Vice‘s check to Satan must have finally cleared, because the rapidly growing media company is teaming up with RSA London and Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions to produce a movie based on Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind’s book Lords Of Chaos: The Bloody Rise Of The Satanic Metal Underground. The book, first published in 1998, offers an overview of the development of the black metal subgenre. But the movie—which, appropriately enough, has been in development hell for years—looks like it will dramatize one of the movement’s more luridly fascinating chapters: the tabloid-driven rise and shockingly violent fall of the band Mayhem.
According to Variety, the movie version of Lords Of Chaos will star Rory Culkin and X-Men: First Class’ Caleb Landry Jones and will focus on Øystein Aarseth, a.k.a. Euronymous, “who is determined to escape his traditional upbringing in 1980s Oslo.” After meeting up with a similarly brutally nihilistic band of misfits—presumably at Helvete, the record store Euronymous ran in the early ’90s that now serves as the headquarters for metal label Neseblod Records—Euronymous founds iconic black metal band Mayhem, a band that, among other disturbing exploits, used a gruesome photo of its singer’s dead body as an album cover after he committed suicide in 1991. (On a lighter note, Mayhem is also sometimes credited with inventing corpse paint.)
Spun’s Jonas Åkerlund will direct the film as well as co-write the script with Dennis Magnusson. Åkerlund has made a career for himself in recent years directing music videos for artists like Lady Gaga, Madonna, and Beyonce, which is not very metal. But he also played drums for proto-black metal group Bathory from 1983 to 1984, which is really fucking metal. Åkerlund will helm the pic presumably after he’s finished directing a different sort of ode to teenage nihilism, Spring Breakers 2.