In anticipation of seeing Anton Corbijn’s Control at Toronto next week (FYI, that film took a couple of prizes at the Edinburgh Film Festival this past weekend), I’ve been watching some of Corbijn’s music videos on YouTube and iFilm. In the late 80s/early 90s, Corbijn was to go-to guy for Euro-bands looking for something grainy and either black-and-white or in washed-out color, in which they could sulk bitterly whilst stalking around either city or countryside, surrounded with what looked like low-rent Helmut Newton girls in various 80s costumes, and eventually resolve some of the underlying tension and hostility in some suggestion of light S & M.

These traits unite videos as disparate as the cowboy brothel fantasy of Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus”, to the, well, cowboys-in-suburbia fantasy of “All These Things I’ve Done” by The Killers. Those two videos were made about 15 years apart, and watching them back-to-back, it’s easy (and disheartening) to imagine a record company trotting Corbijn out every couple of years to do that things he does for a different band of eyelinered white dudes singing mildly threatening synthesizer-addled guitar music. Unfortunately, the latter comes off as a slick copy of the former, drained of its Jodorowsky.

But there a few Corbijn videos that fall way outside those parameters, and two that I had forgotten about until today are “Liar“, starring Henry Rollins, and Nirvana’s “Heart Shaped Box”. Though very different from Corbijn in “Personal Jesus” mode, these two clips have stylistic similarities to one another. Both are clearly shot on constructed sets on soundstages; both take place partially on highly manipulated, Dali-esque landscapes; one’s got a Santa Claus-as-Christ figure, the other has a punk rock legend-as-Satan; both feature their screaming protagonists in such extreme close-up that their faces blur out. Both, when watched outside of the context of promoting for a hit song currently on the radio, are absolutely terrifying.

I’ve embedded “Personal Jesus” above, because it makes me laugh and yet I also find it guiltily sexy. Keep an eye out for this one shot of a horse, seen in profile, looking towards the left side of the screen, ominously licking his gums to the beat. Corbijn repeats the same shot in “Heart Shaped Box”, only this time it’s a crow, and it’s visibly singing along. In both cases, it’s brief, blissful comic relief, and I’m tempted to go as far at to call it Corbijn’s true signature shot.