Iron Maiden - The Wicker Man

What this video is

Released in May 2000, 'The Wicker Man' marked the most commercially significant Iron Maiden comeback in over a decade, reuniting the classic Dickinson/Smith lineup and signalling a full-throated rejection of the band's mid-1990s commercial doldrums. The video's horror-theatrical aesthetic — referencing the 1973 British folk-horror film The Wicker Man — situates the band at a crossroads of classic British metal…

Why it matters

A canonical artefact of NWOBHM's millennial renaissance, the video encodes heavy metal's visual grammar — pyrotechnics, mascot mythology, horror-theatrical narrative, and power-performance iconography — into a tightly edited, early-digital package. Its blend of practical horror FX and rapid-fire…

The director

Dean Karr is a Seattle-born director and photographer who received a BFA from Washington State University and later attended the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. He rose to prominence in the mid-1990s directing Marilyn Manson's 'Sweet Dreams,'…