Watch The Spike Jonze-Directed Video For 'The Suburbs' By The Arcade Fire

It's been a good year for both fans of Spike Jonze and the band Arcade Fire. The director has released a wonderful short film, I'm Here, and a great video for the LCD Soundsystem song 'Drunk Girls.' Even better, he was reportedly working on a secret sci-fi short film with the Arcade Fire.

Now there's a video for the band's song 'The Suburbs,' directed by Mr.  Jonze, which seems to excerpt from that short. More info and the video are after the break.

I won't say too much about the video other than it starts off looking at teen kids roaming around recognizable American suburbs. Looks just like the tract developments in which I spent my youth, and which are familiar from movies like Poltergeist. Then the initially playful tone turns dark and weird — there's something unusual going on here.

Earlier this year we'd heard that Spike Jonze was in Austin working on a sci-fi B-movie short film with the band. (The music of which, you'll remember, was featured in Where the Wild Things Are trailer.) This would appear to be culled from that shoot, but whether the actual short film is still to come is something we don't know right now. There are definitely elements here that would appear to point towards the project we'd heard about before.

Here's what Spike Jonze said about the short film earlier this year:

It's not a video. It's a short film; we're still working on it. It's like a science-fiction B-movie companion piece for the record. Basically, we played Spike some music from the album and the first images that came to his mind had the same feeling as this idea for a science fiction film I had when I was younger. My brother and I and Spike wrote it together, which was really fun– it was like total amateur hour. We shot it in Austin and a lot of kids are in the film, and it was great just hanging out with these 15-year-olds for a week and writing down all the funny things they said. It was cool to revert to being a 15-year-old for a little while.