Passion Pictures Delivers Hand-Drawn 2D Blood And Guts In KoRn’s ‘Diablo IV’ Music Video

Korn’s first new music in four years arrives with a heavy dose of hand-crafted animation, thanks to a collaboration with Blizzard Entertainment on “Reward the Scars,” a music video tied to the latest Diablo IV content release, Lord of Hatred.

The piece doubles as a launch film for the game’s long-awaited showdown with Mephisto, one of the franchise’s long-running big baddies and the guy I have farmed more than any character in gaming over the past two decades, and it leans hard into a brutal, 2D aesthetic that stands out in a commercial space that tends to favor digital polish.

Directed by Philippe Guyenne at Passion Pictures and developed with 72andSunny, the video places the band inside the mind of Mephisto himself. The animated sequences are action-packed and predictably gory.

Guyenne describes his work on the video as an extension of his own franchise fandom:

After endless nights of grinding and looting, this project felt like a legendary drop: Diablo X Korn. We saw this as a chance to tell a visceral story from deep within Mephisto’s mind, using the music as a catalyst for the carnage. It was a unique opportunity to capture the raw intensity of the band with a gritty animation style, aggressive linework, bold colors, and expressionist lighting. Every frame was handcrafted with skill by an incredible team, using the texture and weight of 2D to give the gore a tactile, visceral energy you can almost feel. We wanted to honor the dark, illustrative roots of the game while fueling the fire for both fandoms, creating something as uncompromising as the legacies behind them. No respawn, no compromises, no AI.

Lines scratch and jitter as underworld-inspired colors burn against foreboding shadows. That hand-drawn approach gives the violence weight. Demonic attacks land with a punch that overly-clean digital animation often fails to capture. Blizzard may be known for its best-in-industry game cinematics, and that’s a well-earned reputation, but there is something uniquely gratifying about the texture in the gore, in the movement, and in the way figures distort under pressure when it’s drawn by hand.