In the liner notes to the Swedish metal band Bathory’s 1996 record Blood on Ice, mastermind Thomas Forsberg reflects on his decision to abandon the satanic imagery fast becoming commonplace in the late 1980s metal underground, and adopt that of “proud and strong nordsmen, shiny blades of broadswords, dragon ships and a party-'til-you-puke type of living up there in the great halls...an image of my ancestors and that era not too far away from the romanticised and, to a great extent, utterly wrong image most people have of that period in time through countless Hollywood productions.” On the one hand, the subgenre of Viking Metal that Bathory pioneered aimed for the retrieval of authentic Germanic, heritage from the pre-Christian past; yet as quoted above, Forsberg did not prioritize historical accuracy in his recreations of a Scandinavian golden age, and instead borrowed from popular culture, Hollywood films specifically, narratives and imagery compatible with the core themes of metal, such as masculinity, violence, spectacle, and excess.
Cinema has heavily influenced metal’s frequent reception not only of medieval Scandinavia, but also of the ancient Mediterranean. This paper discusses the extent of that impact and its implications. Across the five-decade history of the genre, hundreds of artists worldwide have produced thousands of songs based on Greek, Roman, and Egyptian history and mythology. The silver screen has largely and demonstrably supplied, more than any other source, recreations of antiquity in song lyrics, album artwork, music videos, live concerts, and even the music itself through the incorporation of sound bites. Clips of such videos and performances will be featured in this presentation.
First, I will demonstrate that, just as the British band Black Sabbath helped create the genre of metal itself through its adaptation of 1960s horror films, so metal’s classical reception begins in 1980 with their countrymen Angel Witch composing the song “The Gorgon,” based on the 1964 Hammer film of the same name. This song in turn set the precedent for metal’s largely sexist reception of the Medusa at large as an archetypal femme fatale. Next, I will trace the influence of films such as Quo Vadis (1951), Caligula (1979), and Gladiator (2000) on metal’s reception of imperial Rome, from the French speed metal of ADX to the music videos of Canadian death metallers Ex Deo. Lastly, I will examine the impact of Zak Snyder’s 300 (2006) on metal’s reception of Sparta, including how the xenophobic and right-wing overtones of the film are translated into metal lyrics, artwork, and music videos, with varying degrees of explicit political messaging. This final discussion will underscore the implications of the metal counter-culture’s appropriation, and even weaponization, of popular culture, and how there is a continuum between the artistic choices of film creators and the charisma of metal music to supply such cinematographic representations of antiquity to millions of fans in a manner that may reinforce and reintrench toxic hierarchies of gender and race.