A teenager's quest to launch Norwegian black metal in Oslo in the 1980s results in a very violent outcome. Lords Of Chaos tells the true story of True Norwegian Black Metal and its most notorious practitioners - a group of young men with a flair for publicity, church-burning and murder: Mayhem.

Drawing from personal experience - director Jonas Åkerlund was for a drummer for the Swedish extreme metal band Bathory for a short time in the early 80s - his adaptation of Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind's book Lords Of Chaos details of the group's rise and fall via Mayhem's co-founder/guitarist Øystein Aarseth, aka Euronymous (Rory Culkin) and his relationship with two volatile collaborators: Per Yngve Ohlin aka Pelle aka Dead (Jack Kilmer), the band's ultra-melancholic first singer who killed cats and then himself; and Varg Vikernes, aka the Count (Emory Cohen), a fellow outcast and Aarseth's eventual murderer.

Behemoth frontman Nergal recently weighed in on the film while speaking with Australia's Everblack podcast.

Nergal: "It's not a bad movie. The whole story is way too trivialized, but then again, hey, it's there to be sold in movies to the kids. The guy (Åkerlund) said it from the very beginning: 'This is not a documentary.' And it's not. He colored it up a little bit... not a little bit; quite much... and some of the characters are… I mean, he really paid attention to the details. And some of the scenery and photos and actions, they were replicated, like, identically, really. I was, like, 'Oh, shit! That looks like the photos that I've seen, or the show that I've seen, or this and that.' But overall, it's pretty shallow. It's really well done. Jonas Åkerlund is amazing. I mean, his talents are amazing. But still, keep in mind, it's a shallow Hollywood story now."

In a recent interview with EW.com, Åkerlund reveals that he felt no need to reach out to Varg Vikernes when making his horror-movie biopic on Norway's notorious Mayhem, Lords Of Chaos.

Vikernes, who was a member of Mayhem from 1992 through 1993, was found guilty of killing Mayhem guitarist Øystein “Euronymous” Aarseth. Åkerlund says he had no contact with Vikernes, who was released from prison in 2009 after serving 15 years of a 21-year sentence for the killing.

“No, never,” says Åkerlund. “I mean, I’ll leave it at that, but - I could say, I never felt I needed to because he has been the most outspoken about what happened and what his reasoning was. So, I felt he was the one character in the movie that I had the most material on. Euronymous was trickier because [he] is dead and he wasn’t as outspoken as Varg was. The Varg material that I had was more than enough for me to understand his character, so I never needed him, so I didn’t reach out to him.”

Read the complete article at EW.com.

An official video trailer for Lords Of Chaos can be found below. The film, released by Gunpowder and Sky, is co-produced by VICE Studios, 20th Century Fox, Scott Free Productions and Insurgent Media.

Visit the official Lords Of Chaos website here.