All Nightmare Long is a song and music video by American heavy metal band Metallica, released as their fifth single from their ninth album Death Magnetic on December 15, 2008. The song is in Drop D tuning.
The music video, directed by Roboshobo (Robert Schober), debuted on December 7, 2008. The video, which does not feature the band, is an alternate history narrative done in grainy mockumentary style, depicting a sequence of fictional events following the historic 1908 Tunguska event, at which Soviet scientists discover spores of an extraterrestrial organism, a small harmless thing resembling an armoured worm. The video bears similarities to the 1940 Russian documentary Experiments in the Revival of Organisms, where animal experimentation to produce life extension is depicted.
However, it turns out the incredibly hardy spores are able to reanimate dead tissue, and subjects turn violent sometime after exposure to the spores; the USSR adapts them as a bioweapon and scatters them from balloons in a pre-emptive strike against the US, causing a localised zombie apocalypse before intervening militarily to distribute humanitarian aid.
At the end of the video, a hybrid US-USSR flag is raised in the now-Soviet-ruled America, and a headless corpse is shown breaching containment and escaping from a Soviet biowarfare lab…
