by Jake Brennan
And heavy lay the crown. Euronymous proudly presented himself as king of the black metal scene, stating that he “was black metal” and that “black metal is me.” But underneath the carefully cultivated image of an antisocial communist who hated humanity lay something quite different. Despite the fact that he identified as evil, anti-humanist, and someone against any and all forms of human pleasure, Euronymous was a mere mortal and needed pleasures of the flesh just like anybody else. His preference was for men, but in the black metal community that sort of expression would have been cause for expulsion. The result of suppressing his desires: an overcompensation of sorts. He made and sold some of the meanest, heaviest, most testosterone-fueled music in the world. Gay was not evil, and he, Euronymous was the most evil. The most black metal.
Euronymous and Dead were joined at the hip. Both bearing a lifetime of inner turmoil of different varieties, they bonded easily. They were not only bandmates, but also roommates. They listened to Motörhead and Bathory records, talked politics, and dissed poser commercial metal bands like Death Angel and Napalm Death as they plotted a path for their band and their scene to rise to infamy. The hopes-and-dreams portion of their story didn’t last. As Mayhem’s career didn’t take off the way Dead hoped it would, the two argued frequently, bickering like an old married couple. And when Euronymous annoyed him, Dead would sleep in the forest outside their cabin (dra åt skogen, or “Go to the forest”). Dead became more and more withdrawn. He was likely clinically depressed, but this was a time, a place, and a scene where such self-awareness was not allowed.
Given Dead’s state of mind, his behavior, and his fascination with death, it’s possible that he suffered from what is known as Cotard delusion, a rare mental illness in which the affected person believes that they are dead; that they are actually a walking, putrefying corpse. This illness manifests after a life-threatening trauma like the beatings Dead took as a schoolboy—in particular, the one where he ended up in the hospital with a ruptured spleen; an experience that left him clinically dead for a period of time. Whatever the reason, his obsession with death became all-consuming. He got his hands on some snuff films on VHS. He watched them. Then he watched them again…and again. He sat alone in his room and cut himself. He stopped eating in an effort to obtain starving wounds. He told friends he believed that his blood had frozen in his veins, that he was a nonhuman and didn’t belong on Earth. That he’d died as a child and longed for the deep sleep he’d experienced for a brief period then.
Cotard delusion or not, deep down Dead was dealing with demons. An intense hatred for authority, social constructs, and ultimately himself were all manifested from his experiences as a misunderstood and, ultimately, bullied child. Playing in Mayhem provided a vent, but the demons within Dead would eventually prove to be too much.
On April 8, 1991, Per Ohlin, aka Dead, singer of Mayhem, the world’s preeminent black metal band, sat down on his sofa and began to write a note. It started with “Excuse all the blood…” When authorities found the note, Dead’s blood was indeed in need of an excuse. It was everywhere. Dead had slit his wrists. Then, he slit his own throat. And somehow, after all of that, he managed to fire off a shot from a shotgun directly into his forehead.
Dead was dead, at twenty-two years old.
I’ve got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind.
I’m just twenty-two and I don’t mind dying.
Dead also noted in his farewell that “it was the intention that I would die in the woods so that it would take a few days before I was possibly found. I belong in the woods and have always done so.” But Euronymous was glad that his friend decided to end it all in a place where it didn’t take “a few days” to find him. His bandmate discovered Dead’s body. He assessed the situation with the cold dispassion of a grizzled homicide detective, and then he acted quickly.
Not to call authorities or family. Instead he moved out the door and down the street to purchase a disposable camera. He hightailed it back to the apartment, where Dead’s exploded skull and bloodied body lay in the early stages of rigor mortis, and began taking pictures. Euronymous knew a good album cover when he saw one. He then collected bits of his friend’s skull and brain. The shards from the skull would make for great necklaces, he thought. Euronymous would later boil the bits of brain down into a stew and consume them so that he could claim the vaunted status of a cannibal.
From beyond this mortal coil, Dead likely sensed that his friend Euronymous had cannibalized what was left of his brain matter. There was no anger in the afterlife. No disgust. In fact, quite the opposite. Dead was impressed with his former bandmate’s commitment to evil. Dead even found it funny that, in life, Euronymous had never been given the chance to consummate his love for Dead—but now in death, he was literally consuming him. If Euronymous was indeed gay, Dead thought, he was one evil motherfucker. Let’s see those rævhåls in Napalm Death eat some brains.
Euronymous consuming the brains of his dead bandmate, Per Ohlin.
Dead’s grisly suicide would be immortalized on the cover of Mayhem’s 1995 live bootleg, Dawn of the Black Hearts. The photo is arresting. It’s the type of thing you wish you could unsee but you can’t. The irony, of course, is that it is a “live” album with a real-life picture of a dead guy named Dead on the cover. The album’s closing track is one of Mayhem’s first compositions, “Pure Fucking Armageddon”—and pure fucking armageddon was exactly what the black metal scene was about to unleash onto Norway.
The way the architects of the black metal scene saw it, to be from Norway in the early ’90s and to be truly into black metal meant that you had to be truly evil. The type of evil that went way beyond the B-grade horror-movie lyrics from Black Sabbath. The type of evil that was much scarier than some long-haired skateboarders in baggy shorts and painter’s caps listening to Anthrax and crushing cans of Meister Bräu on a school night. To be truly “black metal” meant you had to live for death. You praised Satan. You declared war on society and all things moral, particularly Christianity. You listened to and made raw, primitive-sounding, noncommercial heavy metal. The goal for Norwegian black metalheads was to completely subvert democratic morality; to banish poser metal bands who didn’t take death and destruction seriously back to the punk rock ghettos they crawled out of. So forget about Napalm Death and fuck Anthrax.
With Dead’s death there formed a vacuum of charisma in the scene Euronymous lorded over. Soon a new fresh-faced personality came along: Varg Vikernes, aka “Count Grishnackh,” the one-man engine behind the new and exciting black metal band, Burzum. Euronymous was taken with the intensely handsome and talented Count, and he agreed to release Burzum’s records on Deathlike Silence Productions. Varg—through the strength of his Manson-esque gaze and the excitement of his new band—quickly ascended to an unofficial leadership role in the fast-growing scene that now included a flock of new bands like Darkthrone, Immortal, and Enslaved.
Varg’s Burzum lyrics give insight into what made Count Grishnackh tick.
This is WAR!…
Many wounded crawl helplessly around
On the bloodred snowy ground.
WAR!
Varg Vikernes took his music and himself seriously. He wasn’t in this for the free beer or to bust skateboarders with Death Angel patches in the grill with fisted rolls of coins in a street fight. No, Varg was in this for the War. He’d been raging against the hypocrites ever since his days as a boy in Baghdad, when his dad, a computer programmer, worked for Saddam Hussein. Varg had zero respect for the Iraqis. He was disgusted by how easily they subverted their own interests to his white family. Even at the young age of twelve, it was obvious to Varg that the white man had the power. Varg refused to hide the fact. Unlike his father, who was as racist as the day was long—he collected WWII Nazi memorabilia and held among his prized possessions an authentic Nazi flag—yet would have none of it when Varg became involved with the Nazi skinhead movement after they returned from Iraq.
Dead, from beyond
the grave, knew Varg and Euronymous would click. Varg was like a better-looking version of Dead, but his hatred was pointed outward, where Dead’s aimed straight back at himself. Varg quickly committed himself with a fury to the black metal scene. He rose to the occasion to play bass for Mayhem, after Jørn “Necrobutcher” Stubberud quit, understandably freaked out by Dead’s suicide and its gratuitously gory aftermath. But Varg’s commitment to the cause inextricably infused black metal’s Satanism with his even more toxic and racist ethno-nationalism. In addition to his experiences as a boy in Iraq, Varg believed Christianity had purged Norway of its heritage by casting aside Norse tradition, so he took this shit personally. Varg Vikernes was out for revenge against Christians, blacks, homosexuals, posers, and basically anyone who wasn’t a nihilistic, blue-eyed, pagan metalhead. His dad was a hypocrite. It was the last thing Varg wanted to be. He’d play the part to its fullest. Dead may have been dead, but even he was impressed by Varg’s commitment.
Varg sat with Euronymous behind the counter of his record shop, Helvete—which in Norwegian translates to “Hell.” Helvete served as a meeting place for all of the black metal scenesters. Euronymous, in addition to using Helvete as headquarters for his record label, would also use the venue to flex his big man on the black metal campus credentials. Some of these younger black metalheads (especially the handsome ones) needed to know who was in charge, so Euronymous would puff his chest out in front of them and pick winners and losers; which new bands to sign, when to release the next Burzum album, where Mayhem should play live, and occasionally pop off some there-is-nothing-more-evil-than-black-metal manifesto. But with Dead dead and Varg on the scene, the ideological rhetoric was largely Varg’s side of the street, so Euronymous’s manifesto was more of a casual social chorus that went something like this: “Fuck Metallica. Fuck everyone, actually—Metallica, Slayer, the blacks, the Jews, everyone. Long live Satan. Black metal rules.” That sort of thing. The group assembled at Helvete would later come to be called “the Black Circle.” On this day, Euronymous, Varg, and the rest of the crew were closing up shop early to head to Oslo to check out a Morbid Angel show.
Between the opening and headlining acts, Euronymous, Varg, and others from the Black Circle hung outside the club smoking cigarettes and lamenting how lame the scene had become. How there were no bands who were truly evil. Corpse paint, pigs’ heads onstage, and Satanic lyrics churned through guttural screaming vocals weren’t enough to inspire other bands beyond Norway’s black metal scene to carry the torch for evil. Something else had to be done. The ante needed to be upped. Varg had done little beyond talk racist shit to prove his evil bona fides, and ever since Dead’s death, the Norwegian black metal scene had begun to look ordinary. Like just a bunch of teenagers fucking around with distortion pedals and their mother’s makeup kits. If the scene was going to grow, then something dramatic needed to happen to inspire more metalheads to turn to evil.
After his death, Dead knew that Euronymous had grown soft. His cannibalism aside, Euronymous was more interested in keeping up appearances than in truly leading the black metal scene into the future. Dead knew that Varg was the scene’s only hope. If black metal was going to survive and grow beyond the poser confines of other heavy metal subgenres, then real leadership was needed. But Varg needed a push, so Dead whispered to Varg a wicked idea. It was pure evil. And if implemented correctly, it would bring Norway to its knees and show the world what the black metal scene was really all about: Pure Fucking Armageddon.
Shortly after that fateful night outside the Morbid Angel show, in the peaceful villages of Bekkestien and Kråkstad, townsfolk began to find graves of their relatives vandalized. In addition, the home of Christofer Johnsson, the front man for so-called “death metal” band Therion had been set on fire. A note was stuck to his door with a knife. It read, “The Count was here and he will come back.” A homosexual man in Lillehammer was killed randomly, stabbed more than thirty times and left to bleed out in the woods. Dead knew the death of the homosexual would rattle Euronymous to his core no matter how deeply ensconced he may have been in his closet. Then the church fires started.
The first church to go up in flames was the Fantoft Stave Church, one of Norway’s historic treasures. It made national headlines. Next? The Revheim Church. Then the Holmenkollen Chapel and the Ormoya Church.
Satanic symbols started showing up around the sites of the burnings.
Norwegians had no idea what was happening. The press covered the arsons breathlessly. And as the coverage expanded, more churches burned. The black metal rebellion was on. Norwegian black metalheads were literally carrying a torch for their scene, and black metal was no longer a B-grade horror flick: It was full-on evil. Real evil.
Scenesters became heads of arson squads continuously trying to outdo one another. More churches burned: The Skjold Church. The Hauketo Church. The Old Åsane Church. The Methodist church in Sarpsborg; that one took the life of a firefighter. More than thirty churches had been set ablaze. Due to the desecrated graves and Satanic vandalism discovered at the burn scenes, the press blamed it on an until now unknown, unnamed, unimaginable clan of Satanists.
But authorities were slow to pounce on the Satanist theory. Some held out hope that all the fires—and the other assorted crimes—were all just a big accidental coincidence. The bottom line? Nobody had a clue who was behind the terror. Fear was rampant, and there was no real boogeyman in sight.
Not until January 1993 anyway. That’s when Varg Vikernes decided he had enough with the false rumors surrounding the church burnings. The rumor was that Euronymous had masterminded them. Varg seethed with rage. He couldn’t let Euronymous take the credit for what he had pulled off (with a little influence from a certain dark spirit).
Varg decided to try to cheekily set the record straight by giving an interview to a daily newspaper. In it, he claimed he knew who burned the churches and who murdered the homosexual man in Lillehammer. It took local police about five minutes to identify Varg—with his penchant for being photographed with torches, knives, chain mail, and long hair—as a person of interest, and it wasn’t long before they were on to the entire scene.
Within no time, authorities had found a flyer promoting Burzum’s new album, aptly titled Ashes. On it, there was an image depicting the burning of Fantoft Stave Church. The flyer also, unbelievably, included Varg’s address. Dead laughed from beyond the grave because, you know, there were so many people coming upon black metal flyers and deciding they absolutely needed to send their hard-earned cash to get a copy of the latest album by a band they probably never heard of. Dead thought that for all Varg’s supposed high-minded Norse Viking neoracist, pseudo-intellectual horseshit, the Count sure seemed like a fucking moron when it came right down to it. The police showed up at the address on the flyer and found Varg holed up with enough explosives to blast them all to hell. He was taken into custody before he could use the explosives to blow up the Nidaros Cathedral, as he was planning, in celebration of Mayhem’s next album. Now that’s how you throw a record release party!
Varg, Euronymous and Dead: Three-headed black metal monster.
Remarkably, Varg was released for lack of evidence, but not before the rumors took off and the kids in the scene got wind of who the real mastermind was. Euronymous roiled with jealousy while Varg’s ego soared. Varg’s long-simmering distrust of Euronymous was now brimming over into barely containable contempt. The originator of the black metal scene no longer seemed that evil. Not to Varg or anybody within the Black Circle. The vain grab for credit for the church burnings was a big wake-up call for the scene. And soon another set of rumors took flight that would further discredit Euronymous. There were rumors that he was gay, and that someone had even found VHS tapes of gay porn that belonged to him. Rumors that he was secretly in love with Dead and that he pressured Dead to kill himself because he couldn’t stand it anymore. There was another rumor that Euronymous actually pulled the trigger and killed Dead. That he and Dead were in a qua
rrel over something of Euronymous’s that Dead had found; VHS tapes with gay porn and a dildo.
Varg considered the rumors against his own friendship with Euronymous. After all, Euronymous had welcomed Varg into the scene in the first place, but if he would stoop so low as to pretend to be the one behind the church burnings, what else was he faking? As Varg thought about it, he realized a lot of Euronymous’s identity seemed fabricated. While Varg was a devoted follower of Stalin and Hitler’s SS, Euronymous was a socialist who collected government welfare and still took money from his parents.
And if all of that wasn’t enough, Euronymous owed Varg money for unpaid Burzum royalties.
Then Varg heard a final rumor, this one more far-fetched than the last batch, that Euronymous was planning on kidnapping Varg, torturing him, filming the torture, and then finally killing him on film. Even though Euronymous seemed like a poser to Varg, Varg could imagine his former friend in such a desperate state that he would do anything to convince the world that he was every bit as evil as they once thought he was. Euronymous’s reputation was shit, and reputation was all he cared about. Plus, killing Varg would take care of that debt.
Dead, still dead, delighted in the conflict. He sensed Varg brimming with rage and Euronymous overflowing with jealousy of Varg’s new status in the scene. A scene that Euronymous believed he alone built and defined, and that defined him.
Meanwhile, the circumstances around Dead’s suicide, the rumors of Euronymous’s cannibalism, the church burnings, the grave desecrations, the rumored death of a homosexual man at the hands of someone in the scene, and the harassment of other poser metal bands all caused Mayhem’s reputation to ring out worldwide.