25 Best Music Videos: 3

3. Closer
Nine Inch Nails

Silent Hill is a survival horror video game; franchised, developed and published by Konami. The town of Silent Hill manifests itself in at least three distinct parallel layers, or dimensions: a normal, populated town; a quiet, seemingly abandoned town veiled by supernaturally thick fog; and a dark and decaying town (called the "Otherworld") filled with disturbing, hellish imagery. Only the latter two layers are explored by the games' protagonists, where demonic and disfigured creatures roam the streets and buildings (appearing in greater numbers in the Otherworld). Electricity and lighting are extremely limited or nonexistent as well.

Mark Romanek's video for "Closer" elicits much of the "Otherworld"- esque town. Seemingly set in a mad scientist's lab seemingly in the 19th century (seemingly filmed from an old camera and seemingly stored in a film reel, seemingly seemingly), Trent Reznor sings (and claims to want to fornicate with us like some kind of wild beast) in a silhouette into a microphone that manages to simultaneously seem phallic and look like a tit.

After the first eroticism segment finishes, we are treated to a number of artsy-fartsy confusing images, such as a monkey on a crucifix, Reznor swirling around in the air on a suspended wire, an ox skull, and a disembodied pig head being spun around on some type of machine that looks like it was made out of an erector set.

By the end, we are treated to a suspended Reznor playing keyboard keys hung on a wall and the video closes not making any more sense than in the beginning when a heart hooked up to a chair is beating and releasing steam.

This video combines confusingly erotic imagery with confusingly confusing imagery to give a new meaning to the term "artfuck"