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Writer's pictureDarrell Buxton

LORDS OF CHAOS

(The surprisingly great Swedish/UK co-production released earlier this year. I've watched it four times and it gets better and better. The notes from my live introduction to a 'Fright Club' screening at Derby QUAD in late April 2019 are reproduced below):



Welcome to Fright Club, our last show before this year's Paracinema festival, which I hope you'll all be attending as we've got plenty of Fright-friendly fare on show during the first May bank holiday weekend.


We've been running these horror nights for almost a decade now, but I'm not sure that we've ever screened a film for you quite like LORDS OF CHAOS. There aren't too many horror movies based on true stories, and those that are tend to be biographies or studies of serial killers, but LORDS OF CHAOS is kind of 'horror by default' - it's the tale of the creation, in the early 90s, of a whole new musical genre, true Norwegian Black Metal - and depicts how aiming for the extreme can sometimes go too far. In a month where Notre Dame cathedral nearly burned down, we've got more in the way of religious conflagration for you right here.

Now this might be hard to believe, but if you'd known me thirty years ago I had very long, naturally jet black hair! I spent many nights listening to John Peel's radio programmes, and loved a lot of the so-called 'indie' music he played. But Peel was delving into other areas too - bands like Mudhoney, Pixies, Tad and Nirvana were stirring up something called 'grunge' in the States, and many of them had hair even longer than mine. And closer to home, and spearheaded by Nottingham-based label Earache Records, was an extraordinary new musical movement often described as 'extreme metal' - I loved bands like Napalm Death, Carcass, Boltthrower and Extreme Noise Terror, still have my 1980s vinyl copies of their albums, and still to this day enjoy listening to their electrifying, guttural, over-in-a-flash noisy racket. Heavy metal had always been fairly diverse, with groups keen to innovate and change, but by the mid 80s the latest development was the rather disappointing emergence of poodle rock, big-haired American acts playing flashy but somewhat watered down material and throwing in far too many power ballads. Not for me. So when Napalm Death's 'You Suffer' clocked in at about one and a half seconds long, I was thrilled. In fact, the Guinness Book of Records times it officially as 1.316 seconds. Even an epic extreme track would probably only last about thirty or forty seconds, then on to the next.


And this was just one subgenre of metal at the time - we also had speed metal, thrash metal, death metal, doom metal, stoner metal, grindcore, industrial, even Christian metal, and loads more. This stuff had always been popular across Europe, and by the early 90s fans in Norway were dabbling in the scene, starting to form their own bands, initially copying what they'd heard on Metallica and Slayer albums - and this is where LORDS OF CHAOS takes its starting point, as we see a bunch of naive kids forming a group called Mayhem and practising in their parents' homes. Mayhem start to sound pretty decent, and pick up a bit of a local following - but the in-group conversations see everyone starting to try to outdo one another, and events begin to spiral out of control. Add in a vocalist who changes his name from Per Ingve Ohlin to the more succinct and catchy moniker 'Dead', who sniffs dead crows before going on stage, who cuts himself and sprays blood over the crowd, and who seems to have a suicidal death wish, and we have the catalyst for an explosion of linked occurrences and one-upmanship with terrible consequences. The Norwegian scene began to get more and more extreme, not so much in terms of musical progression but in the behaviour of the musicians involved - the burning down of churches was so shocking that these raging blazes began to receive global news coverage, and the spate of fires was merely the start of an unstoppable trail of destruction, eventually working its way inward. 



So it is that a movie based on real-life music trends becomes something suitable to screen in our regular horror movie slot at QUAD. Director Jonas Akerlund was drummer in the Swedish metal band Bathory from 1983-84 but moved on to a successful career as a filmmaker and music video specialist, responsible for Madonna's 'Ray of Light' promo as well as working with Paul McCartney, Roxette, Britney Spears, The Prodigy, and Lady Gaga, amongst others. Akerlund has used the 1998 book 'Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground' by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Soderlind as his source, and his movie version somehow manages to depict many very weird and darker-than-dark true-life events in a fast-moving, slick and very entertaining package. The cast is an odd and unexpected mix, with Rory 'brother of Macaulay' Culkin as Mayhem's main man Euronymous, Val Kilmer's son Jack as Dead, and internet pop discovery Sky Ferreira as the main female character, photographer Ann-Marit. Emory Cohen, so good in THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES a few years ago, is particularly impressive as Kristian Vikernes, aka 'Varg', who has been recording under the name 'Burzum' for many years. Just like the old rock'n'roll movies of the fifties, or the hippy films of the sixties, we've got teenage figures here being played by American actors who are closer to thirty, but it has to be said they're fairly convincing and the film benefits from their presence and talent and experience rather than suffering from it. LORDS OF CHAOS is an odd mix of truth and fiction, of tones ranging from Spinal Tap-style laughs to hideously extreme bloody violence, and even the soundtrack mingles Norwegian Black Metal with the more delicate sounds of groups like Sigur Ros and Dead Can Dance - but for all its contradictions, and a few disputes from various interested parties about exactly how the events have been depicted, it's a brisk and enjoyable run through the brief history of this odd heavy metal spinoff, and certainly does work as a film with appeal to horror fans. I'll sign off by flashing the traditional devil horns at you, and hope you like what you see here. Enjoy LORDS OF CHAOS. Or as the EU might call it, Norway Plus.

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