the cemetery (Priory Cemetery, to be precise), and he eventually comes to the door to a mausoleum and turns to look over his shoulder.
In the meantime, we hear a Vincent Price-sounding dude (whose spookiness has since been severely tempered by his participation in The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby Doo, not to mention "Thriller" — apparently Maiden couldn’t afford the big Hanna Barbera-style bucks VP was demanding, so this is a random actor they hired) reading from the verse in Revelations (Revelation 13:18, adapted somewhat loosely from the King James version) that references the number of the beast.
"Woe to you, oh earth and sea / for the devil sends the beast with wrath / because he knows the time is short… / let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the beast / for it is a human number / it's number is six hundred and sixty-six."
The song begins with a hand strumming a guitar, and then we see Bruce Dickinson singing, lit from beneath in a sort of greenish fog. We see a devil that looks sort of like Dio's Holy Diver guy, then Dave Murray, Bruce again, then Steve Harris, then the creepy dude from Nosferatu.
After more Bruce, there's a scary-ass zombie-type guy that I don't recognize at all (sorry -- you know I'm too weenie for my knowledge of classic horror movies to be that extensive. He looks like the Toxic Avenger, but obviously isn't).
After more Bruce, there's a scary-ass zombie-type guy that I don't recognize at all (sorry -- you know I'm too weenie for my knowledge of classic horror movies to be that extensive. He looks like the Toxic Avenger, but obviously isn't).
[Update: Right, yeah now I am older, wiser, and hella into scary movies. It's one of the scorned makeup artist's creations from How to Make a Monster.]
As Bruce continues singing, you can also see a sort of half-there shot of what appears to be dinosaurs fighting, and yes, I'm not sure what that's from either (though I would say one of them looks to be a dimetrodon). [Present-day me: Pretty sure this is a Bert I. Gordon flick.]
Lots of tight shots of Bruce singing and gesturing, and finally a glimpse from over the shoulder at Nicko McBrain, plus more of Dave and Steve as we at last get a more pulled-out view of their location: A stage lit with lots of smoky, greenish fog and something devilish and huge looming behind it. As Bruce starts the sort of yelling part at the end of the verse, there’s a brief shot of a skeleton dude (think the Misfits skull and you've got it).
Okay, this one I researched, because I can't just let these things go: Both the Misfits dude (and a Misfits song) and the thing we see here are in reference to The Crimson Ghost, a 1946 serial starring a criminal mastermind who is neither crimson nor a ghost nor even a skeleton but a uh, criminal mastermind, in a pretty good mask.
It's weird because I have seriously never noticed any of these inset movie shots until now, watching it at pretty much frame-by-frame speed. They go by hella fast.
ALTERNATE VERSION ALERT: I watched this again on Vh-1 Classic's Metal Mania, it turns out that I haven't been seeing them because they aren't there. My guess is that they couldn't get the rights clearance to use them all (possibly just in the U.S.). In "Can I Play With Madness?" however, when the teacher sees this video playing on that cobweb-covered television, it is the version I describe here with all the monster movies intact. The one I link to from YouTube is the version I'm discussing here, with movie clips intact.
As Bruce yells, "Yeaahhhhhhh!" we see the classic Godzilla superimposed over the stage with all the lights suddenly coming up. As Bruce raises his fist and we see Steve and Adrian Smith, then a big explosion happening in front of Godzilla. As Maiden rocket their way into the first chorus, the camera moves quickly and we see rapid shots of all the band members as the lights above the stage flash continuously.
The second verse begins with more of the same, including another shot of Godzilla and almost sepia-tone black-and-white footage of a couple of people running around while burning pieces of a building fall around them. As Bruce sings, "satan's work is done" we briefly see the Holy Diver-style devil (which is basically a shirtless guy wearing a weird mask with antlers), who then disappears in an explosive puff of smoke a la Yngwie Malmsteen videos.
Ok, ok, here we go. As the second chorus ends, the unidentified zombie dude is shown again. He steps into the frame from the right, and a wolfman dude steps in from the left, and a title comes up over them that says "How to make a monster" with the word "monster" written all scary. And yes! This is how I find out where that zombie dude comes from — as it turns out, these dudes are from a 1958 film called How to Make a Monster.
It is about a movie makeup artist who finds out that his studio is about to fire him, so he creates a special makeup that allows him to control the wearers' minds and make them go, uh, basically kill people.
Ahh, wait! Aha! The zombie dude is actually the main character from I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957, made by the How to Make a Monster people). See? A little bit of googling and it all starts to come together.
As the guitar solo continues, everyone rocks out, and they show a different wolfman (have I mentioned yet that all of the movie clips are in black and white? No? Sorry, they are) who sort of rolls his eyes around and looks nervous — I am thinking it is possibly the dude from I Was a Teenage Werewolf, which would mean it's roughly the same dude (or at least the same makeup) we saw with Teenage Frankenstein above. [Me of today again: I can't believe that when I wrote this I didn't mention IWATW as a MST3K movie, or that the titular teenwolf is Michael Landon.]
Steve and Nicko in particular are going nuts, and we see another clip of the Crimson Ghost, who shoots a gun and then hides behind a square pillar that has the words "silver mine" written on it. We briefly see a white spiral superimposed over the video before Dave really starts tearing it up.
As he does so, we catch our first glimpse of a pantomime Eddie in the background, then a pair of ballroom dancers spin onto the stage. The man is dressed in tails and the woman, who has short dark hair, has on a red and gold dress with a knee length skirt that flares out when she spins. As he finishes spinning her around, she is suddenly wearing a wolfman mask, and they turn and bow to each other.
They begin dancing again, and we see that they both have cards attached to their backs (as if they were in a competition), both have the number 6 on the them.
We then see a shot of Adrian half-screened with an image of some kind of giant, giant skull thing outside of a control room (I can't even begin to guess what it's from). The giant skull thing is then seen from the back reaching its hand toward the window we just saw it looking through, then we see Godzilla once more. [OMG past me, it's another MST3K movie you definitely had seen, Bert I. Gordon's War of the Colossal Beast.]
The band goes nuts, and then the woman dancer smiles and holds up her "6" placard for the camera. The man does the same, and then the wolfman/woman does it too, now also wearing furry gloves with big claws (Get it?). As Bruce begins to sing the penultimate verse, we can see a movie of a giant spider behind the band (my best guess on this ID is Tarantula), and that there are now people dancing on the platforms up on either side of the stage. [Ugh past me knew nothing about horror and sci-fi! It's Angry Red Planet.]
One of them is a guy in what looks to be red long underwear, and he has on a devil mask and is carrying a giant pitchfork. (He's basically dressed as the devil on the cover of the album, only on the album he looks a good deal scarier).
We see a brief shot of a bas relief-style old woman's face carved into a wall morphing into a skull as the devil guy dances around and the dancers display their numbers, then a giant pantomime Eddie who is about twice as tall as the people lurches out onto the stage.
Eddie is wearing a gray t-shirt under a black leather jacket, jeans, and a large belt. He's shot from beneath being vaguely menacing (if you're the kind of person who considers those WTO-protest papier-mache things to be menacing, that is). That skeptical-looking wolfman [Michael Landon!!] also gets shown again. As the song concludes, the ballroom dancers turn to face Eddie, and the devil guy jumps off a riser (in sync with the music). All the band members sort of punch their fists, and the lights go out.
THE VERDICT Iron Maiden are the coolest, precisely because they are the biggest geeks ever. On nearly all of their albums, they display mad love for all kinds of arcania (uhoh, did I just make up a word? You know what I mean), from horror films like Village of the Damned and The Wicker Man to Greek mythology to Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (and I never thought seventh-grade English would come in handy again!).
Steve of course wrote a lot of these songs, but lord knows Bruce is like master dork (come on, he's obsessed with planes and fencing).
The point is, all of this geekiness pays off in spades with songs that are as articulate as they are rocking and videos rife with pop culture references (and, for this genre, strikingly lacking in sexual innuendo -- Iron Maiden make even Queensryche look like a bunch of sex-obsessed pervs).
That said, what is going on in this video? I'm not certain. According to the best Iron Maiden fansite out there, the song was inspired by the 1978 film Damien: The Omen II (why not The Omen? So far as I can tell, the second one is just the first one all over again with a crappier plot) and also a nightmare Steve had.
I am guessing that it's mostly the nightmare, because I can't discern much relation to the Omen movies. The ballroom dancers are a bit random, and Eddie and the devil are basically just as seen on the album's cover.
The movie clips make more sense the more I think about them. Since the song itself is just sort of like, ok, I'm out by myself at night, I think I saw something spooky, and now sure enough here are the townspeople with their burning torches etc. Most of the movie clips used reference this sort of plot: The wolfman is hunted down, Godzilla is driven back into the sea, etc., etc. No matter what though, at the end of the day it's a good setting for rocking out, replete with lots of hair-tossing on Bruce's part, and that's what really counts.