1967 Rock Hit Featured in a Manson-Inspired Movie Ranked Greatest Needle Drop Ever

A shocking crime that unfolded 57 years ago tonight forever changed how Hollywood remembered the summer of 1969.

Just after midnight on Aug. 9, members of the Manson Family arrived at a secluded home in Los Angeles’ Benedict Canyon and murdered actress Sharon Tate and four others.

Tate, who was eight months pregnant, was also just 26 years old.

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The two-night killing spree shattered Hollywood’s era of carefree counterculture, becoming one of the most infamous chapters in La La Land’s history and forever intertwining the era’s bohemian optimism with evil darkness.

Five decades later, that horrifying chapter inspired Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, with a few twists and turns, of course. Rather than recount the murders as they happened, Tarantino used the real-life events as a backdrop for an alternate-history cinematic fairy tale starringLeonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, and Margot Robbie.

By contrasting the fictional struggles of a fading TV star named Rick Dalton and his stunt double, Cliff Booth, with the very real tragedies of the innocent people who were killed that summer, Tarantino was able to give that horrific chapter a cathartic alternate ending.

Naturally, music was involved.

Like all of Tarantino’s films, needle drops played a massive role in his storytelling.

“I’m almost as proud of my discography as I am of my filmography,” Tarantino told Variety about his soundtrack, which itself is a love letter to his favorite sounds of theSixties.

Filling the film with late-’60s rock from Deep Purple, The Bob Seger System, Paul Revere & The Raiders, and more, Tarantino fueled his climax with Vanilla Fudge’s psychedelic hit, “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.”

Related: 1967 Blistering Heartbreak Anthem That Became a Massive Hit Ultimately Destroyed the Band

It was a masterful move.

Vanilla Fudge’s cover of The Supremes’ Motown classic, ‘You Keep Me Hangin’ On,’ was slowed down and transformed into something heavier, darker, and almost hypnotic. That made it the perfect track for the over-the-top violence in Tarantino’s revisionist vision of 1969.

GQ seemingly agreed, because the outlet ranked the shock-and-rock pairing as the greatest needle drop of all time.

Beware: Spoilers for the film’s killer climax are ahead.

“Augmenting the cartoonish—and righteously ultraviolent—action [is] “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” by Vanilla Fudge, which builds to its emphatic guitar-laden crescendo as Booth and his trusty pitbull Brandy punch, chomp, and head-smash their way through the would-be murderous cultists,” GQ wrote. “And it wouldn’t go half as hard without Mark Stein’s soaring vocals, that shrieking keyboard, and Carmine Appice’s unrelenting drums.”

The thunderous 1967cover became a Top 10 hit in the U.S., reaching No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100. It also helped establish Vanilla Fudge as early heavy-rock innovators whose sound would influence bands including Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. That dramatic quality made the track perfect for Tarantino’s film.

According to Rolling Stone, Tarantino and his music supervisor, Mary Ramos, chose the Vanilla Fudge hit for its unique, slow-building musical arc, which mirrors the pivotal scene it soundtracks.

“The song has an amazing arc and shape to it,” Ramos told Rolling Stone. “They used to slow down the songs and creep them out, and this arrangement is really unusual and special. It delves into metal and psychedelia. It’s pretty over the top.”

That over-the-top quality is what makes the needle drop work. The song begins with the familiar sounds of a Motown classic, then turns menacing as Tarantino’s Hollywood fairy tale descends into a bloody revenge fantasy.

Now, nearly six decades after Vanilla Fudge reinvented a Supremes classic, Tarantino found a way to transform the song again, turning it into the sound of a redemption tale for one of Hollywood’s darkest nights.

Related: 1968 Movie, Behind One of TV’s Most Beloved Theme Songs, Was a No. 1 Hit 58 Years Ago