In Popular Culture
"Raining Blood" was covered by Tori Amos on her 2001 album Strange Little Girls. King has admitted that he thought the cover was odd: "It took me a minute and a half to find a spot in the song where I knew where she was. It's so weird. If she had never told us, we would have never known. You could have played it for us and we'd have been like, 'What's that?' Like a minute and a half through I heard a line and was like, 'I know where she's at!'" The band however liked the cover enough to send Slayer t-shirts to Tori Amos. The song was also covered by Malevolent Creation, Chimaira, Vader, Dokaka, Reggie and the Full Effect and Erik Hinds, who covered the entire album on a H'arpeggione.
In 2005, the Slayer tribute band Dead Skin Mask released an album with eight Slayer tracks, including "Angel of Death". The death metal band Monstrosity covered the song in 1999, while the track was featured on the classical band Apocalyptica's 2006 album Amplified / A Decade of Reinventing the Cello. A Slayer tribute album titled Al Sur Del Abismo (Tributo Argentino A Slayer), compiled by Hurling Metal Records, featured sixteen tracks covered by Argentina metal bands, including Asinesia's version of "Angel of Death". "Raining Blood" was also covered by the New Zealand drum and bass band Concord Dawn on their 2003 album Uprising, and by Nashville, Tennessee band Asschapel on their 7" "Satanation".
"Raining Blood" was featured in the 127th South Park episode, Die Hippie, Die, aired on 16 March 2005. The plot centers on the town of South Park, which has been overrun by hippies. Eric Cartman states "Hippies can't stand death metal" and proceeds to drill through a hippie concert onto the main stage to change the audio to "Raining Blood", making the hippies run away. King found the episode humorous and expressed his interest in the show ending the interview with "It was good to see the song being put to good use, if we can horrify some hippies we've done our job." "Angel of Death" also appears in several movies, including Gremlins 2, at the point when the character Mohawk turns into a spider, Jackass: The Movie, where it is played during a car stunt scene, and in the 2005 Iraq War documentary Soundtrack to War.
"Angel of Death" was featured in the multi–platform video game Tony Hawk's Project 8. Nolan Nelson, who selected the soundtrack for the game, asserts; "one of the greatest heavy metal songs ever recorded. Don't know who Slayer is? I feel sorry for you." "Raining Blood" was included in the Grand Theft Auto: Vice City in–game radio station V-Rock. "Raining Blood" is also one of the songs featured in Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock, and is considered one of the most difficult songs in the game, if not the hardest of the career song list. Raining Blood is also featured in the video game Skate. It is also featured in skater Grant Taylor's part in Nike SB's, The SB Chronicles: Volume 1
Read more about this topic: Reign In Blood
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