"All Nightmare Long"
Disc 1 cover
Single byMetallica
from the albumDeath Magnetic
B-side	"Wherever I May Roam" (Live)
Released	December 15, 2008
Recorded	2007–2008
Genre	Thrash metal[1]
Length	7:58
Label	Warner Bros.
Composers	Kirk Hammett James Hetfield Robert Trujillo Lars Ulrich
Lyricist	James Hetfield
Producer	Rick Rubin
Metallica singles chronology
"The Judas Kiss" (2008) "All Nightmare Long" (2008) "Broken, Beat & Scarred" (2009)
Music video
"All Nightmare Long" onYouTube
Alternative covers
Disc 2 cover
Alternative cover
Disc 3 cover

"All Nightmare Long" is a song by Americanheavy metal bandMetallica, released as the third single from their albumDeath Magnetic. The single was released on December 15, 2008.^[2] The song is indrop D tuning. It was nominated for theKerrang! Award for Best Single.

The music video, directed by Roboshobo (Robert Schober),^[3] debuted on December 7, 2008, on Metallica's official website andYahoo! Video.^[4][5] The video, which does not feature the band, is analternate history narrative done in grainymockumentary style, depicting a sequence of fictional events following the historic 1908Tunguska 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; a cartoon then shows theUSSR adapting them as a bioweapon and scattering them from balloons in a preemptive strike against the U.S., causing a localizedzombie apocalypse before intervening militarily to distribute humanitarian aid. At the end of the cartoon, a hybrid U.S.–USSR flag is raised in the now-Soviet-ruled America, and in 1972, a headless corpse is shown breaching containment and escaping from a Soviet biowarfare lab.

Initially, in a video on the website Metclub.com,Kirk Hammett explained the origins of the video. He claimed to have bought the film from a fan for $5 in Russia and soon forgot about it. After digging it up and watching the animated film, he said that he was fascinated by it, researched about its background, and asked a friend's Russian girlfriend to translate parts of it. Following this, Hammett had supposedly been trying to incorporate the film into one of the band's music videos. However, as it was later revealed, Hammett's story was a fake to produce hype about the video: the film was not made in Russia and Hammett did not actually buy it there. Rather, as the video's director Roboshobo stated in an interview, the live action segments (including the ending) were specially shot to look like excerpts of old Russian documentary footage. The video bears similarities to the underground documentaryExperiments in the Revival of Organisms, where animal experimentation to producelife extension is depicted. The subtitles and everything else included in the video are part of its concept. The word "Тунгусский" ("Tunguska") appears several times with different typos ("тунгузский", "тунзский", "тчнгзский").

In an interview,James Hetfield commented on the song's lyrical meaning:^[6]

"I like to keep it as vague as possible, so it can plug into your life. It almost didn't make it. The chorus is a leftover from St. Anger. It was an attempt to get back to theH. P. Lovecraft mythos withThing That Should Not Be,Call of Ktulu.[sic] This was about theHounds 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. You can't even escape through sleep."

The single is available in a three-disc collectors set.^[2] The first disc was released as adigipack to store the remaining two discs with the album version of "All Nightmare Long", along with the songs "Wherever I May Roam" and "Master of Puppets", recorded live in Berlin at theDeath Magnetic release bash at theO₂ Arena in September 2008.^[2] The second disc also has the studio version of "All Nightmare Long", along with the songs "Blackened" and "Seek & Destroy", also recorded at the Berlin O₂ Arena.^[2] The third disc is a DVD, which, along with the album version of the song as audio, includes a ten-minute-long mini-documentary about the bands' day in Berlin, along with twenty minutes' worth of live tracks from that night's album release party, as well a fifteen-minute-long movie from the tuning room at theRock im Park.^[2]

• "All Nightmare Long" appeared in the documentaryMcConkey.
• WWE used the song as the official theme for the 2008 pay-per-view eventNo Mercy,^[7] and in the video package to promote the Winner Takes All match for the WWE and Universal Championship atWrestlemania 38.
• American Dad! uses the song in the season 12 episode "The Life Aquatic with Steve Smith".

Metallica

• James Hetfield – vocals, rhythm guitar
• Lars Ulrich – drums
• Kirk Hammett – lead guitar
• Robert Trujillo – bass

Production

• Rick Rubin – producing
• Ted Jensen – mastering
• Greg Fidelman – mixing

• 2008 singles
• Metallica songs
• Song recordings produced by Rick Rubin
• Songs written by James Hetfield
• Songs written by Kirk Hammett
• Songs written by Lars Ulrich
• Songs written by Robert Trujillo
• Zombies in popular culture
• 2008 songs
• Warner Records singles
• Songs about nightmares
• Cthulhu Mythos music
• Tunguska event

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