In 1998, Dani began his longrunning "Dani's Inferno" column for ''Metal Hammer'', and the band appeared in the BBC documentary series ''Living With the Enemy'' (on tour with a fan and his disapproving mother and sister) and released its third full-length album ''Cruelty and the Beast''. A fully-realised concept album based on the legend of the "Blood Countess" Elizabeth Bathory, the album boasted the casting coup of Ingrid Pitt providing guest narration as the Countess: a role she first played in Hammer's 1971 film ''Countess Dracula''. The album led to Cradle's U.S debut, and Dani claimed it in 2003 as the Cradle album of which he was most proud, although he conceded dissatisfaction with its sound quality.
The following year the band continued primarily to tour, but did release its first music video, ''PanDaemonAeon'', and an accompanying EP, ''From the Cradle to Enslave'', featuring the music from the production. Replete with graphic nudity and gore, the video was directed by Alex Chandon, who would go on to produce further Cradle promo clips and DVD documentaries, as well as the full-length feature film ''Cradle of Fear''.
The band released their fourth full-length studio album on Hallowe'en, 2000. ''Midian'' was based around the Clive Barker novel ''Cabal'' and its subsequent film adaptation ''Nightbreed''.Like ''Cruelty and the Beast'', ''Midian'' featured a guest narrator, this time Doug Bradley, who starred in ''Nightbreed'' but remains best known for playing Pinhead in the ''Hellraiser'' films. Bradley's line "Oh, no tears please" from the song "Her Ghost in the Fog" is a quote of Pinhead's from the first ''Hellraiser'' ("No tears, please. It's a waste of good suffering...") and Bradley would reappear on later albums ''Nymphetamine'' and ''Thornography''. The video for "Her Ghost in the Fog" received heavy rotation on MTV2 and other metal channels, and the track also found its way onto the soundtrack of the werewolf movie ''Ginger Snaps''. ''Midian'' created a rift in fan opinion which has only increased with time: whilst taking the band to new heights of commercial popularity, it also provoked cries of "sell-out" from die-hard fans of the early albums.
The longest-ever interim period between full-length Cradle albums was nevertheless a busy time for the band. ''Bitter Suites to Succubi'' was released on the band’s own "Abracadaver" label, and was a mixture of four new songs, re-recordings of three songs from ''The Principle of Evil Made Flesh'', two instrumental tracks, and a cover of The Sisters of Mercy's "No Time To Cry." Stylistically similar to ''Midian'', the album is unique among Cradle albums in featuring exactly the same band members as its predecessor, but is generally regarded as an EP and often overlooked in the band's canon. Further stop-gap releases followed in the form of the "best of" package ''Lovecraft and Witch Hearts'' and a live album; ''Live Bait for the Dead''. Finally, the band (principally Dani) also found time to appear in ''Cradle of Fear'' while they negotiated their first major-label signing with Sony Music.
''Damnation and a Day'' arrived in 2003; Sony's heavyweight funding underwriting Cradle's undiminished ambition by finally bringing a real orchestra into the studio (the 80-strong Budapest Film Orchestra and Choir replacing the increasingly sophisticated synthesisers of previous albums) and thus marking the band's belated gestation - for one album only - into full-blown symphonic metal. ''Damnation'' featured the band’s most complex compositions to date, outran its predecessors by a good twenty minutes, and produced two more popular videos: the Švankmajer-influenced ''Mannequin'', and ''Babalon AD (So Glad For The Madness)'', based on Pasolini's infamous ''Salò''. Roughly half the album trod the conceptual territory of John Milton's ''Paradise Lost'' - showing the events of the Fall of Man through the eyes of Lucifer - while the remainder comprised stand-alone tracks such as the Nile tribute "Doberman Pharaoh" and the aforementioned "Babalon AD"; a reference to Aleister Crowley. "Babalon AD" was the first DVD-only single to reach the U.K. top 40, according to the ''Guinness Book of Records of British Hit Singles and Albums''. Feeling that Sony's enthusiasm quickly palled however, Cradle jumped ship to Roadrunner Records after barely a year.
2004's ''Nymphetamine'' was the band's first full album since ''The Principle of Evil Made Flesh'' to not be based around any sort of overarching concept (although references to the works of H. P. Lovecraft are made more than once). Cradle's bassist Dave Pybus described it as an "eclectic mix between the group's ''Damnation'' and ''Cruelty'' albums with a renewed vigour for melody, songmanship sic and plain fucking weirdness spat into the smelting bowl." Cradle's growing acceptance by the mainstream was confirmed when the album's title track was nominated for a Grammy award, but the band's cover version of Cliff Richard's "Devil Woman" for the ''Nymphetamine'' special edition did little to convince its detractors of the band's integrity.
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