While most metal fans and musicians enjoy its adolescent focus on demons, death and gore as a transgressive cartoon, this film shows what once happened amongst a cultish collection of young men who felt an onus to take it absolutely seriously, then follows the schism between those who do and those who don’t. The latter is obsessed with death, breathing fumes from rotting animal corpses in paper bags before going onstage, and his eventual suicide is the fulcrum which sends things completely off the rails.

He’s aided on this journey by making the supremely damaged Dead (Per Ohlin – played by Jack Kilmer) Mayhem’s lead singer. We follow Euronymous as he goes from happy-go-lucky headbanger to ostentatious reveller in “evil”. The events portrayed are contentious (as, incidentally, is the fact Åkerlund chose to do the whole thing in English, an odd decision).

However, his origins lie in the Norwegian metal scene (he was in the band Bathory) and, set mostly in the early Nineties, Lords of Chaos follows the story of Euronymous (Øystein Aarseth), his band Mayhem, his friendship and eventual rivalry with Varg Vikernes of the band Burzum (played by Emory Cohen – Homer from The OA), and the catalogue of disaster that ensues.ĭrawn loosely from the book of the same name, the film tells us at its start that it’s “based on truth… lies… and what actually happened”. Strangely, however, the film is, upon occasion, very funny.ĭirector Jonas Åkerlund is primarily renowned as the man behind ground-breaking pop videos (notably for Madonna, Lady Gaga and The Prodigy). Freakish, depressing and horrific, certainly.

Varg vikernes lord of chaos