Credit: Dangerous Minds / MUBI

Never forget that heavy metal is meant to be silly.

This goes back to the very beginning of the genre, when jobbing blues band Earth spotted a queue snaking across the block near their rehearsal space to see the Mario Bava horror film Black Sabbath. A title that would stick with Ozzy and friends, clearly. Now, if you go back and watch Black Sabbath, along with the Hammer Horror classics that also inspired the original heavy metal band, the very last things these film are is intense and… Well, horrible. They’re a bit of fun!

Buckets of fake blood, plastic masks, Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee chewing as much scenery as necks, sure, they’re meant to scare you, but not in any way that traumatises an audience. In the way that makes you laugh directly after you’ve screamed and cuddle up closer to your date. That’s when heavy metal is at its best, too, when you’ve got the riffs and screams to make the hardiest metalheads headbang, but it’s dressed up in enough spooky bollocks to make it actually fun.

Without that fun, metal becomes nothing more than an endurance test. A bunch of bearded men in black T-shirts standing with their arms crossed at the Black Heart, trying to act like they’re hard enough to get through a set that sounds more like a power drill than actual music. Fair play to the people making it, if that’s the art that you want to put into the world, more power to you. However, we know what happens when metal scenes become about who can be more genuinely scary and evil than anyone else.

It happened in the Swedish black metal scene, and let me tell you, it’s nothing good.

Why did metal bands start trying to out-evil each other?

So, black metal is massive in the Scandi countries. Which sort of checks out.

Perhaps the reason for their famously high satisfaction with life comes from the fact that all the people who aren’t so happy with their lot get to make brutally heavy screeds that reflect how bleak, barren and cold vast swathes of their home country are. Anyone would feel like they’d gotten a lot off their chest. The issue is that black metal, despite all the facepaint and patently ridiculous shit, has a habit of taking itself deadly seriously.

This was partially due to how the scene gate-kept itself. The very worst thing you could do was be “a poser” that was scamming the scene by pretending to be something you were in order to get… I dunno, actually. No one was getting signed or rich off the back of this shit. Clout, I guess? People are fucking dumb. Whatever the reason, suddenly, it wasn’t enough to make evil music; you had to do evil shit. After all, if you were screeching about how much you hate Christianity, what better way of proving yourself legit than burning down churches?

That may sound like a stupid thing to do. This is because it is. But people are nothing if not fuckwits, and Nazi murderer Varg Vikernes especially. In March 1993, he released his band Burzum’s second EP, Aske, which featured the charred remains of Berger’s Fantoft Stave Church on the cover. He was never charged for the crime as there was no proof, but it has since been taken as a claim of responsibility for destroying a 900 hundred year old church.

Especially because the Fantoft Stave church wasn’t Vikernes’ only casualty. In 1994, he was found guilty of burning down no fewer than three other churches in Norway. This made international news, and because, as mentioned, people are fuckwits, Vikernes became a role model for several other stunted man-children. No less than 50 arson attacks on churches were reported by 1996, and all the people caught in the act were black metal fans.

The irony of it all is that by trying to be as evil and scary as possible, each of them proved the cardinal law of heavy metal better than anyone ever could. Metal is, and has always been, incredibly silly.