Cinematic Mayhem

According to Rolling Stone, the long delayed Mayhem bio-pic will finally begin filming this September in Norway. The film had been attempted to be made since 2004, but producers could never get the funding needed to film it until now.

The movie will be based on the 1998 book “The Lords Of Chaos”, which was written by Michael Moynihan an Didrik Soderlind. The book chronicled the rise of the Norwegian Black Metal movement, which unlike most of the Satanism used in American and British heavy metal, took the Satanic aspect seriously, mixed in with some ancient Odinism. For instance, Slayer are actually Atheists who used pentagrams because they looked cool as imagery. But their some of their Norwegian counterparts and their fans took Satanism seriously enough to go on church-burning sprees.

For those that do not know the story of Mayhem, they were a Black Metal band formed in 1984 who, kind of like rappers, gave themselves nicknames and wore “corpsepaint” on stage. Originally with Euronymous on vocals and guitar, Necrobutcher on bass and Manheim on drums. Euronymous eventually decided the band should have another vocalist and went through Maniac and Messiah before settling on Dead in 1988, and replaced drummer Manheim with Hellhammer.

Mayhem’s concerts started gaining the attention of Europe’s metal community. The band would perform with impaled animal heads on stage, singer Dead would routinely perform self-mutilation with knives while performing, and they started building one of the larger fanbases in their music community. Dead would also keep his stage closed buried outside and dig them up right before performing so they’d have the appearance of what a corpse would be wearing. He also carried around a dead bird in a jar, which he opened and inhaled to smell decay to help get him in the mood to perform. Drummer Hellhammer also claimed he once asked him to bury him underground for the total corpse effect.

On April 8th, 1991, after suffering from severe depression since he was a teenager, and reportedly depressed about situations within the band, Dead slit his wrists and then shot himself in the head with a shotgun at the home the band shared. Hours later Euronymous came home and discovered the suicide scene. But instead of immediately calling police, Euronymous went to a local drug store to buy a disposable camera, with which he used to take pictures of the crime scene. He also claimed that before finally calling the police, he collected bits of skull fragment to make into necklaces and scooped up brain matter to mix into a stew he was cooking. One of Euronymous’s photos of Dead was reportedly stolen and circulated around their fanbase until it made its way on the cover of a live bootleg.

After that the Norwegian Black Metal scene got even bigger. A few murders by people associated with the scene mixed in with churches being burned down made it one of the most talked about metal scenes in the world in the early 90s. Even Britain’s Kerrang magazine came in to do a cover story on them, despite most of the bands not even having released proper albums yet (Mayhem’s debut didn’t see the light of day until 1994.)

Varg Vikernes of the band Burzum became the mouthpiece of the scene. He cemented his place at the forefront of Black Metal by announcing to a newspaper reporter the Black Metal community was at war with Christianity, and flirted with Nazi ideas and imagery (including decorating his home with Nazi memorabilia.) He also appeared on the cover of Kerrang magazine holding knives and gloated about the violence and destruction the community was bringing to Norway. His boasts got the attention of police, who arrested he and several other Black Metal band members for suspicion of arson. Vikernes didn’t help his case any by using a picture of a burned down church on the cover of a Burzum album, although he denied taking it himself.

Vikernes was also briefly the bassist of Mayhem, redubbing himself Count Grishnackh. But even though he was only with the band for less than a year, he left a huge impact. He was the bassist when in early 1993 they finally recorded the long-awaited debut album “De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas”, which is Latin for “The Mysteries Of Satan”, although the band attempted to have it Latin for “Lord Satan‘s Secret Rites” but got a bad translation. But on August 10th, 1993, Euronymous was dead by Count Grishnackh’s hand.

Vikernes’s side of the story is that there was a dispute over money Euronymous owed to him, so he traveled to his apartment to discuss matters with him. He claims that they got into an argument and that Euronymous attacked him, so he murdered him in self-defense. But police believed it was a premeditated murder, since accomplice Snorre Ruch confessed to police that the two drove hours to Oslo, Norway with a knife to murder Euronymous. Also he told police that they had rented a movie and left it running on their VCR so that neighbors would believe they were still in Vikernes’s apartment as an alibi. The other members of Mayhem believed that Euronymous liked to give death threats to people he was angry with, although he wasn’t serious, but that Vikernes did take him serious and murdered him because he believed Euronymous was out to kill him. Vikernes was eventually found guilty of the murder and sentences to the maximum sentence of Norwegian law, which is 21 years.

In May 1994, “De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas” was finally released and hailed as an instant classic by the metal community. Euronymous’s family asked the remaining Mayhem members singer Attilla Csihar and drummer Hellhammer to remove the bass parts of Vikernes before it was released. Hellhammer claims they told the family they would, but in actuality left them in and just turned them down in the mix, but left in his credit in the album. Music writers were interested that it was the first album where a murderer plays on the album with the person he murdered. This wouldn’t be done again until Zapp drummer Larry Troutman murdered his brother, Zapp singer Roger Troutman, on April 25th, 1999.

Hellhammer re-hired ex-bassist Necro Butcher at Euronymous’s funeral and announced plans that the band would continue with new guitarist Blasphemer and went on tour to support the record. They didn’t release new material until the EP “Wolf’s Lair Abyss” in 1997 and the full length “Grand Declaration Of War” in 2000. They gained headlines again in 2003 when they were charged with assault after a concert in Bergen, Norway when a band member threw a severed sheep’s head into the crowd and it landed on a fan’s head, fracturing his skull.

Now if this doesn’t sound like it would make one hell of an entertaining movie, then I don’t know what does!