“All Nightmare Long” was released as Metallica’s fifth single from Death Magnetic. The single was released on December 15, 2008.

It was nominated for the Kerrang! Award for Best Single.

The music video, directed by Roboshobo, which does not feature the band, is an alternate history narrative done in a grainy mockumentary style, depicting a sequence of fictional events following the historic 1908 Tunguska event, at which Soviet scientists discover spores of an extraterrestrial organism, a small harmless thing resembling an armored worm. However, it turns out the incredibly hardy spores are able to reanimate dead tissue, and subjects turn violent sometime after exposure to the spores; the USSR adapts them as a bioweapon and scatters them from balloons in a preemptive strike against the U.S., causing a localized zombie apocalypse before intervening militarily to distribute humanitarian aid. At the end of the video, a hybrid U.S.-USSR flag is raised in the now-Soviet-ruled America, and a headless corpse is shown breaching containment and escaping from a Soviet biowarfare lab.