So here’s a funny thing: last week, while the votes came pouring in for Trump and a bleak shroud of depression began to descend, I was in Budapest, Hungary, watching the whole mess unfold. One of my reasons for being out there at the time was to sneak onto the set of the Jonas Åkerlund-directed film Lords of Chaos. For those unfamiliar, Lords of Chaos the film is based on the book of the same name, which chronicles the birth and rise of the Norwegian black metal scene in the late 80s and early 90s. If you haven’t watched our doc on the genre, set aside 31 minutes and do so now.
Central to this scene is the band Mayhem. Their story involves church burnings, suicide, murder, corpse paint, and obviously some sick, sick, metal. Åkerlund—who spent a year in the 80s drumming for Swedish metal band Bathory—has been working on bringing this story to the silver screen for years. He cut his teeth making iconic, award-winning music videos for the likes of Madonna, The Prodigy, Britney, and Satyricon, to name a few, but has also helmed feature lengths like the meth-whirlwind Spun.
Videos by VICE
Now, in conjunction with VICE Films, Insurgent Media, and Fox, the director’s cast Rory Culkin as “Euronymous,” Emory Cohen as “Varg,” Jack Kilmer as “Dead” (yup, Val Kilmer’s son), Valter Skarsgård as “Faust,” and Sky Ferreira as “Ann-Marit.” Let is be known: the costume department spent $21,000 on wigs alone, not to mention sourcing a dark array of original 80s metal t-shirts. The attention to detail in that area really was second to none.
On Friday Metallica release their first album in eight years, Hardwired… To Self-Destruct. Today and tomorrow, the band will release a video for every single track on the album. Åkerlund has previously directed a couple of videos for the SF-based band and so naturally they hit him up—but he had his hands full shooting Lords of Chaos. Luckily they managed to come up with a solution that would work for both: while shooting the fictional incarnation of Mayhem playing a live show, why not just make the actors learn the Metallica song “ManUNkind.”
So what we have here is actors pretending to be Mayhem—and doing a pretty good job of it, note the onstage self-harm, yup that all happened—covering a Metallica song. The irony is Mayhem really didn’t like Metallica IRL/ You can bet Dead and Euronymous are likely turning in their cold, cold graves. Watch the whole bloody video below. And yes that’s a real pig head. I came face to face with it in the back of a car in Budapest.
