14 Days of Metallica: Day 11

In what I consider a throwback (at least cinematographically... is that even a word? [EDIT: It IS!]) to the band's first video, One, Day 11 hosts All Nightmare Long.

Sticking with the latest album, this is my personal favorite.  It's got a raw, gutsy metal groove to it, with a faster moving, melodic chorus.  Reminiscent of the old Metallica lyrics, as this whole album is.  The chorus is just so damn catchy.  Another shredfest of a solo, this one full of wah but all of 2:30, it ends with lightning fast, high adrenaline metal triplets.

Favorite lyrics are "Hunt you down all nightmare long // But your luck runs out!"

To try and explain what the song and video are about is proving to be quite difficult in my own words, so from the wealth of knowledge known as Wikipedia, James Hetfield;

It was an attempt to get back to the H. P. Lovecraft mythos with Thing that Should Not Be, Call of Ktulu.[sic] This was about the Hounds of Tindalos, which was another crazy mindfuck about these wolves that hunt through their nightmares and the only way you can get away from them is stay within angles (120 or less). You can't even escape through sleep. 

From the same source, regarding the video;

The music video, directed by Roboshobo (Robert Schober),^[3] debuted on December 7, 2008, on Metallica's official website and Yahoo! Video.^[4][5] 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 armored worm.

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 preemptive strike against the U.S., causing a localized zombie apocalypse before intervening militarily to distribute humanitarian aid. At the end of the video, a hybrid U.S.-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. 

Pretty intense.