Metallica’s New Music Video is a Trailer for an Upcoming Black Metal Biopic

The latest concept video from Metallica’s metaled-up new album Hardwired…to Self-Destruct is basically a trailer for director Jonas Åkerlund’s upcoming biopic about Norway’s early-1990s black metal scene. The video presents actors miming a Hollywood version of a Mayhem show circa 1991, set to a mid-tempo, modern-day Metallica song. Parts of the scene are viewed through the perspective of camcorder-wielding Sam Coleman from Game of Thrones in the role of Jon “Metalion” Kristiansen. The video feels like a parody, which is jarring in relation to the very real tragedy at the end of the original Mayhem history.

As black metal exploitation, the movie footage ranks with the “Mayhem on a Cross” episode of Bones from around ten years ago; this century’s tribute to the glorious Quincy and ChiPs punk panic episodes of the 1970s:

Of course, Fenriz of Darkthrone calls the black metal biopic “the worst idea since unsliced bread,” the exact inverse of his praise for METALION: The Slayer Mag Diaries: “the best idea since sliced bread.”

The book is always better than the movie.