Obsessed with True Crime discussion

Mark Monastyrski (who says he recently visited the grave of H.H. Holmes) just filled me in on the release of a film adaptation of Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground, which he describes as "equal parts This is Spın̈al Tap and Helter Skelter."

It can't outstrip the new Godzilla movie as a must-see, but hey...

The movie arrived in the mail -- strangely, they sent me 2 copies -- and I saw the first little part of this movie last night. It's actually kind of adorable. Of course, we're less than half an hour in and nobody's brain has been eaten yet.

It was mostly adorable right through to the end, but there were some pretty tragic, violent and gorier-than-anything moments in there. I assumed that the story would focus on the two-legged weirdness that was Per "Dead" Ohlin, but in fact it skipped past him almost completely and concentrated on the crumbling relationship between Euronymous (Mayhem's bandleader and pretty much the inventor of Norwegian black metal), and Christian Vikernes (onetime Mayhem bassist) who killed him. I wasn't able to finish up the movie for a few days after I started, but shoehorned in some YouTube research before continuing, and discovered that the movie is composed of facts from history -- for instance the way they inserted, almost word-for-word, an interview Euronymous did a couple of months before he was murdered -- and wild inaccuracy, like the fact that it was presented as being for an article in Kerrang! magazine when in fact he gave the interview on Norwegian radio. They really changed Euronymous's personality too. He was painted in the movie as a cute little teen idol who was just playing Satanist for the crowd when in fact he appears to have been -- you should pardon the expression -- dead serious about being a Satanist, an anti-Christian terrorist, a guy who never considered appealing to a large audience of fans and who was pretty surprised to have gotten famous considering what he did all day long. There were some big differences between the real Dead and the guy who played him in the movie, too.

Which makes me wonder how accurate the portrayal of Vikernes is, too. I'm sort of too disgusted with him to do the research to find out. He was allowed by the Norwegian authorities to go on recording music in his prison cell and making bank on the popularity he won from the Satanist crowd for his crimes. When he was released he was more famous than ever, with a pretty big bank account. He was out in 15 years; one and a half years for every time he stabbed the man who made him famous. It is to puke.


RIP Dead and Euronymous