Broken—fans still call it The Broken Movie—is a 1993 horror-musical short and long-form music video shot and directed by Peter Christopherson from an idea by Trent Reznor, founder of industrial band Nine Inch Nails. It is the visual twin of the 1992 Broken EP: roughly twenty minutes that stitch the record’s promo clips (everything except "Last" and the two hidden tracks) into a fake-snuff frame story, then slam the door with an otherwise unreleased cut of the EP closer "Gave Up." The violence is so extreme the piece never got a real commercial release. It leaked, crawled across 1990s VHS trading circles, and later the internet. Reznor once said Broken makes the already-banned "Happiness in Slavery" video "look like a Disney movie." He has stayed cryptic about the project, but he has never pretended it does not exist. For industrial and kink-cinema viewers this is not a pop promo: it is a leather-mask basement torture loop built around Bob Flanagan’s real-pain performance and Christopherson’s obsession with how people consume snuff myth. The unofficial nickname The Broken Movie stuck because there was never a clean official title card on a store shelf—only a 20-minute object that behaved like a compilation reel until the snuff wraparound made it a single film.
The snuff frame and the video sequence
The film opens on a hanging. The trapdoor drops and the condemned man falls with a calm smile. Cut to amateur camcorder footage from inside a car crawling a city—middle-class suburbs, then literally the other side of the tracks into industrial wreckage. The car finds a young man on a sidewalk. Almost immediately he is in a basement, seatbelt-tied to a chair, cleave-gagged, forced to watch a television. That is when "Pinion" starts: a bathroom, a flushing toilet, a maze of pipes feeding a geared contraption with a pressure gauge. Pull back and a tight plastic body-bag suit hangs in a padded cell on six rods, the pipe end jammed into the mouth-hole as water floods in. The usual read is drowning. Another is that the bound figure is being force-fed the "waste of the world" coming through the plumbing.
Back in the basement tape, the killer—some kind of leather mask—yanks the victim’s head back and makes him drink from a jerrycan. Midway through "Wish," the amateur footage cuts in again: the captive chained to a table, a dark wad smeared over his face. The killer is pulling his pants on, so the smear is usually read as feces. When the clip ends, the killer rewinds again and again to the instant Reznor screams "fist fuck!" and starts rubbing his own fist.
"Help Me I Am in Hell" shows a middle-aged man in a room thick with flies. He eats steak and drinks wine as if they are not there, even as they crawl into his mouth. The clip cuts several times to the same man in bondage gear. In the most famous leak that video is blacked out. The consensus now—never fully proven—is that it belongs in the complete film, and that Reznor himself blanked it on the bootleg that spread. He later admitted he handed different friends different VHS copies, each with a different stretch blacked out, so that if a leak surfaced he could identify which copy it came from.
After that clip the victim is still table-tied while the killer rips his teeth out. Then comes "Happiness in Slavery," banned by music-video channels worldwide and still the sequence kink and industrial audiences remember. Performance artist Bob Flanagan strips, sits on a machine that tortures him, rapes him, and kills him, then grinds the body to fertilize a patch of soil under the device. Aside from the on-screen death, every assault on Flanagan’s body in that video is unsimulated: pincers on nipples and penis, a paddle crushing his genitals, flesh pierced by the mechanism. It is the film’s most widely known passage because it is also real masochist craft, not latex theater.
"Gave Up" closes the frame, and it is not the Closure band video. It is Nine Inch Nails audio laid over the movie’s own story. The victim hangs from the ceiling while the killer works him with a blade, then a blowtorch, then slices off his penis with a straight razor. Intercut: police ransacking the basement, finding remains of earlier victims. Cut back to the table. The murderer takes the limbs with a chainsaw, rapes the torso, splits the chest, and eats the heart. Then the hanging returns: the killer drops through the trap with that same smile, falls down an impossibly long shaft until the rope finally bites. After the film ends there are thirty seconds of black silence—then the killer’s severed head flies across the screen. Read as kink cinema rather than as a NIN collector hunt, the sequence is a forced-viewing dungeon: cleave gag, seatbelt tie-down, leather-masked captor, scat implication, dental extraction, suspension, blade, blowtorch, castration, chainsaw dismemberment, rape, and cannibalism, all scored to industrial tracks the captive is made to watch. The hangman’s smile bookends it so the killer and the condemned occupy the same drop.
Who made it, and why it was buried
Almost nobody in the cast is identified. Exceptions: Flanagan in "Happiness in Slavery," and the band itself in "Wish." Christopherson—Throbbing Gristle, co-founder of Industrial Records—directed the film and the "Wish" clip. The other videos came from other hands: Eric Goode and Serge Becker on "Pinion" and "Help Me I Am in Hell," Jon Reiss on "Happiness in Slavery."
Reznor wanted an art object built off the EP. Christopherson wanted a comment on snuff films and the public’s hunger for them. At the same time Reznor was recording in the house where the Tate murders happened; watching the finished piece made him uneasy, so the project was shelved—though not before he circulated a few VHS copies. Christopherson later regretted how famous the thing became. He had built it to look obviously fake. Generation loss on dubbed tapes erased his "pretty obvious clues," including the dummy head in the tooth-ripping scene. What was meant as a satire of snuff mythology started to read, on tenth-generation cassettes, like the thing it was mocking. That is the industrial-kink paradox of Broken: a fake snuff movie about people who cannot stop watching fake snuff, degraded by copying until the fake looks documentary. Christopherson’s Throbbing Gristle / Industrial Records résumé is not trivia here—he came from the same noise-and-body culture that treated extreme imagery as critique, then watched the critique get consumed as forbidden product.
Leaks, blackouts, and how you actually see it
There was never an official store-shelf release. Reznor did not want the gore myth to eat the music. That refusal only fed the legend in alternative culture. The original hand-dubbed tapes went to friends with deliberate glitches planted as watermarks. In 2007, in the "Access" section of the Nine Inch Nails site, Reznor implied that Gibby Haynes was the source of the most widespread leak. That copy lived on VHS for years—hence the muddy high-generation dupes—then as MPEG and AVI files on peer-to-peer networks and fan sites. Those encodes are rarely first-generation.
The standalone videos for "Pinion," "Wish," "Help Me I Am in Hell," and "Happiness in Slavery"—without the basement interstitial torture—did get official homes on Closure and on the band site. On Fixed, the 1992 remix CD for the EP, remixers ran a heavily processed sample of Flanagan’s screaming from the slavery video as rhythm on "Screaming Slave" and on a remix of "Happiness in Slavery" itself (the sample is nearly unreadable on the latter). The 2005 Collected DVD, sent out to promote With Teeth, flashes a few seconds of the movie in unexpectedly clean quality.
In August 2005 a remaster titled "Broken 2.0" hit BitTorrent as a DVD image. The spine came from a low-generation tape mailed anonymously to a longtime online fan; much of the music-video footage was swapped for higher-resolution material pulled from the Closure VHS. Like every prior online copy, this one still has a blank screen during "Help Me I Am in Hell." What it does have: menus, a chapter index, and the option to hear the CD audio tracks without the added sound effects. On December 30, 2006, the same anonymous uploader "seed0" who had dumped the leaked Closure DVD put an unofficial Broken DVD image on The Pirate Bay. Picture and sound were a clear step up from 2.0, and this version finally included the missing "Help Me I Am in Hell" picture. Fans guessed it came from a master tape and that Reznor himself had walked it out the door—especially after a December 21, 2006 post on his official blog: "Happy Holidays! This one is a guilt-free download. (shhhh – I didn’t say that out loud). If you know what I’m talking about, cool."
On May 6, 2013 the full video streamed on Vimeo via Nine Inch Nails’ Tumblr. Vimeo yanked it almost immediately; the Tumblr post was updated with a wink at The Pirate Bay. In July 2014 the complete film reappeared on Vimeo and was deleted again. As of January 2020, the uncensored movie is watchable through a hidden link on the official Nine Inch Nails discography page, pointing at a copy on the Internet Archive. For BDSM and industrial viewers the point is not "is it real snuff"—it is not—but how a Christopherson/Reznor frame about fake snuff, a leather-masked captor, forced viewing, and Flanagan’s unfaked masochism became the most hunted kink-adjacent music film of the 1990s, precisely because official culture would not put it on a shelf. If you want the music videos without the basement wraparound, Closure and the official site still carry "Pinion," "Wish," "Help Me I Am in Hell," and "Happiness in Slavery." If you want the snuff frame, the Flanagan machine, the leather-mask captor, and the hanging that bookends the killer’s grin, you are still in bootleg territory that the band will point at only through a hidden discography link. That is the film’s whole afterlife: never sold, endlessly copied, watermarked, blamed on Haynes, remastered by fans, dumped by seed0, yanked off Vimeo twice, and still the most important piece of 1990s industrial kink cinema Nine Inch Nails ever made.
