The Crow

Various Artists
The Crow
Atlantic, 1994

The Crow and its soundtrack tapped into the resurgence in goth culture during the 1990s in the same way The Big Chill had encapsulated baby boomers in mid-life crisis 10 years earlier. The film was an adaptation of an underground comic of the same name and was the first big hit for Australian director Alex Proyas, who cut his teeth making music videos for INXS and Crowded House. Its cult status began to build before it was released, when lead actor Brandon Lee was fatally injured on-set by a dummy round accidentally fired in a gunshot scene during the last week of filming. Lee's depiction of a man who had been violently murdered and then magically returned to life one year later to exact revenge on his killers was given a tragic and somewhat eerie quality in the wake of his actual death.

The film itself is rather incredibly dark and violent, set in a fictional city one part Detroit and two parts Gotham with a visual style similar to the sci-fi noir classic Blade Runner. Thanks to Proyas's background shooting music videos, some parts feel like a series of film clips strung together to make a story. The soundtrack includes The Cure, Nine Inch Nails covering Joy Division's 'Dead Souls', Pantera, Rage Against The Machine, Stone Temple Pilots, Violent Femmes and Rollins Band covering 'Ghost Rider' by Suicide. For years after it was released, it was one of those records you'd find everywhere you went.

What strikes me most about The Crow soundtrack now is just how varied the songs are. At the time it seemed like such a single-minded collection, but it actually captured a wide range of musical ideas circa 1994 – hangers-on from the decade before (The Jesus And Mary Chain, Violent Femmes, The Cure), grunge (Stone Temple Pilots), metal (Pantera, Rollins Band), the kind of industrial-gothic sounds that only ever made sense at the time (Nine Inch Nails, Machines Of Loving Grace) and last but not least the brilliant political rap-rock hybrid of Rage Against The Machine, who would play no small part in inspiring the insufferably lame likes of Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park to dominate "alternative" music charts for the next ten years. I still really like it as well. I can't imagine not owning a copy.