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Musical subgenres, and the complicated nomenclature used to describe them, can be both fascinating and difficult to comprehend. Until the Light Takes Us is a documentary concerned with black metal, a subgenre of heavy metal and a cousin to death metal, which arose in the early ‘90s in Norway. Focused more on the culture that produced black metal than the particulars of the music itself, it follows the subgenre’s rise and emergence into popular awareness through a series of arson and murders.
The filmmakers spend most of the time with two men, Gylve “Fenriz” Nagell of the band Darkthrone and Varg “Count Grishnackh” Vikernes. As Nagell mentions early in the film, both men started in the same circle of musicians. Vikernes moved more into the politics of black metal, while Nagell remained focused on the music. As a result, the interview sections with Vikernes tend to be more interesting.
Of course, part of that stems from the fact that Vikernes is interviewed in prison, where he spent 1994-2009, after being convicted of arson and murder. It’s when these topics come up that the documentary finds its strengths. The arson ascribed to members of this scene mostly concerned churches, some considered historical landmarks, fueling media speculation that those involved were Satanists. Vikernes and Nagell both describe the rise of black metal culture as a rebellion against a staid and conformist culture, and Vikernes relates the church burnings to an outgrowth of that philosophy.
Vikernes’s approach to the murder he was convicted of follows a similar trajectory. The documentary examines black metal’s use of death imagery, from corpse paint to a live album with jacket art featuring a real photo of a musician who had committed suicide and was found by a band mate. Vikernes contends that his victim, a prominent musician, record store owner, and music producer in the insular Norwegian black metal scene, had intended to torture and kill him on film.
Aside from a few other interviewees, there’s very little context available in this decidedly low-key documentary. While both Virkenes and, to a lesser extent, Nagell come across as intelligent and self-aware, it’s hard to know how seriously to take either of them. As candid as Virkenes is about the murder, his justifications for it seem a bit thin. When it’s done, it’s easier to empathize with Nagell’s disappointment at how black metal was eventually co-opted into popular culture than with Virkenes’s revolutionary musings.
In the end, I can’t say that I really understand black metal or how it fits into the larger category of heavy metal much better than I did before. Luckily, the DVD includes the 40-minute “Black Metal 101,” in which Nagell delivers a pretty decent lecture on how black metal evolved musically. Also included are outtakes, deleted scenes, and extended interview sets grouped by band affiliation. Taken as a whole, the DVD of Until the Light Takes Us provides a reasonably deep, if somewhat self-contained, exploration of an often overlooked musical subculture.
