It’s been a few months since I’ve talked about Manson in detail, and as it is one of my favorite subjects, I feel compelled to do so. Today, I’m going to talk about a very specific aspect of his videos, the color, and try to show what can be gained from them. I’m doing this partly for myself as well, because color is a weaker skill of mine, and so I think this is a great way to learn. If this works well, I’m planning on making it a regular thing, possibly pulling from a certain director’s oeuvre. So, let’s get to it.

Below, I have taken a screen shot from an iconic video from each era of his career, from 1994–present. I sampled the range of colors and tried to create a pallet based on the still. Obviously, one still cannot encompass the entirety of a music video’s color style that has hundreds of shots. But I think there’s enough info here to make my point.

I believe that each one of these pallets ties in extremely closely to the message/concept of each album. These colors weren’t simply chosen because they “look pretty.” Rather, the color style contributes just as much to the overall narrative of the albums as the lyrics do. And I guess that’s what makes Manson such a great artist–everything he does is about storytelling, even if it’s abstract or ambiguous. There’s always a sense that you’re being taken on some sort of journey.

So we start out with Lunchbox (Portrait of an American Family, 1994), and we’re working primarily with earth tones, that are incredibly saturated. We continue with this same general direction for Sweet Dreams (Smells Like Children, 1995) and The Beautiful People (Antichrist Superstar, 1996). All three of these albums stick very closely in musical style and theme, and so it follows that the color design would also be similar. These albums are considered his most “brutal” records, with many songs that are anti-religion, anti-establishment, etc. He’s never quite returned to that level of intensity in his work.

Both The Beautiful People and Sweet Dreams are working primarily with browns and yellows. So aesthetically, they are very similar, having both been shot in abandoned locations. The themes of both records are post-apocalpytic, beginning first with Manson proclaiming “I think that moshing is a sign of the apocalypse,” on the Phil Donahue Show during this era, which later sparked the entire concept of Antichrist Superstar. Thus, these colors reflect that sense of the world having been destroyed. It’s also conceivable that they were pulling some influence from the Mad Max films–the godfather of the post-apocalyptic genre. These colors are, like I said, extremely saturated, giving them a sense of intensity. You can almost feel the heat coming off the screen.

The Beautiful People also shares a lot of aesthetic similarities to the cinematography in David Fincher’s films.

But by the time we get to The Dope Show (Mechanical Animals, 1998), we see a radical departure. We see deep red and cool blue. Before, we were invoking post-apocalyptic visions, now, we have sci-fi futurism, and these colors are often used in dark sci-fi films. James Cameron particularly loves the color blue. Not just for his giant cat-people, but even going back to Aliens and Terminator. When I think of Cameron, I think of blue. And even films like The Empire Strikes Back used blue quite well.

Where the previous pallets tended to stay in relatively the same range, here we have two polar opposite colors. This is a perfect metaphor for the dichotomy of the album–half of it is heavy rock, the other, soft ballads. This was Manson’s first real flirtation with introspection, the album being essentially a parody of his own career up to that point, and an homage to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spider’s from Mars. The colors are also slightly less saturated, and there’s more of a middle ground. The previous albums were more extreme, but by this point, he started injecting a lot more nuance into his writing. But we’re still working with a relatively small number of colors, so there’s still a sense of a focused vision for the album. Mechanical Animals might be his most tightly written album. It’s over an hour, but it feels like fifteen minutes cause of how well constructed it is.

Now, things get really interesting. On Disposable Teens (Holy Wood, 2000), we move entirely to the opposite end of the spectrum. No longer do we have hot colors, but instead, we have incredibly muted blues, greens and greys. This is his darkest album by far, and the colors really accentuate the somber tone he’s going for. It’s all about having no hope and feeling like you can’t change the world. He was blamed for Columbine, and this record was his answer to that, calling out all the horrible values held by society that caused such horrible acts of violence to occur.

Now regardless of my personal opinions of the man as a director, this is a very similar technique used by Zack Snyder, and it’s why his movies are so goddamn depressing. The difference is, when Manson does it, it actually helps the story.

Now we get to This is the New Shit (The Golden Age of Grotesque, 2003), and this was another radical departure. Manson’s reign as “the antichrist” was coming to an end, and he was looking to transition into something a little more fun. This record is a weaker one because, although it does draw a lot of inspirations from various places like Burlesque, it doesn’t have quite the same level of vision. Still, it’s worth a listen every now and then and there are still themes worth mentioning. This song in particular is about how Manson felt that his music was becoming too much of a product. Nobody seemed to care about what he actually said, and just used it as a fashion statement. “Do we get it? No. Do we want it? Yeah!”

The cinematography stays similar to Holy Wood, but with a notable difference. It is much more saturated, despite being just as dark. The film I most closely associate it with is The Matrix; which I’m sure is just a coincidence that this song is on the soundtrack to The Matrix Reloaded, as was Rock is Dead for the first movie.

After this album, Manson “retired.” But four years later he came back to make a divisive record, to put it nicely. I personally like it a lot, and it’s in my top five at least. He had ended his marriage to Dita Von Teese, and most of the songs are about his regret over the relationship. But there’s still the same attention to detail that was always present.

The video for Heart Shaped Glasses (Eat me, Drink Me, 2007), which was written as an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s controversial film Lolita, is shot in mostly monochrome red, and features Manson and then-girlfriend Evan Rachel Wood making out in a shower of blood. It’s not too hard to pick up on the symbolism here (sex, danger, vampiricism), but there’s a very curious aesthetic element here: It shares a very similar look to 70s horror films.

You see, realistic blood is not nearly this bright red. It’s more maroon. But by using this kind of blood that probably would have been used during the 70s, the video evokes the same feeling without us consciously being aware of it.

This horror element ties in with the themes of the album, which was also inspired greatly by Alice in Wonderland, a book that is theorized to be a metaphor for a girl discovering sexuality. Whether this is true or not, I’m sure Manson knew about the theory, given he was working on a biopic of the author. Thus, the blood in this video could be seen as a metaphor for Manson taking this girl’s virginity.

Arma-goddamn-mother-fucking-geddon (The High End of Low, 2009) is a curious video. It uses a somewhat similar color pallet to Mechanical Animals, but is much more saturated, to the point of being practically neon. The filmmaker I most associate this style with is Nicolas Winding Refn (who made a film called Neon Demon, of all things).

There’s not a ton to say about the themes here, because this album is kind of all-over-the-place. I do like it, but it’s kind of a mess. A fun mess though. This song in particular is about Manson and his long, troubled history with censorship. Whether the nods to Refn were intentional, it’s hard to deny both images create the same sort of foreboding and intensity.

Next is Slo-mo-tion (Born Villain, 2012), and Manson continues the neon look, using black lights to create a very interesting visual style. The song is all about putting on a show, and you get a sense that he wanted to get back to the showman he was back in the 90s with this one. He had started to become the goth Bob Dylan, and I don’t think he liked who he was during that period.

Finally, Deep Six (The Pale Emperor, 2015). Easily his most minimalist record, and so it follows that this video would reflect that by using the least amount of colors yet. I also get a sci-fi vibe from this video, but different from how it was in the past. I pick up on a strong Ridley Scott influence here.

In this video, Manson’s head is attached to a long, black tube, which surrounds a naked woman. He also has another tube come out of his mouth with another face on it. This may be an homage to the xenomorph from Alien: A film which also plays with sexual themes and symbolism of rape, the xenomorph being very phallic in design and the facehugger attacking people and impregnating them. And I don’t even know if this reference was conscious on the part of Manson or the director. But by using similar visual elements, it still manages to have the same effect. The stark white creates a feeling of emptiness and no place to run.

So I hope you enjoyed this little exploration, and I hope it comes in handy when thinking about how to use color to evoke mood and tell story better. Until next time!