This is based on opinion. Please don't list it on a work's trope example list.
Given that they’re an
Industrial Metal band and Till Lindeman is often considered to be one of the scariest, if not
the scariest vocalist of all time, it’s not surprising that
Rammstein will have
some scary moments.
- The lyrics to the song "Stein um Stein", which describe the process of building someone into a wall. While they're still alive. (It's a metaphor for sexual abuse.) See for yourself here
. - "Mein Teil" is both lyrically and musically one of the - if not the - most extreme Rammstein song. Partly because it's about the real-life case of Armin Meiwes — indeed, the lyrics are preceded by Meiwes' ad for a young man to be "slaughtered and then consumed" — and partly because in the middle eight, there's a noise in the background that sounds like dying screams. As if the fact it's an eerie metal song about cannibalism sung in a foreign language creepily weren't enough, read the story behind the song in excruciating detail. Yes, he really did that to his you-know-what (hence the title, 'Mein Teil', which means 'my part' in German, can also translate to 'my penis' if you know a thing or two about German slang). And if you're still not convinced as to how frightening the song is, watch the music video. Sweet dreams...
- The stage show isn't any less disturbing. Till dresses up as an Evil Chef, with what looks like fresh blood running down his shoulders, smeared across his mouth, and spattered along his clothes. He shimmers, like he's covered in some mixture of sweat and grease, spends much of the song sharpening a knife with a steel and routinely grins and licks his lips at the crowd.
- The instrumental bridge consists of a heavily distorted guitar riff with caustic, machine-like synths put over it that almost sound like somebody screaming in pain.
- The song also goes on shortly after the lyrics and guitar stop. This part of the song consists of nothing but creepy wailing.
- It's also told from the perspective of the guy being eaten. One set of lyrics describes how difficult it is to eat. Why? Because the blood loss is so severe that he can barely stay conscious.
- Rammstein generally have either lyrics about sex or murder or both. There are two songs about plane crashes, one about an insane man shagging his decaying dead wife. Then there's "Ich tu dir weh" (I hurt you), an Obligatory Bondage Song so twisted and graphic that the German government has put it and the album on which it appears, Liebe ist für alle da, on the Index. This means it cannot be sold to minors. (to be fair, the artwork shows them killing and eating women.) And "Haifisch" (Shark) is based on the chorus of "Die Moritat von Mackier Messer" (The Ballad of Mack the Knife). Finally, there's "Wiener Blut" (Viennese Blood), which talks about the Joseph Fritzl case.
- Till's Slasher Smile at the end of the "Mein Land" video.
- "Du riechst so gut" is by itself a horrifying song, being based on the book Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and also since it's sang from the point of view of a Stalker with a Crush who apparently rapes the target of his affections, but the '98 music video makes it even more unsettling, with Till playing the part of a vampire hunting down a high-life woman all the way to a castle. He manages to seduce the woman, but then kills her and takes her clothes, before transforming into a pack of wolves wreaking havoc in the ballroom. Upon escaping from the castle, the wolves are revealed to be the entire band, as the other people check out the woman's corpse. Except the woman herself has been transformed into a vampire, as the surprise ending shows.
- The masks in the "Du hast" music video are nothing short of Uncanny Valley.
- The cover art of Mutter, which is a close-up of a dead fetus.
- The weird kitchen-object face masks on the Sehnsucht cover (pictured above), which look like something straight out of a Marilyn Manson music video.
- "Donaukinder", based off Baia Mare cyanide spill, is also scary — both the lyrics and the music itself (with its use of extremely heavy guitars and Ethereal Choir), as typical for Rammstein.
- Worse, the first phrase of the chorus translates to "Where are the children?" The singer is watching his hometown die in front of him because of a chemical spill, smelling the rotten fish and birds in the river, and it hits him-Where are my kids?
- Add to that by reading up on the disaster- some call it the largest natural disaster since Chernobyl. By the time it got to the Danube (which features in the song title), the cyanide already went through at least 3 rivers big and small, and was highly diluted. The effects were felt not only in Romania, where the spill happened, but Hungary (thanks to the spill almost directly getting into 2 of Hungary's major rivers, first the Szamos then the Tisza), Serbia (via the Tisza and Danube as far as Belgrad), and even as far as Bulgaria. As for the question, the accident happened in January so no children were actually swimming in the rivers, per se, bu they could have been walking along them, and parents from all these places asked that question when seeing fish and other animals die and smelling their rivers stink- and just as the song states, the Romanian government and the mine itself denied everything and claimed ignorance for a good while. "Nobody saw what happened" indeed.
- The piano version of "Mein Herz brennt". The original song is creepy enough as it is (especially the music video for it), but just playing it with only a lone piano is just disturbing. Till's appearance in the video doesn't help matters either.
- "Bück dich", a song about hard Dom/sub sex, has a rather disturbing instrumental with a mercilessly pounding beat, a synth bass consisting of what sounds like machine noises in the verses, samples of screams every now and then, and Till's distorted panting into the microphone as he tells you he doesn't care about his sub's face, he just wants them to bend over. The lyrics reduce the sub to a "biped on all fours" that Till takes for a walk.
- Towards the end of "Das alte Leid", a song about the complete pointlessness of the whole cycle of birth-life-death because it only gives rise to yet more suffering, as the band keeps repeating the chorus, you can hear deep in the mix the sound of a baby crying. It goes on. And on.
- "Engel". It's a song about how, if you're good, you'll rise to Heaven and become an angel... and then you get to spend the rest of eternity cold and alone, with no way out. The stage version involves a flaming cage.
- The music video for "Ich will", disturbing not because of gore and violence or nightmarish lyrics of the song, but because its depiction of journalists treating bank robbers as if they were celebrities is uncomfortably close to how news media sometimes operate in Real Life.
- "Weisses Fleisch" definitely deserves a mention here as well, the song is about child rape told from the rapist's perspective in rather graphic detail.
- "Dalai Lama" from Reise, Reise is about a plane crash. It tells the story of a child and father who are killed in the crash. The song starts by describing the child happily flying with their father for their mother's birthday, before the plane experiences a failure and starts to fall to Earth. The lyrics mordantly say that human beings were not meant to fly. The song ends by describing the child's loving father asphyxiating the child so that they don't have to experience the agony and terror of dying in a plane crash.
- Reise, Reise comes in packaging designed to look like a cockpit flight recorder and has a hidden track at the start of the album of the actual Japan Airlines 123 plane crash, of which only four passengers survived. It's very, very disturbing.
- The music video for "Rosenrot". Let's count the ways, shall we?
- There's nothing scary at first. It starts with six monks (played by the band members) visiting a charming little village. One of the monks (played by lead singer Till Lindemann) seems to be attracted to a beautiful girl, but that's not exactly scary. Then suddenly, there's a scene of Till on the ground, with bloody injuries on his face, apparently being dragged away, interspersed with a scene of the monks self-flagellating.
- Later on, it turns out that the girl apparently returns his feelings, and the two become closer. Eventually, she asks him to do her a favor. Said favor? Breaking into her house and murdering her parents. We don't see much of the actual killing, but we do see a few quick shots of the struggle inside the house. We also see some fighting through the windows, spatters of blood hitting a picture, the father's corpse, and the girl giving a Psychotic Smirk. Oh, and all this is interspersed with more footage of self-flagellation.
- After the deed is done, Till comes out of the house (the interior of which is now filled with Red lighting), expecting the girl to be grateful. But her face suddenly turns angry, and she lets loose with furious yelling, while pointing at him. Suddenly, a crowd of armed townsfolk rushes towards him from the darkness, accompanied by the other monks.
- The townsfolk and monks give him a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, tie him up, put an execution hood over his head, and drag him away. Not long afterwards, he gets burned at the stake, surrounded by angry townsfolk and his former travelling companions. The kicker? The girl who seduced him is the first to throw a torch onto the woodpile.
- And it goes without saying that these images more or less tie in perfectly with the meaning of the song: about a man whose lover wants him to climb to the top of a mountain to pick an extremely rare rose for her. So he does... only to die while trying to get it. The circumstances may be different, but the meaning is more or less the same: both songs are about a man who died because of the selfishness of someone he loved.
- The lyrics for "Hallelujah" tells of a child-molesting priest whilst juxtaposing his actions with his holy duties. One of the creepiest songs in terms of subject matter.
- The end of "Bestrafe mich":
Der Herrgott nimmt note The lord taketh away
Der Herrgott gibtnote The lord giveth
Doch gibt [er] nur demnote But he only gives to the ones
Den er auch liebtnote that he loves
- "Puppe" (Doll) is a perfect cocktail of Nightmare Fuel, Tear Jerker and Missing Child with a healthy dose of Paranoia Fuel. The lyrics tell of a neglected child who is forced to live with his sister, who is a prostitute, for unspecified reasons. She gives him a doll to play with and abandons him for the rest of the day as she works with her clients. Because he's forced to hear her have sex all day, he goes crazy and bites the doll's head off. At one point all goes quiet and he looks through the door's keyhole... only to find his sister has been brutally and violently killed. Worse? This is a lot more common in real life than a lot are aware of.
- The music video for "Deutschland", which darts back and forth between some of the darkest and most violent points in Germany's history. For example:
- The prologue to the video has a group of Roman legionaries, coming upon the remains of The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, with corpses hanging from trees, and Germania using a hunting knife to saw off a legionary's head.
- A medieval era battlefield strewn with corpses of fallen knights, impaled with arrows and swords. The knights are resurrected by Germania, only to be led into another slaughter of a battle, implying they're damned to fight and die for eternity.
- A underground boxing ring (with Germania giving out brass knuckles for the boxers to beat each other to a bloody pulp) set during the Weimar Republic, with the fight symbolizing the chaotic street fighting and multiple revolutions and coups attempted during the short-lived Republic's history.
- A government office used by the leadership of East Germany, who guzzle champagne and party with women, despite being part of an allegedly anti-capitalist communist nation note Truth in Television, in that, despite the many shortages to East Germany in luxuries, exceptions were usually made for members of the government - something that Rammstein's members, growing up in East Germany prior to its collapse, were well aware of. And even when their office starts to collapse, they're still partying away, right until the roof caves in on their heads.
- A group of monks enter a castle, and have a feast over Germania's body (although the way the scene is shot, there are moments it looks like they are eating Germania alive).
- A group of prisoners are being led through a prison in the middle of a riot (with the prisoners occasionally beaten to the ground by their guards), while money rains down from the air - the uniforms of the prisoners and Germania imply this is another scene set during the Weimar Republic, again showing the chaotic upheaval of the fragile republic, and also showing the disastrous hyperinflation of the Deutsche mark due to the reparations it owed post-World War 1.
- A concentration camp, with the band members being prisoners awaiting their Public Execution at a gallows, while V2 Rockets are fired into the air in the background note According to an analysis video, the V2 rockets imply the specific camp is most likely Mittelbau-Dora, the location the V2s were manufactured, with the company manufacturing the rockets exploiting the camp's slave labor, and being co-responsible for the over 20,000 inmates killed during the V2s production, including a mass execution - and even more specifically, a mass strangulation - of over 30 inmates. Near the video's end, the prisoners take their revenge by tying the Nazi officers to a post, and shooting them in their heads - even though these deaths are more than deserved, they're no less gruesome.
- A group of heavily-armed men and women in 70s attire kidnap Germania, and stuff her into a van while shooting at the police - this is most likely a reference to the Red Army Faction, a far-left terrorist group in Western Germany, and their most infamous actions during the "German Autumn", where they kidnapped and executed a leading German industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer, among other terrorist actionsnote admittedly, the assassination of Schleyer is, while most famous, also probably the least controversial of RAF actions, as Schleyer was revealed to have been a former high-ranking SS official responsible for procuring slave labour for Nazi industrialists (his past was an Open Secret at the time) who only escaped punishment by lying about his rank and making himself useful with his connections and anti-communist activities. Notable in that the male band members still play the female members of the RAF, with notable closeups on a stand-in for either Ulrike Meinhof or Gudrun Ensslin, whose face is withered and wrinkled.
- A groups of inquisitors burning someone at the stake is juxtaposed with Nazis burning books, with the inquisitors and Nazis hugging and shaking hands.
- A street riot resulting in clashes between Molotov Cocktail throwing protestors and riot police opening fire with assault rifles, and in one instance driving a tank; this scene is somewhat up to interpretation, but one event potentially referenced is the East German Uprising, where Soviet tanks and East German police brutally suppressed strikers against the Soviet occupation.
- "Stir Nicht vor Mir (Don't Die Before I Do)" is pure gothic melodrama. It's haunting, mournful arpeggios, acoustic guitar and lyrics about two lovers who've never met but feel a sort of spiritual connection to one another are already creepy enough, but it's Sharleen Spiteri singing about being strangled to death every night in her dreams by this unknown person in the most gentle, romantic voice that elevate it to completely disturbing.
He comes to me every night
No words are left to say
With his hands around my neck
I close my eyes and pass away
I don't know who he is
In my dreams he does exist
His passion is a kiss
And I can not resist
- Till's first lyrics aren't any less creepy, as it's ambiguous whether they're meant to describe a man watching his wife give birth to a stillborn or are metaphorical for something else.
"The night opens your lap
The child's name is loneliness
It is cold and motionless
I cry quietly in time"
- Imagine getting a shirt saying "Heirate mich" on it to tell your significant other that you want to marry them, only to find out the song is about a man digging up his dead wife because he has slept by her gravestone for a year and now will love her even when dead. The lyrics are about her skin tearing like paper and her escaping from him again and it ends with him chopping off a cockerel's head as he crows to greet the morning.
- The video for "Angst" once again lets the band express their darker side, as the band is portrayed as being enslaved to the fear stoked by a demogogue tied up in a straight jacket, going from idyllic white picket fences where they freely interact and are relaxed to men terrified of their own shadow, clinging to assault rifles in the corner of walls they built up to "protect" themselves...only for all of to perish as the ground beneath them finally gives out. All of this interspersed with cheerleaders with nightmare faces, Till at some of his most deranged, and a color palette consisting of black, white, and red for the entire video.
- "Zick Zack" hits for a double whammy of both Nightmare Fuel and Nausea Fuel, as befits a song themed around excessive cosmetic surgery. In the video, the band members look positively grotesque, all of them (except for Flake, who is their surgeon) having plastic faces which have been given ridiculous amounts of lip filler, permanent makeup and botox injections. Halfway through the video, Till's botoxed face starts sagging massively on one side, which prompts him and Flake to go backstage in order to fix up his face... until Till takes matters into his own hands and hurriedly pieces his face back together with a stapler and surgical tape. The end result is not pretty.
- The lyrics are no slouch in the nightmare department either. Lyrically, the song is just as graphic as "Ich Tu Dir Weh," but while that song deals with extreme S&M play, this song describes... real procedures in cosmetic surgery. While there is a little bit of exaggeration thrown in, it only serves to illustrate further just how far people have went in pursuing — or preserving — beauty.
Tightening cheeks, carving cheekbones
Splashing hazardous waste into lips
Wrinkles snap at the scalpel
Foreskin gone, very topical
If the woman is not content within the man's body
Then cut everything off anyway
