LORDS OF CHAOS, the long awaited movie adaptation of the infamous 2003 book of the same name is having its Australian Premiere on Sunday, November 25.
It will be the closing film of this year’s MONSTER FEST at Cinema Nova in Melbourne’s Carlton – an annual film festival that specialises in bringing cult, horror and cinema that bites to Australian screens.
Written by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlin, Lords Of Chaos that blew the lid off the underground Scandinavian Black Metal scene of the early 90’s.
Metal fans will all be familiar with the iconic and legendary Norwegian black metal band Mayhem, whose unbelievable antics led them to be called “the band with the wildest story ever told”.
You know the main players: Dead, who rubbed himself in animal corpses to give himself the smell of death and eventually blew his head off with a shotgun – the photo of which became a notorious Mayhem album cover.
Øystein Aarseth, AKA Euronymous, a proud Satanist who supposedly carried a piece of Dead’s blown-up skull around his neck as a keepsake.
And of course Varg Vikernes, the church-burning sociopath who founded the early black metal band Burzum and who violently murdered Euronymous and ended up in prison for 15 years where he continued recording albums.
These crazy antics in a far flung corner of the world, put Norway on the global metal map in the early 90’s and forever associated the underground sub-genre of black metal with these notorious musicians who have since become larger than life and taken on an almost mythical presence in the metal world.
The above mentioned stories are also just the tip of the iceberg, with the ‘Inner Circle’ or Norwegian (and some Swedish) bands going on to commit more murders, assaults and of course those still talked about church burnings.
Now this unbelievable story hits Melbourne as the insane film it was always meant to become!
If the pre-release buzz is anything to go by Lords Of Chaos looks set to reflect all the insanity of the real-life story. Combining a realistic look at the oft-neglected world of metal, a beautiful 80s setting, the blackest of black humour and (of course) brutally visceral scenes of violence, Lords Of Chaos may be the rare film that is truly metal.
Director Jonas Akerlund – who fans may recognise as former drummer for one of the most influential black metal bands of all time, Bathory, – is also uniquely placed to reflect the realities of being in a black metal band and bring it to the big screen.
Akerlund says of of the film ‘Based on truth and lies, Lords of Chaos is a coming of age story of a band of brothers with the right intentions heading in the wrong direction. There’s rock n roll, youth, love and death woven through an incredibly dark story. It is more than the extraordinary story of an aspiring black metal band, it is a complex and rich visual story of a group of passionate souls. It should take the viewer along a raw emotional and psychological journey that will reflect the core of humanity and all its contradictions. I see this film as the perfect opportunity to fuse these rich emotionally flawed characters with visceral and cinematic storytelling.’
Lords Of Chaos stars
Rory Culkin as Euronymous
Emory Cohen as Varg Vikernes
Sky Ferreira as Ann-Marit
Jack Kilmer as Dead
Head over to the Monster Fest website for more info.
www.monsterfest.com.au/2018
