The crime reporter who broke this story called his source the strangest person he had ever met. That line comes from Torstein Grude's documentary Satan rir media, made in 1998 and shown on Norwegian television at the start of 1999, and it is a good place to begin, because it is a journalist describing an interviewee rather than a scene describing itself. Almost nothing else written about black metal in 1993 had that much distance in it.
What the press did with this subject is a larger story than the subject, and it is the reason a reader in 2026 already has opinions about a music they may never have heard. The church burnings produced roughly five convicted men. The coverage produced the entire public idea of the genre, and it is still the frame every new article is written inside.
January 1993, and how it actually started
It did not begin with a police investigation. According to Grude's film, two trainee journalists brought a story to Bergens Tidende, the Bergen daily, involving church fires and a killing, and it reached the paper's crime reporter, Finn Bjørn Tønder. He met the young man at the centre of it, was promised nothing and promised anonymity in return, and the paper ran the result on its front page on 20 January 1993 under a headline that translates as we set fire to the churches, with a photograph of a hooded figure and knives on a table.
The weirdest person I think I have ever met in my life.
Finn Bjørn Tønder on his interviewee, in Satan rir media (1999)
Vikernes was arrested within days. Grude's film goes further than that and says the paper handed the name over: the police investigator Svein Erik Krogvold states in it that the police got the name directly from the journalist, and the film argues the published piece misrepresented what was said. Those are the film's claims rather than findings of a court, and they have never been tested in one. They are also, thirty years on, the only serious attempt anybody in Norway has made to audit how this story was obtained.
The template that was already waiting
The reason the story travelled so fast in Norway is that Norwegian papers had been running a satanism scare since the middle of the eighties, complete with backwards messages, worried clergy and heavy metal as the delivery mechanism. When a genuine arson case turned up with a genuine teenage satanist attached to it, the file was already open and the vocabulary was already in use. Nothing had to be invented except the scale.
The scale is where the damage was done. A few dozen people in two cities became a network with a leader and a membership, and the fires went on for two more years, set mostly by people with no band, no label and no connection to anyone in the original file. A story about a dozen teenagers had been printed as a story about an organisation, and then enough readers turned up to make the second version look true.
A story about a dozen teenagers was printed as a story about an organisation, and then enough readers turned up to make the second version look true.
The export edition
Outside Norway the story arrived on 27 March 1993, when Kerrang! gave its cover to Jason Arnopp's piece on the arsons and the killings. One issue of a British weekly did more for the international profile of Norwegian black metal than three years of records had managed. Darkthrone had put out Under a Funeral Moon on Peaceville in February, a month before that cover, with no expectation that anybody outside a mailing list would hear it.
That is the mechanism worth naming, because it repeats. Extreme music is generally covered by the music press when it sells and by the news desk when somebody is charged. This scene was covered by the news desk first, which meant its public identity was assembled by reporters whose job was the crime and who had no particular interest in whether the guitars were any good.
The book that stood in for an archive
In 1998 Feral House published Lords of Chaos by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind, expanded by about fifty pages for a second edition in 2003. In English there was nothing else, so it became the standard account by default, and a very large proportion of what an English speaking reader believes about this scene reaches them from that one book by way of a few hundred articles that never checked it against anything.
It has been argued with ever since, from several directions at once. The German magazine Telepolis objected that far right and racist statements by interviewees were left in the text uncommented. Kevin Coogan wrote that one of the authors' own political convictions run just under the surface of the book and that the black metal and fascism connection it draws rests on a thin evidentiary thread. Vikernes, from prison, complained that the authors did not understand what the music had been about in 1991 and 1992. When the subject, the reviewers and the critics all reject a book and it remains the standard source, the problem is not the book. It is that nobody wrote the other one.
The institutions changed their minds
The clearest measure of how much of this was framing rather than substance is what the Norwegian establishment did next. In 2001 the country's national music prize, the Spellemannprisen, added a metal category, and the first one went to Dimmu Borgir. By 2011 the press was reporting that the foreign ministry wanted its trainee diplomats briefed on the genre for nation branding purposes, on the argument, made by the author Håvard Rem among others, that for foreigners under forty it is the thing they associate with Norway. Music Norway, set up in 2013 under the culture ministry with foreign ministry money behind it, has promoted the export of Norwegian music of every kind since.
Eighteen years separate a front page about satanic terrorists from a ministry recommending the same music to its diplomats, and the press covered both without noticing it had turned around. That is not hypocrisy so much as evidence that the coverage was never really about the records.
Since then, and the new failure mode
The documentaries arrived once the sentences had been served. Once Upon a Time in Norway came in 2007, Until the Light Takes Us in 2008, Peter Beste's photographs were collected in book form the same year, and a feature film with actors turned up in 2018. Dayal Patterson's Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult, published in 2013, was the first widely read English book to treat the music as the subject and the crimes as an episode inside it, which took twenty years.
The coverage failure has changed shape rather than gone away. The news desk framing has been replaced by a nostalgia framing, in which the early nineties are a lost golden age, every band that formed after 1996 is measured against a two year window in one country, and the same eight photographs are reprinted. That is friendlier than the 1993 version and no more accurate. A genre with thirty five years of records in a dozen countries is still being reported as a Norwegian news story with a soundtrack.
The other thing the press learned to do with this scene, and has never stopped doing, is to treat any show with a difficult prop as evidence of something, which is a subject with its own page: the Most Infamous Black Metal Live Shows.
