Judas Priest — A Touch of Evil

JUL 01 1991 · 12:00

Judas Priest — A Touch of Evil (1991) Director: Wayne Isham Era: Heavy Metal Golden Age / Post-PMRC Era (1990-1991) - Peak of Judas Priest's Painkiller cycle; second single from their most critically lauded late-career album, released at the apex of MTV's heavy metal programming dominance and amid ongoing censorship debates in the music industry. High curatorial value as a document of a culturally charged moment in heavy metal history, combining Wayne Isham's directorial authorship with Judas Priest's explicit anti-censorship messaging during the PMRC era. The extreme low-brightness, near-static cinematography, and surrealist narrative make it a formally unusual artifact within both the director's portfolio and the genre's visual archive. Essential for any collection documenting the intersection of music-industry censorship battles and music video as political expression. Context: Released in 1990-1991 during the aftermath of Judas Priest's landmark subliminal-messages civil trial (1990), this video's opening imagery of a man shoveling coal into a furnace beside a 'censorship' sign is a pointed cultural statement. The Painkiller era represented the band's artistic and commercial resurgence at a moment when heavy metal's cultural legitimacy was under sustained legal and legislative attack via the PMRC. The video's gothic-industrial aesthetic — infernal lighting, carnival freak-show inserts, and projection onto flowing sheets — visually encodes themes of demonic temptation and moral panic that had been weaponized against the band and the genre broadly. The near-total desaturation and extreme amber color temperature situate the piece within the hellish visual language common to the era's most iconographically ambitious metal videos. Director notes: Isham directed this video for the second single from Judas Priest's 1990 album Painkiller on Columbia Records. The production deploys his signature arena-rock performance aesthetic but fused with gothic narrative inserts: a man shoveling coal into a furnace beside a 'censorship' sign (a direct commentary on the PMRC era and Judas Priest's own high-profile subliminal-messages trial in 1990), performance footage broadcast onto billowing fabric sheets, and intercutting visions of a young boy experiencing freak-show imagery — literalizing the song's lyrical themes of demonic temptation. The extremely low brightness (49.72/255) and near-static camera work (motion score 2.90) reflect a deliberate departure from Isham's more kinetic rock-performance style, matching the song's unusually slow, pseudo-ballad structure within the Painkiller album context.