Broken (1993): Nine Inch Nails Snuff-Frame Film and Happiness in Slavery

Fans still call the 1993 short Broken—or The Broken Movie. Peter Christopherson shot and directed it from an idea by Trent Reznor, founder of 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 close on an otherwise unreleased cut of the EP closer “Gave Up.” The violence is extreme enough that the piece never got a real commercial release. It leaked through 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.”

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 a car crawling middle-class suburbs, then across the tracks into industrial wreckage, until it finds a young man on a sidewalk. Almost at once he is in a basement, seatbelt-tied to a chair, cleave-gagged, forced to watch a television. “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 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.” Back in the basement tape, the leather-masked killer 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 flies crawl into his mouth. The clip cuts several times to the same man in bondage gear. In the most famous leak that stretch is blacked out. The consensus—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 a leak could be traced. After that clip the victim is still table-tied while the killer rips his teeth out.

Bob Flanagan and “Happiness in Slavery”

Banned by music-video channels worldwide, “Happiness in Slavery” is 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 soil under the device. Aside from the on-screen death, every assault on Flanagan’s body is unsimulated: pincers on nipples and penis, a paddle crushing his genitals, flesh pierced by the mechanism—real masochist craft, not latex theater. “Gave Up” closes the frame with Nine Inch Nails audio over the movie’s own story, not the Closure band video. 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 and 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.

Who made it, and why it stayed underground

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. Eric Goode and Serge Becker did “Pinion” and “Help Me I Am in Hell”; Jon Reiss did “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.

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. 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, then as MPEG and AVI on peer-to-peer networks and fan sites. The standalone videos for “Pinion,” “Wish,” “Help Me I Am in Hell,” and “Happiness in Slavery”—without the basement interstitial torture—got official homes on Closure and on the band site. On Fixed, the 1992 remix CD, remixers ran a heavily processed sample of Flanagan’s screaming as rhythm on “Screaming Slave” and on a remix of “Happiness in Slavery.” 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 fan; much of the music-video footage was swapped for higher-resolution material from the Closure VHS. Like every prior online copy, this one still blanks “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—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).” 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 those singles. 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.