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.

4 COMMENTS

  1. Hey, at least you’ve got a cool shirt there, Metalion: The Slayer Mag Diaries, by Jon Kristiansen! Jokes aside, the attention to details in this video is damn impressive.

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