1967 Rock Anthem Transformed One of the Greatest War Movies Ever Made
War movies are minefields for killer needle drops. There everywhere you look. Take The Animals' "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" in Hamburger Hill, Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" in Full Metal Jacket, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' "Tracks of My Tears" in Platoon, Manfred Mann's "Do Wah Diddy" in Stripes - we could go on … or we could just go straight to the top.
In Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, The Doors' theatrical epic, "The End," pulls double duty. A haunting audio bookend for his Oscar-winning cinematic fever dream from 1979, the track first sets a doomed hypnotic tone for the opening sequence, then underscores the horror and visceral climax of the film, overall framing the Vietnam War as a nightmarish descent into madness.
"Vietnam movies seem to get all the cool songs, but it's only because Francis Ford Coppola showed them how," Rolling Stone writes about the film it ranked at No. 21 in its roundup of "The 30 Greatest Rock & Roll Movie Moments." "As ‘The End' crawls through Martin Sheen's war-ravaged brain, Apocalypse Now taps into the late Jim Morrison's heart of darkness."
Released in 1967, "The End" was the closing track on The Doors' self-titled landmark album, which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200. Though penned by frontman Jim Morrison, all four members of the band, including Robby Krieger on guitar, Ray Manzarek on keyboards, and John Densmore on drums, are credited with its existence.
According to Far Out, Morrison initially wrote the song about his breakup with ex-girlfriend Mary Werbelow, but over several live performances, the track evolved into something much more mystical, with fans projecting their own interpretations onto the lyrics.
In a 1969 interview with Rolling Stone, Morrison attempted to set the record straight, while also leaving plenty of room for mystery.
"Let's see … Oedipus is a Greek myth. Sophocles wrote about it. I don't know who before that. It's about a man who inadvertently killed his father and married his mother. Yeh, I'd say there was a similarity, definitely," Morrison shared. "But to tell you the truth, every time I hear that song, it means something else to me. I really don't know what I was trying to say. It just started out as a simple goodbye song. … But I could see how it could be goodbye to a kind of childhood. I really don't know. I think it's sufficiently complex and universal in its imagery that it could be almost anything you want it to be."
Ambiguity might be exactly what makes the song so appealing to filmmakers. Martin Scorsese famously used the song in his 1967 film debut, Who's That Knocking at My Door, where it soundtracked a scene of intimacy rather than the hallucinatory napalm-chopper imagery it would later evoke in Apocalypse Now.
Despite the song's now-iconic place in film, Coppola insisted the decision was less calculated than it might seem, even chalking the whole thing up to fate.
"It's a funny story actually!" Coppola once told The Talks. "It would have begun totally differently if this hadn't happened: I was hanging out with the editor of the film, surrounded by all these bins of film, basically scenes that weren't going to be used, as well as the soundtracks. So in one of these bins was The Doors singing a song called 'The End.' I thought it was sort of amusing, the idea of starting a movie at the beginning with a song saying, 'This is the end.' And just for the hell of it I took that and grabbed the footage of the napalm drop, and I just thought it looked terrific. I could have picked another and it wouldn't have looked interesting, it was totally accidental. Fate gave me that beginning!"
Related: 1968 Era-Defining Anthem Called a ‘Fluke' Became the Most Played Rock Song in Movies
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This story was originally published June 17, 2026 at 4:31 PM.