Director: Chris Cunningham
In 1997, electronic music was surfing a wave of popularity, thanks to artists like The Prodigy, Underworld, Daft Punk and Orbital. Then, the music video for British group Aphex Twin's "Come To Daddy" burst onto MTV… and made everyone sit up, gawp in disbelief, then cower behind their sofa...
Directed by Chris Cunningham, "Come To Daddy" painted a vivid picture of a British urban nightmare, containing surreal and frightening imagery that seemed to ingrain itself into your psyche. It was, basically, the perfect marriage to Aphex Twin's twisted brand of electro-psychedelic music.
Cunningham used the face of Richard D. James (Aphex Twin) as a "logo" after James suggested it, then began crafting a crazy vision of a depressing council estate... where a TV gives birth to a pale, thin creature with razor-sharp teeth, that proceeds to scream into an old lady's face with the ferocity of a hurricane… all intermixed with a gang of creepy children (also wearing masks resembling James), who later dance around this TV-beast-deity. The visual tricks and scratches of the visuals, set to the weird music track itself, completes a very unsettling effect.
"Come To Daddy" has to been seen (or "experienced") to get the full effect, but it's undoubtedly one of the scariest music videos ever made, and deservedly won a pile of awards in 1998. It seemed to herald the emergence of a bright, new talent in the 27-year-old Cunningham -- but the director's output has been disappointing in the decade since. He has continued to collaborate with Aphex Twin on videos, most notably "Windowlicker", but his last noteworthy effort was 2005's Rubber Johnny, a 6-minute experimental short/music video.
Trivia1. Cunningham used to work on satirical puppet series Spitting Image.
2. Cunningham was head-hunted by director Stanley Kubrick, who noticed his work on 1995's Judge Dredd. Cunningham spent a year working on Kubrick's cherished A.I projected, before leaving to pursue his own career.
3. Cunningham operated the steadicam for Daft Punk's Electroma in 2007.
