Synopsis

The video frames the song as a dark fairy tale. In a rural French village, a young boy encounters a storybook world populated by wolves, villagers, and the band. The imagery shifts between live-action scenes, concert footage, and a pop-up-book fantasy as the boy becomes caught up in a nocturnal alarm. Castle walls, villagers, and animated paper-like figures turn the old warning into a theatrical nightmare, with the boundary between the book's illustrations and the real village deliberately blurred.

Factoids & Trivia

• The video was filmed at the Chateau de Couches in Couches, Burgundy, France, in November 1986.

• The production used the castle and surrounding village as its main setting, giving the clip a deliberately old-world, fairy-tale atmosphere.

• The central boy, known as Sebastian, was a local student from Couches. His English teacher announced the casting, and he was selected after several pupils auditioned.

• Sebastian had no previous acting experience. He later recalled that the shoot lasted roughly two or three days and included scenes filmed inside a village house and behind the castle walls.

• Many local residents took part in the production. The band's presence was kept quiet, and the shoot was conducted with little publicity or fan attention.

• The visual concept is built around a pop-up book, combining live action, concert footage, castle imagery, and brief animated or paper-like effects.

• The clip contains extremely short inserts, some reportedly lasting only 1/25 of a second. Among them are children expressing their wish to appear in an a-ha video.

• "Cry Wolf" was released as the second single from a-ha's 1986 album "Scoundrel Days."

• In the United States, the single reached No. 50 on the Billboard Hot 100. It became a-ha's final song to appear on that chart.