It refers to the name a group of eight teens in Florida who bestowed that name upon themselves in 1996, five years after Dead’s suicide.
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(Other than the setting, the film never really feels European - a death knell when you’re attempting to depict a regional scene its creators are intimately familiar with.)Īnd then there’s scene where Dead looks in the mirror and declares, “We are Lords of Chaos” - a downright bizarre titular line considering the title of the book, which is far more wide-ranging than simply the story of Mayhem. Nobody refers to this music as “True Norwegian Black Metal.” And it’s even worse coming through Culkin’s wimpy American accent. While it’s true the band members were in their early 20s at the time of the story and young men are prone to saying goofy things, it’s hard to imagine anyone proclaiming anything as corny as, “I created a whole new genre of music: True Norwegian Black Metal,” out loud.
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Although interviews with Mayhem still exist in zines from the time, not to mention the nonfiction chronicle that details the band’s rise and fall, the film has chosen its own voice for the characters - and it is decidedly Midwestern.Īside from a few blatant chronological oversights (where are pre-Dead singers Messiah and Maniac?), one of the biggest problems is the dialogue. But they colored the pictures in with their own guesses as to what actually happened. They nailed the sound of the film, with a great soundtrack of black-metal legends (augmented, oddly, by a Sigur Rós score), as well as its look by meticulously replicating photos that headbangers have pored over for decades.
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The film is sort of black metal’s answer to Bohemian Rhapsody, in the sense that Åkerlund and cowriter Dennis Magnusson took the tent poles of the story and filled in the gaps however they saw fit. (The real-life Vikernes has said that his girlfriend at the time never met Euronymous and that he was never aware of his bandmate dating anyone in an interview in the Lords of Chaos book, he alleged that Euronymous was gay, though his opinions are suspect since he, y’know, murdered the man.) And for some extra Hollywood glitz, Åkerlund has given Euronymous a girlfriend, played by Sky Ferreira. The film has also included the incident where Faust, a fellow arsonist and the drummer for black metallers Emperor, killed a gay man. ( Spin wrote a good overview of the whole scene in 1996.) If not, spoilers abound ahead: Along the way, Dead kills himself Euronymous saves (and savors) pieces of the singer’s cranium Vikernes and members of other bands torch churches and the bassist ends up ruthlessly stabbing Euronymous to death. Chances are good that if you’re reading this, you already know the rest of the story. Along the way, he enlists the depressed, bird-corpse-sniffing Dead (Jack Kilmer) as the group’s singer and locks horns with the bloodthirsty Burzum frontman/future Mayhem bassist Varg Vikernes (Emory Cohen). The film focuses on guitarist Euronymous (Rory Culkin), as he assembles Mayhem and attempts to instill the values of devil worship in his bandmates.
#LORD OF CHAOS COVER MOVIE#
Somehow, though, he made a movie that, to paraphrase an album from the director’s former musical endeavor, has seriously missed the Black Mark. And he was a founding member of Bathory, a pioneering Swedish black-metal band that inspired Mayhem (though he left the group after a year). He’s directed gnarly music videos for metal groups Candlemass, Metallica and Rammstein, as well as Prodigy’s forever-problematic “Smack My Bitch Up” clip. 'Silence of the Lambs': The Complete Buffalo Bill StoryĪnd Åkerlund, you would assume, has all the bona fides to tell the story right. Their story inspired a couple of authors to co-write the true-crime book Lords of Chaos in the late Nineties, which loosely served as source material for the movie. Murder, suicide, cannibalism, general acts of morbidity (such as someone huffing a bag with a dead crow in it) and, of course, arson overshadowed the band’s music from 1987 to 1994. It tells the story of the band Mayhem, the country’s most prominent and notorious purveyors of black metal - a subgenre that’s a distant cousin of devil-worshipping death metal and speed-racing thrash - and it focuses on the band’s most troubled period.
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That’s because he was at the center of the nation’s most terrifying wave of homegrown terrorism, which filmmaker Jonas Åkerlund ( Spun) has dramatized in his new movie, Lords of Chaos. To many Norwegians, Vikernes is the country’s Charles Manson, the ultimate boogieman. Frommer’s even names one of the arsonists, Varg Vikernes, adding that he was a Satanist who went to jail for murder. Nearly every travel guide of Norway bears at least a passing reference to the wave of church burnings that swept the country in the early Nineties.