So is this kind of material tragic or comic, celebratory or off-putting? Unless you’re a connoisseur who knows the outcome, the appearance of fan-turned-band member Varg Virkenes is another occasion to howl and grimace equally, in that actor Emory Cohen’s exaggeratedly pursed, coiled vibe is almost laughably that of a sociopathic weirdo any right-minded person would avoid. Satanic worship, church burnings and murder: The true story behind ‘Lords of Chaos’ » They’re the band whose lead singer blew his head off!
Eventually Dead turns a shotgun on himself, and when Aarseth discovers the blood-drenched scene, our showman protagonist sees opportunity, not loss: take a few pictures, fashion necklaces from bone bits and send a message to everyone that Mayhem isn’t kidding around. With one corpse-painted eye on nurturing what he called a “black metal inner circle” and the other on a projected genuineness - “I was brought into this world to create suffering, chaos and death,” he narrates for us - Aarseth was the proverbial music impresario, just one who preferred cagily selling a doom-laden nightmare to hawking a tired fantasy of upbeat rock ’n’ roll bliss.īut his hardcore mindset put him in the path of distinctly troubled believers in the cause, starting with a Swedish frontman who called himself “Dead” (Jack Kilmer) and liked to inhale the fumes of putrefying roadkill before shows, then slice his arms onstage to the eyes-widened delight of spattered fans. That’s the glib message of Jonas Åkerlund’s “Lords of Chaos,” a loose, thin and bloody romp through the early days of the grisly rock subculture known as Norwegian black metal, which emerged in the late ’80s as a doubling down on black metal’s shock tactics - Satanism, misanthropy, necromania - but which also fed a nascent criminality in its less psychologically stable adherents.įoremost in that camp were members of the influential glower-and-growl band Mayhem, started by Øystein Aarseth aka Euronymous (Rory Culkin), a stringy-haired suburban basement jammer turned black metal ideologue, record store owner, label founder and savvy brand custodian. It’s all fun and games until someone loses a soul.
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