This story misidentified Pixies lead guitarist Joey Santiago as playing drums.
- Sarah Royce
- The Pixies.
- Sarah Royce
- Charles Manson.
Do you ever listen to The Pixies and imagine the Manson family’s murder of Sharon Tate? Well, I do. Here’s the first installment of our new feature “Score your own movie.” Daily Arts takes a scene and sets it to appropriate music, or we take a song and come up with some matching cinematic glory of our own.
Working title: “Helter Skelter”
Starring: Romain Duris as Charles Manson, Next Hollywood Starlet as Sharon Tate.
Key scene:
Wide-shot of landscape. Camera’s locked on one position. No other sound in the following scenes except for the Pixies’ “Where is my mind?”
“Oooh.”
“STOP.”
“Oooh-oooh.”
A lazy acoustic strum dribbles into the weighted boom-boom-kish of Joey Santiago on lead guitar and the now famous whine of a guitar line.
Manson family in car zips by the camera. Switch to second camera, which moves up from the area by the front wheel and skims up, over and alongside the car, allowing the vehicle to pass. Camera follows car from behind as Mansons journey to destination. Several cuts back and forth between Manson family members.
“With your feet in the air and your head on the ground / Try this trick and spin it, yeah / your head will collapse / But there’s nothing in it / And you’ll ask yourself / Where is my mind? (x3)”
Manson family arrives at Tate and husband Roman Polanski’s Benedict Canyon home at end of first verse. Camera follows them as they get out of vehicle, make their way around the property and finally get into the house. We see 18-year-old kid Stephen Parent in the driveway shot and killed first at the lines “Way out in the water / See it swimming.” It’s late night, dark out.
Second verse kicks in. Building, driving guitars as Manson family breaks in, wander around house. Split screens to follow individual killers, then the images reconvene as they find Sharon Tate and her friends Jay Sebring, Frykowski and Folger.
“I was swimming in the Caribbean / Animals were hiding behind a rock
“Except the little fish / But they told me, he swears / Tryin’ to talk to me koi koi”
Frantic stabbing commences.
“Way out in the water / See it swimming.”
Intensity builds. Switch between close-ups of Charles Manson and extreme-crops of the others. Tate’s screams heard above bridge into third verse.
“With your feet in the air and your head on the ground / Try this trick and spin it, yeah / your head will collapse / But there’s nothing in it / And you’ll ask yourself / Where is my mind? (x3)”
The attacks now seem methodical; the continuity coupled with the song’s repetition is soothing. Everything is finished by the end of the third verse. Time fast-forwards through stillness as track winds down. At the end of the song, track finishes off with “Ooo-oooh.” Sun rises. “Oooh-ooh.”