Synopsis

Marilyn Manson plays an isolated man whose fate is decided by a blindfolded child in a ritualized act of chance. After the child points toward his trailer, the condemned man spends his final day moving through a hostile, surreal community. He shares a brief moment of tenderness with a woman before being led into the desert by a bizarre procession. There, the villagers surround him and carry out his sentence by stoning, turning an ordinary man into a public sacrifice.

Factoids & Trivia

• The video draws heavily from Shirley Jackson's 1948 short story "The Lottery," replacing its small-town ritual with a harsher desert setting and a more theatrical procession.

• Its imagery also contains visual and symbolic echoes of Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1989 film "Santa Sangre." The unusual funeral-like procession and masked figures are among the clearest parallels.

• The clip deliberately presents Manson in a more vulnerable and sympathetic role than the grotesque figure seen in earlier "Antichrist Superstar" videos. W.I.Z. described this as a conscious attempt to work against the horror-driven visual style associated with the band at the time.

• The video was made during the "Antichrist Superstar" touring period, when the band's increasingly controversial public image had attracted death threats. W.I.Z. recalled that some concerts were canceled after police warned that members of the band could be targeted.

• "Man That You Fear" is the closing track on "Antichrist Superstar" and was issued as a promotional single in 1997. The video consequently functions as a visual ending to the album's larger rise-and-fall narrative.

• The song's full album version ends with repeated computerized speech generated using Apple's MacInTalk text-to-speech feature.

• An acoustic version, titled "Man That You Fear (Acoustic Requiem for Antichrist Superstar)," appeared on the 1997 EP "Remix & Repent."

• The video was later included in the band's 1999 compilation "God Is in the TV," which collected the group's music videos along with concert and backstage material.