Broken

The film involves a young man being kidnapped and made to watch Nine Inch Nails videos while being tortured. Trent Reznor once said that the Broken Movie "...makes 'Happiness In Slavery' look like a Disney movie". Much of the cast, save Bob Flanagan in "Happiness In Slavery" and the band itself in "Wish", is unknown. The film was inspired by scenes from Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer .[[1]]( For info on the actual music videos, see the individual song pages. Following the "Pinion" video, the film cuts back to the amateur video where the killer, wearing some kind of leather mask, violently drags back the victim’s head and forces him to drink some sort of liquid from a petrol can, mimicking the person in the music video who is forced to drink waste. The middle of the music video is interrupted by the amateur footage with the victim chained to a big table with a large wad of dark substance on his face. As the killer can immediately be seen putting his pants on, it can be assumed that it's feces. The music video then commences and finishes; the killer then repeatedly rewinds it to the part where Reznor screams “fist fuck” and begins to rub his fist. At this point in the film, the victim is shown still tied to the table as the killer proceeds to rip his victim’s teeth out, reflecting the man in the music video shown eating. In the most prominent VHS leak, this part was blacked out, possibly as a way for Reznor to tell whose copy of the film had been leaked. The movie then cuts back to the execution scene shown at the beginning of the film, where the killer is being dropped through the trap door, falling through a seemingly immensely long expanse, until the rope goes taut. The movie ends with the inverted version of the Broken album cover, with the background black, and a mirrored "n" character filled with the original orange background texture. In a stinger, after roughly a minute of silence and a black screen, the decapitated head of the killer is shown flying across the screen. According to Reznor's Prodigy posts, the film was planned to be released on VHS and LaserDisc in May 1993. [[2]]( However, due to its extremely graphic content, the Broken Movie has never seen an official release, with Reznor stating: [[3]]( A copy was leaked on VHS in the 1990s and traded for years, resulting in many poor-quality, high-generation copies, and was later digitized and distributed through P2P networks. The original source of this leaked copy of the movie was likely Gibby Haynes, formerly of The Butthole Surfers and Revolting Cocks, as implied by Reznor in his answer to an Access question on May 7, 2004: On December 30, 2006, someone under the name seed0 leaked a high-quality DVD image on The Pirate Bay; it includes the video for "Help Me I Am In Hell", which none of the fan-made compilations did, because the first leak had the video dropped out. It was leaked online by the same user who uploaded the leaked DVD version of Closure , and it was speculated that Reznor himself was the source of the leaks. This was implied by a post on his blog on The Spiral : "12/21/06 : Happy Holidays! This one is a guilt-free download. (shhhh - I didn't say that out loud). If you know what I'm talking about, cool." Rob Sheridan has since confirmed that the Closure leak was from the NIN camp, thereby confirming that the Broken Movie leak was as well.[[4]]( In 2013, the Broken Movie was uploaded to the official NIN Vimeo account, but was promptly removed by Vimeo. It is currently available to download from archive.org.[[5]]( What was the story behind the video for Broken? I heard that Reznor asked you to ‘do your worst’, so to speak. Coil had already done some remixes of Nine Inch Nails and they’d been used in Seven , the famous horror movie. So I was on pretty good terms with the guys and we put together a compilation for the Broken album of which the culmination was a track called “Gave Up”. Basically the video was what I intended to be a comment