Reflects on hit music video ‘Acid Rain’

Julian Flores

Julian Flores’ co-directed music video, Acid Rain, for American electronic artist LORN, has just soared past an impressive 90 million views on YouTube, captivating audiences worldwide with its haunting visuals and dark, hypnotic choreography.

Released in 2017, the video is a dark and surreal narrative that blends death, loss, and eerie beauty themes. It follows a group of cheerleaders who appear in a desolate parking lot at night, performing a slow and melancholic choreography. The cheerleaders are bloodied, bruised, and lifeless in appearance, moving in eerie synchronization.

The video begins with a distressed woman driving a car. She pulls into a parking lot, and as the camera moves, it reveals the cheerleaders standing in formation, their vacant expressions contrasted by their ghostly appearances. They begin to perform a series of slow-motion dance moves, their bodies twisting and turning in a haunting, almost hypnotic manner.

As the video progresses, the cheerleaders’ dance becomes more fluid yet unsettling. Each movement appears as if they are caught in a loop, endlessly repeating their ritualistic motions. Their bloodstained and bruised faces suggest that something tragic has occurred, yet their expressions remain emotionless and detached.

There is a sense that these cheerleaders are trapped in a purgatorial state, caught between life and death, performing their routine as a form of spiritual limbo. The video concludes with them continuing their eerie dance, their fate unresolved as they drift deeper into the night, leaving a haunting and lasting impression of stillness and despair.

The Acid Rain video was a self-financed endeavour that was shot in one night at Cadillac Jacks in Sun Valley, California. The idea for the video was to show the 'Last Dance' of a cheerleader as she passes into the next life. I wanted the dancing to represent her struggle or fight to live. And also to show that death is a journey that one takes alone, as she isn’t the only casualty in the car. One by one, the rest of the cheerleaders join her in the next life, but each one of them goes through the experience individually. Just as I do with the rest of my work, I bookend the ending, because I see my stories as circles.

“The video wasn’t commissioned, it was an independent project that wasn’t an official music video, until I reached out to Lorn and sent him the music video. He liked the music video so much that he made it his official music video and the rest is history.”

— Julian Flores

Julian is currently working on developing two of the three scripts they have written.

The first script, 'Cadillac Blues,' is a dark comedy set in modern-day Los Angeles over the course of a single day. It follows a down-on-his-luck, middle-aged stoner who becomes embroiled in a cartel war when he unwittingly steals a 1970 Cadillac Deville from a quirky pair of hitmen. Inside the trunk of the stolen car is the body of a dead cartel boss. This all happens as the protagonist tries to recover his loudmouth girlfriend's car, which he gambled away to a bookie. 'Cadillac Blues' is envisioned as an ensemble film with a killer soundtrack featuring Blues music and Creedence Clearwater Revival. The style of the film is imagined to resemble an American independent film from the 90s, drawing comparisons to 'Pulp Fiction' and 'The Big Lebowski.'

The second script, 'Naked Kill,' is a Shakespearean crime drama set in modern-day Paris. It tells the story of a middle-aged socialite with a dark past who seeks vengeance for the murder of her family. She infiltrates the family of the crime lord responsible for their deaths by marrying his son. French actress Frédérique Bel (known for 'La Minute Blonde' and 'Serial (Bad) Weddings') is attached to play the lead role, and the film will be in French.

The third script, 'Elysian City,' is both a screenplay and a graphic novel. This dystopian noir is set in a fictional city and follows a cynical detective in his fifties as he hunts a cop-killing serial killer known as the Pig Killer. As a bloody war rages between clans, the detective becomes public enemy number one when he discovers that the true criminals are not the clans or the killer, but those in power. The creator plans to develop 'Elysian City' as a graphic novel first and is currently looking for an illustrator to help realize this vision. There are versions of the story in both English and French. Given the ambitious nature of this project, they are holding off on developing it for film until it is realized as a graphic novel.

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