Until the Light Takes Us

I flunked out of high school, I admit it. Not because I was stupid, but rather because I was bored. I grew up in the NorCal Valley of the 1980s, flipping through the vinyl metal collection at the Southland Mall in Hayward and taking pains to transform my hair into a perfect, immovable helmet of peroxide and Aqua Net that could withstand F-5 force winds. I didn’t give a fuck about conjugating Spanish verbs or dissecting squids. I hated school and all of the cookie cutter little suburban zombies that choked its halls, drowning me in a sea of Guess jeans and conformity. I took solace in the angry metal music of the day, spending the majority of class time making alphabetical lists of heavy metal bands. Every time a new band came along, I had to crumple up the list and start all over again. From Accept to Zebra (both of whom kinda sucked, but whatever), I maintained that list in my most perfect handwriting for years, even after applying for, and being granted, an early parole from the public education penal system in the form of a GED. I take full responsibility for having been a pothead loser with too much make-up and no self esteem, but the lack of compassion inherent in the school system is also partly to blame, as is the School Board’s failure to procure instructors who looked like Gylve Nagell.

Now, UTLTU the main documentary is not aimed specifically at the lifelong, hardcore black metal fan. It’s not even necessarily about black metal music per se, but rather about the culture that inspired it, swiftly condemned it, and then turned it into a profitable commodity once the initial fervor had died down. It’s more sociology than rock n’ roll. Black metal was never really intended to appeal to anyone, nor attract a large fan base, therefore how can a movie about the black metal movement actually be targeted at a specific audience? I’ve heard more than one “black metal fan” bitch about how mainstream this film is, that it doesn’t tell them anything they didn’t already know and how the techno soundtrack is “shitty.” Those people are what I like to call “stupid.” This movie wasn’t made for YOU. If this film had been intended only for black metal fans, no one would ever have seen it. Black metal frightens people; it’s shocking, gruesome, offensive and causes irreversible damage to your tympanic membranes. UTLTU explains, in straightforward terms for everyone to understand, just what the hell happened in the Norway of the early 90s. If the public at large had thought for an instant that UTLTU was going to be nothing more than a two hour assault on their eardrums, it never would have garnered the audience it has now. But it did, because it was – at its core – an expose on a culture, an investigation of arson, murder and suicide and a look at the people involved, all of whom just happened to have one thing in common: the music they listened to and made to please no one other than themselves.

So, here's the condensed version for those of you unfamiliar with the tale: black metal was/is an extreme subgenre of heavy metal which was never intended to please its listeners and never sought an audience. Black metal is anti-music. The production is purposely shitty. The lyrics are pure hatred. The sound is ugly. The aesthetics are pure evil. Birthed by bands such as Venom and Bathory, it was appropriated and owned by Scandinavia, and Norway in particular. Guitarist Øystein 'Euronymous' Aarseth founded the band Mayhem with Swedish singer Per "Dead" Ohlin, started his own record label - Deathlike Silence" - and opened a shop called Helvete (literally translated: Hell) in Oslo where people of like minds could gather.

In April of 1991, Per Ohlin lived up to his stage name and committed suicide with a single shotgun blast to the head. His body was discovered by Aarseth, who staged the corpse and photographed it before reporting the death to authorities. The photo was later used as the album cover for Mayhem's "Dawn of the Black Hearts."

In 1992, Varg Vikernes, lead singer of Burzum and friend of Aarseth, started burning down churches for reasons known only to himself. Pissed off that Aarseth was all talk and no pyro, and had apparently been planning on kidnapping, torturing and killing Varg (all the while recording it like his own personal snuff film), Vikernes murdered Aarseth in August of 1993, stabbing him in the head with a knife. Arrested and convicted of the murder, Varg was sentenced to 21 years in prison and used the time to become a monstrous fucking Nazi scum douchebag. Meanwhile, the scene all but collapsed. The film attempts, in a standard runtime of 1 hour and forty minutes, to rehash the events and give the main surviving characters (namely Varg and Fenriz) a chance to clarify things.

That said, the “super hella uber awesome fucking amazing extended edition” of UTLTU (as I have officially decided to refer to it) actually IS aimed at the metalhead community. In the simplest of terms, the four hours of deleted footage to be found on the bonus disc of this two disc set, is pure masturbatory fodder for the diehard headbanger. So yeah – all you little twits on Tumblr bitching about how uncool it is to like this film (yet you all screen cap the shit out of it anyway) – this bonus footage is for you: interviews with Ted Skjellum of Darkthrone, Abbath of Immortal, Necrobutcher of Mayhem, Grutle Kjellson of Enslaved, Garm Rygg of Ulver, and extended versions of already existing interviews with Fenriz, Hellhammer and Varg Vikernes, including a scene in which Varg is asked point blank if he regrets murdering Oystein “Euronymous” Aarseth, and responds with an answer that froze my bone marrow solid.

Best of all, however, is the 45 minute segment entitled Black Metal University (or Black Metal 101, whichever), in which Gylve “Fenriz” Nagell is set loose in an empty lecture classroom complete with four chalkboards, plenty of chalk and a pointer, and proceeds to school us in the origins of Black Metal (duh!) and its myriad influences from Black Sabbath to Bathory and beyond. It reminded me very much of those long lists I used to make in math class when I was supposed to be giving a fuck about pre-algebraic equations. Nagell, a seemingly affable and self-deprecatory sort, makes this history lesson both engaging and surprisingly educational, even if metal isn’t your bag. For me however – a fan of Venom and Mercyful Fate since roughly 1984 – it was like hanging out with an old friend and rehashing our glory days of geekdom, with many an exclamation of “Oh yeah, I remember those guys!” to be heard. Perhaps if I’d had a teacher who had looked like Gylve, I might have graduated valedictorian.

Think the filmmakers glossed over the scene? Think again. The bonus footage is topsoil not merely turned over, but backhoe’d into a bloody charnel shit house of maggoty corpses and wormy earth, festering out loud beneath the weak Norwegian sun. This is the metal meat of the project for all you whiners and naysayers. You want blood and violence and corpse paint? Here: choke on it. Taste the whole four fucking hours of the black metal rainbow, bitch. You’ll be drowning in Krieg. You’ll be shitting KVLT for a week afterwards. You’ll be so goddamned Necro after this shit that it’ll take major invasive surgery to put your fucking skull back on the inside of your face where it belongs.
If you’re still sitting on your ass reading this, you shouldn’t be. If you’ve ever found yourself YouTubing Abbath’s crab dance, or humming the main melody from “Dunkelheit” then you need to see the super hella uber awesome fucking amazing extended edition of Until The Light Takes Us. Now. It’s pure fucking Armageddon.