Read Anytime Anywhere Easy Ebook Downloads at ebookmeta.

com

Norwegian Nightmares The Horror Cinema of a Nordic

Country 1st Edition Christer Bakke Andresen

https://ebookmeta.com/product/norwegian-nightmares-the-
horror-cinema-of-a-nordic-country-1st-edition-christer-
bakke-andresen/

OR CLICK HERE

DOWLOAD EBOOK

Visit and Get More Ebook Downloads Instantly at https://ebookmeta.com

 Recommended digital products (PDF, EPUB, MOBI) that
you can download immediately if you are interested.

The Pulse in Cinema The Aesthetics of Horror Mee

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-pulse-in-cinema-the-aesthetics-of-
horror-mee/

ebookmeta.com

Colloquial Norwegian The Complete Course for Beginners 2nd

ed 2016 2nd Edition Margaret Hayford O Leary Torunn
Andresen
https://ebookmeta.com/product/colloquial-norwegian-the-complete-
course-for-beginners-2nd-ed-2016-2nd-edition-margaret-hayford-o-leary-
torunn-andresen/
ebookmeta.com

Indian Horror Cinema En gendering the Monstrous 1st

Edition Mithuraaj Dhusiya

https://ebookmeta.com/product/indian-horror-cinema-en-gendering-the-
monstrous-1st-edition-mithuraaj-dhusiya/

ebookmeta.com

Some Shall Break 1st Edition Ellie Marney

https://ebookmeta.com/product/some-shall-break-1st-edition-ellie-
marney/

ebookmeta.com
Heidegger in Chicago A comedy of errors 2015th Edition Jef
Costello

https://ebookmeta.com/product/heidegger-in-chicago-a-comedy-of-
errors-2015th-edition-jef-costello/

ebookmeta.com

Principles for Evaluation of One Health Surveillance The

EVA Book Marisa Peyre

https://ebookmeta.com/product/principles-for-evaluation-of-one-health-
surveillance-the-eva-book-marisa-peyre/

ebookmeta.com

Math Workout for the SAT Extra Practice to Help Achieve an

Excellent SAT Math Score 4th Edition The Princeton Review

https://ebookmeta.com/product/math-workout-for-the-sat-extra-practice-
to-help-achieve-an-excellent-sat-math-score-4th-edition-the-princeton-
review/
ebookmeta.com

The Last Judgement 1st Edition R D Shah

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-last-judgement-1st-edition-r-d-shah/

ebookmeta.com

Prolegomena to the Study of Yeats s Plays George Brandon

Saul

https://ebookmeta.com/product/prolegomena-to-the-study-of-yeats-s-
plays-george-brandon-saul/

ebookmeta.com
Exploring Universal Basic Income A Guide to Navigating
Concepts Evidence and Practices 1st Edition Ugo Gentilini

https://ebookmeta.com/product/exploring-universal-basic-income-a-
guide-to-navigating-concepts-evidence-and-practices-1st-edition-ugo-
gentilini/
ebookmeta.com
NORWEGIAN NIGHTMARES
Traditions in World Cinema

General Editors Coming-of-Age Cinema in New Zealand

Linda Badley (Middle Tennessee State Alistair Fox
University) New Transnationalisms in Contemporary Latin
R. Barton Palmer (Clemson University) American Cinemas
Founding Editor Dolores Tierney
Steven Jay Schneider (New York University) Celluloid Singapore: Cinema, Performance and
the National
Edna Lim
Titles in the series include:
Short Films from a Small Nation: Danish
Traditions in World Cinema Informational Cinema 1935–1965
Linda Badley, R. Barton Palmer and Steven Jay C. Claire Thomson
Schneider (eds) B-Movie Gothic: International Perspectives
Post-beur Cinema: North African Émigré and Justin D. Edwards and Johan Höglund (eds)
Maghrebi-French Filmmaking in France since Francophone Belgian Cinema
2000 Jamie Steele
Will Higbee
The New Romanian Cinema
New Taiwanese Cinema in Focus: Moving Christina Stojanova (ed) with the participation
Within and Beyond the Frame of Dana Duma
Flannery Wilson
French Blockbusters: Cultural Politics of a
International Noir Transnational Cinema
Homer B. Pettey and R. Barton Palmer (eds) Charlie Michael
Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere
Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerståhl Anna Westerståhl Stenport and Arne Lunde
Stenport (eds) (eds)
Nordic Genre Film: Small Nation Film Cultures New Realism: Contemporary British Cinema
in the Global Marketplace David Forrest
Tommy Gustafsson and Pietari Kääpä (eds)
Contemporary Balkan Cinema: Transnational
Contemporary Japanese Cinema Since Hana-Bi Exchanges and Global Circuits
Adam Bingham Lydia Papadimitriou and Ana Grgić (eds)
Chinese Martial Arts Cinema: The Wuxia Mapping the Rockumentary: Images of Sound
Tradition (Second edition) and Fury
Stephen Teo Gunnar Iversen and Scott MacKenzie
Slow Cinema
Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge Images of Apartheid: Filmmaking on the Fringe
in the Old South Africa
Expressionism in the Cinema Calum Waddell
Olaf Brill and Gary D. Rhodes (eds)
Greek Film Noir
French-language Road Cinema: Borders, Anna Poupou, Nikitas Fessas, and Maria
Diasporas, Migration and ‘New Europe’ Chalkou (eds)
Michael Gott
Norwegian Nightmares: The Horror Cinema of
Transnational Film Remakes a Nordic Country
Iain Robert Smith and Constantine Verevis Christer Bakke Andresen

Please see our website for a complete list of titles in the series
www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/TIWC
NORWEGIAN NIGHTMARES
The Horror Cinema of a
Nordic Country

Christer Bakke Andresen

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK.
We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the
­humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial
and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more
information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

© Christer Bakke Andresen, 2022

Cover image: Dark Woods 2 (Villmark 2, Pål Øie, 2015) by kind permission of
Handmade Films in Norwegian Woods.
Cover design: Stuart Dalziel

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

The Tun – Holyrood Road
12(2f) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ

Typeset in 10/12.5 pt Sabon by

Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4744 5784 2 (hardback)

ISBN 978 1 4744 5786 6 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 47445 787 3 (epub)

The right of Christer Bakke Andresen to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988,
and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
 CONTENTS

List of Figures vi
Acknowledgementsviii
Traditions in World Cinema x
Forewordxii

1. Introduction to Norwegian Nightmares 1

2. The Source of Horror 18
3. The Slashers of Norway 35
4. Open Bodies in Rural Nightmares 53
5. Norwegian Psychological Horror 71
6. Healing Power 85
7. Fantastic Horror Hybrids 106
8. Dead Water 124
9. The Norwegian Apocalypse 142

Filmography159
Bibliography165
Online Resources 171
Interviews Conducted 173
Index174
 FIGURES

1.1 ‘The Water Sprite’ (‘Nøkken’), a fantastic creature from

Norwegian folklore peeking out of a dark lake, by the artist
Theodor Kittelsen in 1904. (Creative Commons, Public domain) 6
2.1 Liljan Werner at the edge of the Lake of the Dead. (Screenshot) 28
2.2 Television producer Gunnar contemplates the dead body in
the lake, while Lasse, left, and Per watch in the background.
(Screenshot from Dark Woods)30
3.1 Jannicke slumping in the snow, having become the exhausted
final girl of the first true Norwegian slasher story. (Screenshot
from Cold Prey)40
3.2 Ingunn in the terrible place, wounded, doomed and desperate.
(Screenshot from Cold Prey)43
3.3 The Mountain Man, Jannicke’s slasher film nemesis and a
­transnational icon of horror. (Screenshot from Cold Prey)45
4.1 Jannicke fixes her eyes on the mountains in the distance,
­resolving to end the terror of the Mountain Man at whatever
cost to herself. (Screenshot from Cold Prey II)61
5.1 John sits down opposite Kim, on the surreal stage where
Norway’s first modern psychological horror film reaches its
­terrible climax. (Screenshot from Next Door)79
6.1 Anna and Helge communicate with the dead via baby monitor.
(Screenshot from The Monitor)88

vi
 figures

6.2 The empty windows of suburban Oslo stare out at Anna as she
investigates the source of sounds on her baby alarm. (Screenshot
from The Monitor)90
6.3 Thelma crawls from the lake and regurgitates a blackbird,
shortly after her father spontaneously combusts and dies in the
cold water. (Screenshot from Thelma)95
6.4 Ben and Anna’s trial face-off in the woods in Eskil Vogt’s
­supernatural thriller, foreshadowing the final showdown.
(Screenshot from The Innocents)100
7.1 Norway’s biggest secret, quite literally, is revealed to be the
Jötunn troll, itself a mountain in the mountains of Dovre.
(Screenshot from Troll Hunter)109
7.2 Hans the troll hunter, underplayed by comedian Otto Jespersen.
(Screenshot from Troll Hunter)110
7.3 ‘The troll that ponders how old it is’ (‘Trollet som grunner på
hvor gammelt det er’), by artist Theodor Kittelsen in 1911, is one
of the significant templates for the modern visualisation of trolls.
(Public domain) 111
7.4 A Nazi zombie emerges from the Arctic snow. (Screenshot from
Dead Snow)115
7.5 Feeding on fossil fuel, in a rare socio-political satire depicting
Norwegians as helpless oil junkies. (Screenshot from Dark Souls)118
7.6 It could have been a Hollywood dinosaur, but it is the CGI
Midgard Serpent of Norse mythology. (Screenshot from
Ragnarok)121
8.1 The contemporary Norwegian gothic castle. (Screenshot from
Dark Woods 2)126
8.2 Lillian and her twin brother ponder their separation in a boat on
the lake, in the film’s traumatising past event. (Screenshot from
Lake of Death)140

vii
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank Gillian Leslie at Edinburgh University Press for such genuine ­enthusiasm
for this project and for shepherding the book along. Richard Strachan and
Sam Johnson, also at EUP, for swift and faultless help to the author whenever
needed. Series editors Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer for encouraging this
book to become a part of Traditions in World Cinema. I am grateful for the
opportunity that you all have given me.
I am indebted to Gunnar Iversen for steering me into the field of Norwegian
horror many years ago, and for sticking with me ever since. If I ‘keep cool’ just
a fraction of how well you do it, I will consider myself well taught.
Rikke Schubart for reading and discussing drafts of the book along the way.
Your insight and passion have been invaluable, and our talks are always a
highlight of my day.
Anne Gjelsvik for always being supportive of my research, my ideas, and
my teaching. If you only knew how often I hear your voice in my head: ‘Baby
steps.’
Friends, colleagues and students at the Department of Art and Media Studies,
NTNU.
Luis Rocha Antuñes and Lorna Piatti-Farnell for generous input, inspiration
and direction at various points of my research into Norwegian horror.
Jakub Sebastian Konefal at the University of Gdansk and Panoptikum for
providing the first opportunity to publish my research in English, in their
issue 17 on Nordic film and television (see Andresen 2017a). The Journal of

viii
 acknowledgements

Scandinavian Cinema for allowing me to explore some of my ideas, in their

volume 7 issue 3 and volume 9 issue 2 (see Andresen 2017b and 2019). Also,
Karsten Meinich and Lars Ole Kristiansen at Montages.no for letting me have
a critical go at a varied selection of popular, and less popular, Norwegian
movies upon their release.
Trond-Atle Farestveit for a steady eye and calm hand in correcting and
editing my text, and for constructive content discussions to go with it.
Sven Østgaard for essential help with the technicalities of the screenshot.
The filmmakers who gave generously of their time to discuss their genre work
during my research: Pål Øie, Roar Uthaug, Martin Sundland, Pål Sletaune,
Astrid Thorvaldsen and Eskil Vogt. Also, Joachim Trier for the uplifting
residence visit to our department at NTNU in 2017, and Severin Eskeland for
uncompromising dedication to horror genre filmmaking.
First and last, my wife Line Solberg Ohnstad for patience and support.

ix
 TRADITIONS IN WORLD CINEMA

General editors: Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer

Founding editor: Steven Jay Schneider

Traditions in World Cinema is a series of textbooks and monographs devoted to

the analysis of currently popular and previously underexamined or ­undervalued
film movements from around the globe. Also intended for general interest
readers, the textbooks in this series offer undergraduate- and graduate-level
film students accessible and comprehensive introductions to diverse traditions
in world cinema. The monographs open up for advanced academic study more
specialised groups of films, including those that require theoretically-oriented
approaches. Both textbooks and monographs provide thorough examinations
of the industrial, cultural, and socio-historical ­conditions of production and
reception.

The flagship textbook for the series includes chapters by noted scholars on
traditions of acknowledged importance (the French New Wave, German
Expressionism), recent and emergent traditions (New Iranian, post-Cinema
Novo), and those whose rightful claim to recognition has yet to be established
(the Israeli persecution film, global found footage cinema). Other volumes
concentrate on individual national, regional or global cinema traditions. As the
introductory chapter to each volume makes clear, the films under discussion

x
 traditions in world cinema

form a coherent group on the basis of substantive and relatively transparent, if

not always obvious, commonalities. These commonalities may be formal, sty-
listic or thematic, and the groupings may, although they need not, be popularly
identified as genres, cycles or movements (Japanese horror, Chinese martial
arts cinema, Italian Neorealism). Indeed, in cases in which a group of films
is not already commonly identified as a tradition, one purpose of the volume is
to establish its claim to importance and make it visible (East Central European
Magical Realist cinema, Palestinian cinema).
Textbooks and monographs include:

• An introduction that clarifies the rationale for the grouping of films

under examination
• A concise history of the regional, national, or transnational cinema in
question
• A summary of previous published work on the tradition
• Contextual analysis of industrial, cultural and socio-historical condi-
tions of production and reception
• Textual analysis of specific and notable films, with clear and judicious
application of relevant film theoretical approaches
• Bibliograph(ies)/filmograph(ies)

Monographs may additionally include:

• Discussion of the dynamics of cross-cultural exchange in light of

current research and thinking about cultural imperialism and glo-
balisation, as well as issues of regional/national cinema or political/
aesthetic movements (such as new waves, postmodernism, or identity
politics)
• Interview(s) with key filmmakers working within the tradition.

xi
 FOREWORD

Norway is a very small country, and public funding has long been necessary to
maintain a national cinema. Against this background, commercial film genres
(with the sole exception of the comedy) had never taken permanent hold at
any point in Norway’s cinema history, until shortly after 2000. Since then,
popular genres like the action film, the romantic comedy and the war film
have proliferated in Norway. Norwegian horror fiction also came to a massive
turning point in 2003: that year saw the release of Dark Woods, the first
clear-cut and successful Norwegian horror film to hit cinemas since Lake of
the Dead in 1958. For the past two decades, genre entertainment has reached
unprecedented popularity in Norwegian cinema, including the previously
shunned horror film. In fact, Norway has become the only Nordic country to
cultivate a regular output of horror, both in underground moviemaking as well
as the mainstream cinema which is the focus of the present book.
Besides Dark Woods by director Pål Øie, my book will give particular atten-
tion to the Cold Prey trilogy of slasher films that started with Roar Uthaug’s
Cold Prey in 2006; the psychological horror films Next Door (2005) and The
Monitor (2011) by Pål Sletaune, and Joachim Trier’s Thelma (2017); as well as
the horror-related genre hybrids Troll Hunter (2010) by André Øvredal, and
Ragnarok (2013) by Mikkel Brænne Sandemose. These films are major works
of commercial and artistic importance in Norway’s horror cinema tradition,
although many others will be discussed along the way. I will also chart the
changes and continuities that are discernible in the development of Norwegian

xii
 foreword

horror from the original Lake of the Dead by Kåre Bergstrøm in 1958 to the
modern re-adaptation of the same source novel, Nini Bull Robsahm’s Lake of
Death in 2019.
This book follows on from my PhD research into popular Norwegian cinema,
a project which was designed to serve the need for a closer look at how and
why horror became a mainstay in Norwegian national cinema, and how this
tradition relates to the major global force of Hollywood genre cinema. Genre
entertainment, including horror fiction, enjoys great popularity in Norway
these days. The book will aim to explain why a coherent Norwegian horror
cinema did not exist prior to 2000, and how horror became a trend after that
point. One might assume that Norway was fertile soil for this kind of national
tradition, bearing in mind that the closely related crime genre has a peculiar
history in this country.
In March 1923, publishers Gyldendal took out a ground-breaking ad to
hype their latest crime novel, The Train to Bergen Was Robbed Last Night
(Bergenstoget plyndret i natt). The book was co-written by poet Nordahl
Grieg and translator Nils Lie, under the pseudonym Jonathan Jerv (which
translates as Jonathan Wolverine), and the publisher’s inventive approach to
marketing consisted of a front-page ad in the newspaper Aftenposten, among
others, which read ‘The Train to Bergen Was Robbed Last Night!’. The ad
was designed to look like a newspaper headline, many people mistook it for an
actual headline, and this created quite the intended uproar. Once the wilful act
of misguidance was revealed, the book sold like hot cakes around the time of
the 1923 Easter holidays.
With a formal tradition of taking a minimum of five days off at Easter,
Norwegians have seen fit to use this time for visits to mountain or seaside
cabins. This national pastime of recreation in nature is effortlessly combined
with reading fairly light thrillers and crime novels, something that literature
marketing has not failed to exploit. In Norway, enjoying peace and quiet comes
with a certain dose of murder and mystery, and the proper literature is easily
adaptable to radio as well. As television became more and more common,
including in remote cabins, this Easter reading and listening tradition morphed
into an Easter viewing tradition, with British detectives like P. D. James’
Dalgliesh and Agatha Christie’s Poirot gaining great popularity in Norway. So
ingrained in Norwegian culture are the Easter holiday traditions that one of
the greatest public outrages of the 2020 pandemic lockdown was aimed at the
ban on travelling to remote cabins at Easter. Taking this annual cabin vacation
away from Norwegians was controversial enough for the government to not
even consider such a ban during the second year of the pandemic in 2021.
The 1923 publishing coup related above might be called the ‘seed of the
Easter crime phenomenon’ (Folkvord 2018), at least in terms of marketing
and possibly in terms of reading habits, a phenomenon that seems curiously

xiii
norwegian nightmares

particular to Norway. Throughout the twentieth century Norwegian crime

literature grew steadily into a strong and coherent tradition, and when we
fast forward to the 1990s, closer to the post-2000 horror boom in Norwegian
cinema, we find the start of the truly massive output of crime and thriller
fiction from Norwegian authors that we are now accustomed to. However,
horror films being popular with Norwegian audiences did not automatically
translate into this same type of fiction becoming a trend in domestic film
production. Indeed, horror film has only quite recently become a solid national
tradition in Norway, a fact which is a main issue of discussion in this book.
The relevance of the Easter crime tradition to the question of Norwegian
horror cinema is obvious when one considers the settings of two of the earli-
est films in the genre: Dark Woods (the Norwegian title Villmark literally
translates as Wilderness) takes place in the woods around a mountain lake, far
from the city, and Cold Prey stages its action in and around a mountain lodge,
which is plopped down in the middle of an Easter-like snowy desolation.
The question of why Norwegians like to spend their holidays devouring crime
fiction can be extended to asking why such a seemingly peaceful and happy
country, in a peaceful and happy Nordic region of Europe, produces horror
movies at all. This is another main topic of the book.
The interest in Norwegian horror from abroad does not represent something
completely new or truly unique. The post-2000 popularity of the literature,
film and television crime fiction known collectively as Nordic noir is a strong
example of dark and troublesome entertainment from the Scandinavian and
Nordic countries that strikes a global nerve, not necessarily by being very
original in terms of plots and stories, but through the particularities of their
melancholic settings. Modern Norwegian crime literature and the recent wave
of horror cinema are not alone in having a global reach, for the aesthetics of
horror have generally made for strong cultural exports from Norway to the
world: from the scary folktales of the 1800s to the black metal music scene that
grew globally influential in the 1990s, horror motifs and tropes in Norwegian
popular culture have since coalesced into the modern horror cinema of
Norway. With the non-artistic and sinister sideshows of church burnings and
murders heightening a sense of international infamy, some elements of the
early black metal scene took its relation to horror culture way too far. Even so,
an aesthetic of dread and terror in the presentation of Nordic rock music no
doubt communicates very well across borders. Recently, the Norwegian heavy
metal band Vreid released the album Wild North West and accompanied the
music with a long-form video filmed in the same woods where the Norwegian
horror cinema ground-breaker Dark Woods was shot nearly two decades ago.
Horror and its related genres are thriving in Norway at the time of writing.
The producers of Dark Woods are currently in post-production with the psy-
chological horror film The Nightmare and are also preparing a television

xiv
 foreword

series called Norwegian Horror Kit that will combine folktales and horror in
a contemporary setting. The producers of Cold Prey, on the other hand, have
shifted their focus from horror to disaster films, of which The North Sea is
the latest example. Several more horror films and horror-related genre hybrids
are in the works in Norway, the horror tradition in Norwegian cinema still
going strong. It is my hope that the present book will illuminate its past, its
major works, and also its possible future.

Christer Bakke Andresen

Trondheim, Halloween 2021

xv
 1. INTRODUCTION TO NORWEGIAN
NIGHTMARES

On 1 November 2019, the weekend of Halloween, a Norwegian horror movie

premiered in cinemas across the country. The title of the movie was Lake
of Death (De dødes tjern), and it was loosely based on a 1942 novel by the
esteemed Norwegian poet and crime author André Bjerke. At the time of its
release, this adaptation by director Nini Bull Robsahm was the latest addition
to the popular horror cinema tradition that had flourished in Norway since the
turn of the millennium.
The film was also the second adaptation of Bjerke’s novel, the first incar-
nation being the only full-blooded pre-2000 Norwegian horror film: Kåre
Bergstrøm’s Lake of the Dead (De dødes tjern) in 1958. While such a genre
movie had been one-of-a-kind in the 1950s, a generic anomaly in a national
cinema that rarely indulged popular Hollywood-related genres except for the
comedy, the horror film had become so common and proliferating in post-
2000 Norwegian cinema that the new adaptation barely registered in the
national press. A lot had changed in the film and media landscape of Norway
in the preceding twenty years, and the coming and consolidation of a national
horror cinema was one of the results.
Robsahm’s Lake of Death tells the story of a group of young people who
venture into the wilderness of Norway to spend time together in a remote
house in the woods. Here they will ostensibly help the film’s central character
Lillian (Iben Akerlie) overcome the lingering trauma of losing her twin brother.
As is common for many types of horror tales, things are not quite as they

1
norwegian nightmares

seem: the lost brother returns, and the deep secrets of his disappearance and
subsequent reappearance force their way back to the surface. The return of the
repressed, overwhelmingly often staged in and around dark waters or desola-
tions of snow and ice, is an aesthetic hallmark of Norwegian horror cinema.
This book concerns itself with three main topics. First, why did Norway
begin to produce horror movies regularly after 2000 and not before? Second,
what types of horror have been the prevalent subgenres in Norwegian cinema,
and how do these Norwegian films relate to the Anglo-American cinema that
seems to be their chief inspiration? Third, what are the identifiable hallmarks
of a specifically Norwegian brand of the transnational horror genre? I will start
my inquiry by describing the country where it happened and the people who
are the makers of, as well as the principal audience for, this national genre
tradition.

Norway and Norwegians

Each year Norwegians can look at international rankings and find that their
country, Norway, is among the best countries in the world to live in, sometimes
even topping the list as the very best nation on the planet in which to spend
one’s life. The official United Nations indicators ranked Norway highest as
recently as 2020 (UN Development Programme 2020). Norway scores consist-
ently well in terms of health and life expectancy, income and education, peace
and stability. Crime rates are low, and affluence is high. There is no death
penalty, although lifetime incarceration is possible, and the guiding principle
of the judicial system is rehabilitation rather than revenge. People in Norway
have a remarkable level of trust in their government and institutions, and they
are generally optimistic about the future. The World Bank and the World
Economic Forum confirm the positive state of affairs in reports that gauge
wealth per capita and the level of economic inclusion, naming Norway the
wealthiest and most inclusive country in the world (Corrigan 2017; Berglund
2018). Life in Norway, however, has only become this good quite recently.
The Kingdom of Norway is a small European country with a population of
about 5,400,000. Norway’s extensive coastline stretches from the Arctic Ocean
in the north to the North Sea area of the Atlantic Ocean in the south, and the
country shares mainland borders with Sweden, Finland and Russia. Together
with Sweden and Denmark, Norway makes up the cultural region known as
Scandinavia, which is part of the Nordic region that also includes Finland,
Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe and Åland islands. The Norwegian language
is a type of North Germanic, similar to but distinct from Swedish and Danish.
Norway is a social-democratic welfare state, like all of its Nordic n
­ eighbours,
meaning that within an essentially capitalist framework there exists a strong
regulatory state and a well-established tradition for promoting and securing

2
 introduction to norwegian nightmares

social and economic equality through democratic processes, strong labour

unions, and universal health care. As such, Norway is widely perceived as
an affluent and peaceful nation state, where there is a high degree of income
redistribution and very little social unrest. The country is also marked by its
cultural, political and military bonds with Great Britain and the United States
of America in the west, as well as its geographical close proximity to Russia
in the east.
For most of its history, Norway has been a poor country, but this changed
with the discovery of oil and gas along its coast in the 1960s. Indeed, even
those who know next to nothing about Norway and its people are likely to
associate the country with Vikings, trolls and oil. Respectively, these concepts
represent Norway’s iconic past, its mythical wilderness, and its current status
as one of the richest countries in the world.
Norway became a relatively unified kingdom under King Harald I Fairhair
in the late AD 800s (Sørensen 1998). The Viking Age, generally considered
to be the period from about AD 800 to about AD 1050, brought Norwegian
expansion through conquest, trade and settlements in Europe as well as North
America. A period of peace and stability in Norway was followed by civil
war over contested and unclear succession laws from 1130 to 1240, before a
renewed period of unification and prosperity was achieved by King Håkon IV
Håkonsson in the mid-1200s. Under his rule the Crown of Norway included
Iceland and Greenland in its domain, and the foundations for the later myth
of a medieval Norwegian empire were thus laid down (Bomann-Larsen 2004:
235–6). However, in 1349 and 1350 the plague known as the Black Death
decimated the Norwegian population, and this led to a recession that precipi-
tated a long period of unions with Denmark and Sweden.
Norway remained in a union with Denmark for more than 430 years, until
the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1814. At that point Denmark was forced to
cede mainland Norway to Sweden as part of a peace treaty, and Norway thus
entered a personal union with Sweden despite also declaring independence and
creating the Norwegian constitution that same year. The country maintained
its independence in all matters of state except foreign policy, but ultimately
broke out of the union in 1905 and became the sovereign nation state of
modern Norway. The country chose to remain a constitutional monarchy
rather than become a republic, which was significant to power relations in a
Europe dominated by monarchies, and then elected prince Carl of Denmark
through national referendum to become King Haakon VII of Norway (Ibid.:
300–12, 412, 441). This sequence of events in 1905 established the country’s
new royal family as national symbols of unity and independence, in whose line
the grandson of Haakon VII is now King Harald V of Norway.
The first few decades of the 1900s saw an effort to differentiate Norway, not
from continental Europe or the United States of America, but from Sweden and

3
norwegian nightmares

Denmark. Essential to this was a romantic view of Norway and Norwegians,

the historical fallacy of assuming that certain traits, traditions and objects
are more authentically and uniquely Norwegian than others (Bryn 1993: 39).
The creation and perpetuation of the myth of national authenticity was, and
still is, decisive. On the one hand, is the Norwegian national costume authenti-
cally Norwegian, when it was certainly created with influences from abroad?
On the other hand, when does a hamburger become a typically Norwegian
meal? In the romantic view, the costume is authentically Norwegian, while
the fast-food item is an Americanised intrusion, precisely because the two
are divided by the establishing period of national romanticism.
The national-romantic reconstruction of a fully independent Norway at the
dawn of the 1900s, and the reframing of traits and traditions of Norwegian-ness
took place in politics, literature, painting and also in the cinema. What Anne
Marit Myrstad (1997) has labelled the national breakthrough of Norwegian
cinema in the 1920s was essentially a bid to reclaim Norway’s rural landscapes
and national literature from Swedish filmmakers. In the early years of cinema,
successful Swedish motion pictures like A Man There Was (Terje Vigen, Victor
Sjöström, 1917) and Synnöve Solbakken (John W. Brunius, 1919) were based
on Norwegian poetry and literature, and the latter was even filmed on location
in Norway, something that many Norwegians took as a national insult at the
time. This natural and cultural heritage, landscapes and literature perceived
as authentically Norwegian, would be brought back home in the Norwegian
cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, when many literary dramas were adapted for
the screen and filmed in the national-romantically appropriate settings of the
Norwegian countryside and wilderness (Iversen 2011: 32–8).
Norway and Norwegians are concepts that necessarily take shape against
some notion of otherness (Bryn 1992: 79). The particulars of Norway as a
country and Norwegians as a people were formed in opposition to Sweden
and Denmark, because the national-romantic sense of Norway’s uniqueness
was built on perceived, and ultimately exaggerated, contrasts to the other
Scandinavian countries. Sabine Henlin-Strømme (2012) has pointed out how
the rural farmer personified this image of Norway, and how the distance
to Sweden and Denmark was highlighted by fjords and mountains in the
reconstruction of Norway in the early decades of the 1900s. Certain contrasts
were readily identified. Where Denmark was flat, Norway was mountainous.
While Sweden was urban, Norway was rustic. A large part of the population
of Norway lived and worked in and with nature, and the country’s farmers and
working-class folk made for a clear, if partly contrived, ideological contrast to
Sweden’s urban aristocracy.
National romanticism was essential in defining the nation state of Norway
in the 1800s and the early 1900s, and it also played a major part in shaping
the early Norwegian cinema. Somewhat paradoxically, Norwegian films in

4
 introduction to norwegian nightmares

the 1920s and 1930s were often stylistically close to the globally dominant
Hollywood cinema, as they strove to establish the cinema of Norway as an
alternative to the popular cinema of Sweden. Classical Hollywood style and
narrative were a major influence on the most important Norwegian director of
the era: Tancred Ibsen, grandson of the internationally acclaimed Norwegian
authors and playwrights Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and Henrik Ibsen. The latter’s
stage plays had in turn been important to the foundation of classical Hollywood
cinema, and his grandson studied the craft of filmmaking in Hollywood before
returning to direct feature films in Norway. Tancred Ibsen’s 1937 movie Gypsy
(Fant) would become one of the most important Norwegian films of all time
due to its stylistic and narrative assuredness and its popularity with contempo-
rary audiences and critics. Gunnar Iversen has written about Tancred Ibsen’s
significance to Norwegian film history that ‘for the first time a Norwegian film
director completely mastered that much-imitated [Hollywood] style’, and that
Gypsy ‘resembled any film from Hollywood, but still contained something
Nordic’ (1997: 112–13).
As I will discuss in Chapter 2, the question of how to apply something
­specifically Norwegian to transnational genres, and a kind of love/hate rela-
tionship with the style and storytelling of popular Hollywood cinema, would
be decisive in the turn to genre filmmaking in Norway after 2000. At certain
points in time, Norwegian cinema has aimed to align itself more closely with the
aesthetics of Hollywood cinema, and the concept of cultural Americanisation
is pertinent, being the presumed movement away from something original
towards something American (Bryn 1992: 19, 1993: 119). On the other hand,
as this book will show, the Norwegian approach to genre filmmaking has often
hinged on exploiting national history, landscapes and traditions in a conscious
effort to create something that differs from American templates while still
sticking close enough to tried and tested genre formulas.
However, the national-romantic application of rustic Norwegian nature and
culture, whether in the political project of differentiating the newly independent
Norway, or in the Hollywood-inspired shaping of early Norwegian cinema, is
actually at odds with national folklore. The positive and regenerative quali-
ties with which national romanticism imbues the Norwegian countryside, the
fetishizing of nature and wilderness, seems to ignore the much scarier roots of
woods, mountains and waters. After all, the wild nature of Norwegian folk-
tales is filled with trolls, goblins and hulders: supernatural creatures that can
and will harm you. Getting lost in the woods is dangerous, nature is a force far
stronger than humans, and this folkloric vision of Norway is certainly much
closer to the post-2000 horror film treatments than the national romanticism
of the 1800s and 1900s.
The films of the Norwegian horror cinema clearly borrow their generic
framework from other places, chiefly from popular American cinema. Still, they

5
norwegian nightmares

Figure 1.1 ‘The Water Sprite’ (‘Nøkken’), a fantastic creature from Norwegian
folklore peeking out of a dark lake, by the artist Theodor Kittelsen in 1904.
(Creative Commons, Public domain)

feature landscapes, themes and creatures that can be considered ­specifically

Norwegian in ways that will be discussed in the following chapters. What
Mette Hjort (2016) has outlined as the parameters of Danish cinema is equally
true for Norway: the population is too small to sustain a private sector film
industry, the language is primarily understood within the country’s borders,
and American cinema is the dominant force in the marketplace. Within these
parameters the largely publicly funded cinema of Norway negotiates the vola-
tile oppositions of commercial popularity and artistic ambition, existing in a
state of friction that has informed the emergence of a horror cinema tradition
in a wealthy and prosperous Nordic country where, on the surface, everything
seems fine.
A darkly paradoxical truth is the fact that suicide rates in Norway doubled
from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, the same period in which oil riches set
Norway on course towards the top of international rankings describing the
wealth and health of nations, and the numbers have remained at this historical
high ever since (Ekeberg and Hem 2019). Although precise answers to this are
hard to find, it is a fact that young Norwegians in the age bracket from 18 to
24 have reported an increasing sense of unhappiness, loneliness and a lack
of everyday meaning in recent years (Nes et al 2021). The suicide rates have
proven tragically hard to lower during the same era that Norwegian crime

6
 introduction to norwegian nightmares

literature and horror cinema have also laboured to expose the potential dark
side of the allegedly best country in the world.
The last 100 years have brought two instances of utter darkness to Norway.
The Nazi invasion and occupation during the Second World War, in the years
1940 to 1945, brought hardship of a kind Norwegians had never known.
However, Norwegians’ sense of national identity would ultimately be strength-
ened by the Allied victory and the fact that Norway was on the side of the
Allies in the war, and King Haakon VII would become the object of immense
national pride. The King and his government spent the war years in exile after
refusing to give in to German demands for a Nazi-friendly administration,
returning to a liberated Norway in the spring and summer of 1945. These
events have been fundamentally important in shaping the image of Norway
and Norwegians, both at home and abroad.
After prosperous post-war decades of rebuilding, in which the Norwegian
social democracy and its welfare state flourished, darkness descended once
again on 22 July 2011. The Oslo bombing and the Utøya massacre on that day
were the worst displays of criminal violence the country had seen since the war.
A right-wing extremist set off a bomb in the government quarter in Oslo and
attacked a Labour Party youth camp at the Utøya Island with semi-automatic
weapons. A total of seventy-seven people, most of them teenagers, were killed
and many more injured in the two sequential terror attacks. Although the title
of this book could hardly be more appropriate for such a national trauma,
the complexities involved in the discussion of 22 July lie outside the purview
of the present work. I will, however, make note of the fact that the killer
infiltrated the Utøya camp by posing as a police officer.
It is a curious fact that we will only find one single Norwegian horror movie
in which a law enforcement officer is a villain. In Severin Eskeland’s debut
feature film Detour (Snarveien, 2009), the principle bad guy is a police officer.
However, this man and his badge are Swedish, not Norwegian. The absence of
Norwegian law enforcement villains in the country’s horror cinema points to a
hallmark of the social-democratic Norwegian welfare state: a high level of trust
in police institutions. The crime rate in Norway has been in steady decline for
decades (Statistics Norway 2019), and police officers are mostly unarmed. This
means that they carry firearms under lock in their vehicles, but not at the hip
unless the situation demands it. There is a broad political consensus in Norway
that unarmed police officers are important to reaching peaceful resolutions in
heated situations, and research suggests a clear correlation between the lack of
firearms and the low number of shootings in countries like Norway and Great
Britain (Knutsson 2014). This trust level makes bad guys with badges signifi-
cantly less viable in Norwegian horror cinema than they are in justifiably more
paranoid American thrillers like Kiss the Girls (Gary Felder, 1997), although
there are examples of such villains in Norwegian crime literature.

7
norwegian nightmares

The golden age of Norwegian crime and horror fiction coincides strikingly
with a time when the citizens of Norway are wealthier and, by most accounts,
healthier than at any other point in history. In light of this fact, what is the
stuff that Norwegian nightmares are made of? What horror do Norwegians
fear? Is there a dreadful dark side of the social-democratic utopia that serves
dark storytelling in a way that appeals to audiences both in Norway and
abroad? Indeed, Norway is the home of internationally acclaimed author
Jo Nesbø, whose novels about hard-boiled detective Harry Hole are among
the most globally well-known and commercially successful crime literature
of the subgenre labelled Nordic noir. Despite the wealth, despite the peaceful
and prosperous existence at the top of UN and World Bank rankings: in the
world of fiction, Norway is a place of terrifying crime and horror.

Nordic noir and Nordic horror cinema

The term Nordic noir is fairly new. It was probably first used in main-
stream media, and possibly coined, by critic Laura Miller of The Wall Street
Journal in a January 2010 article titled ‘The Strange Case of the Nordic
Detectives’. This was followed that same year by further media coverage
like The New York Times article ‘Nordic Noir and the Welfare State’ and
the BBC documentary ‘Nordic Noir: The Story of Scandinavian Crime
Fiction’. Ove Solum has pointed out that, just like its semi-namesake film
noir, the term itself was created by people looking in from the outside (2016a:
109, 115–18).
By that point the United States and Europe had long been exposed to a
wave of Nordic crime literature that the Germans had already labelled Scandi
krim. The roots of Nordic noir as a crime subgenre are often traced to the
Swedish novels featuring detective Martin Beck, published by Maj Sjöwall and
Per Wahlöö from 1965 to 1975. Swedish authors of major significance in the
1990s and 2000s include Henning Mankell, known for the detective character
Kurt Wallander, Håkan Nesser and his novels about detective Van Veeteren,
and Stieg Larsson, who wrote the Millennium trilogy about journalist Mikael
Blomqvist and hacker Lisbeth Salander. In recent years, the series of novels
featuring detective Joona Linna by Lars Kepler (a pseudonym for Alexander
Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril) has been met with international
acclaim and massive commercial success, and the crime fiction of Danish
author Jussi Adler-Olsen is also among the most popular Nordic literature
in the years after 2000. Deadly crime and troubled detectives in Scandinavia
and the Nordic countries would capture imaginations around the world, con-
trasting the upper-class mysteries of British crime solvers like Agatha Christie’s
Poirot by venturing into the dark side of contemporary and ostensibly classless
social-democratic societies.

8
 introduction to norwegian nightmares

This Nordic detective tradition, exploiting the shock value of uncovering

violence and death in a seemingly peaceful society, has deeper roots than
one might think. While Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘The Murders in the Rue
Morgue’, published in 1841, is usually credited as the first modern detective
story, there were others. One year earlier, in 1840, Norwegian author Maurits
Hansen had published his novel The Murder of Engine Maker Roolfsen
(Mordet på maskinbygger Roolfsen), a book with several characteristics that
would ultimately become hallmarks of detective fiction (Dahl 1993). About a
hundred years later there would be more snippets of early Norwegian crime
fiction that pointed ahead to Nordic noir, like Arthur Omre’s The Escape
(Flukten) in 1936 and André Bjerke’s Dead Men Disembark (Døde menn går
i land) in 1947.
Internationally acclaimed crime fiction from Norway in the age of Nordic
noir includes the Konrad Sejer series by Karin Fossum, the Cato Isaksen
series by Unni Lindell, the Varg Veum series by Gunnar Staalesen (who had
been active as a crime author all the way back to the 1970s), and Jo Nesbø’s
novels about alcoholic detective Harry Hole, the latter of which spawned
the Hollywood adaptation The Snowman (Snømannen, Tomas Alfredson) in
2017. A Norwegian precursor to the later film and television output of Nordic
noir was the debut feature film from director Erik Skjoldbjærg, the detective
thriller Insomnia in 1997. Alongside director Pål Sletaune’s debut film Junk
Mail (Budbringeren, 1997), Insomnia was selected for the 1997 Cannes Film
Festival and inspired the short-lived term Norwave that purported to describe
the new direction and influence of Norwegian cinema. Insomnia stood out as
a detective story in the way that Skjoldbjærg utilised the perpetual daylight
of a northern Norwegian summer, making a basic film noir premise literally
light up with a tangible sense of Nordic authenticity. In fact, French critics
called the movie a film blanc, and the road to a cinematic Nordic noir subgenre
of crime fiction was opened (Engelstad 2006; Listmoen 2017: 34–8).
Indeed, the Nordic noir phenomenon would soon make the leap to
feature films and television series. Some of these would be adaptations, like
the Swedish films based on Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, which was also
turned into the Hollywood feature The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) by
David Fincher, a director who had launched his strong genre reputation with
the horror-related crime thriller Seven (1995). Other and more consistently
popular projects have included the original Danish television series The Killing
(2007–12) and the Danish and Swedish co-production The Bridge (2011–18),
both of which have subsequently been remade in non-Nordic countries while
sometimes, confusingly, retaining the Nordic noir label. There has also been
the Icelandic series Trapped (2016–19) and the Finnish Bordertown ­(2016–20),
adding to a collective body of Nordic work with significant ­international
impact.

9
norwegian nightmares

A key issue in Nordic noir is a leftist criticism of the modern Nordic society,
utilising characters and stories that essentially reveal the dark side of paradise
(Forshaw 2012: 16–18; Solum 2016b: 137–41). Social-democratic welfare
states are not always as socially and economically equitable as they might
appear on the surface, and the narratives of Nordic noir often aim to express
a concern for how the Nordic welfare model is under duress in an age of
globalised capitalism and New Public Management ideals. It is evident that
even in the perceived Nordic utopia, the rich get richer and the poor stay poor.
Utopia for some, but not for others. Nordic noir, as well as some of the Nordic
horror cinema, stirs these waters.
Another hallmark of Nordic noir is the frequent spectre of a dark past,
in particular the Second World War and a significant proclivity for Nazism in
the Nordic countries at that time. If not for the German invasion in April
1940, Norway and Denmark might have chosen the path that Sweden did: an
ostensible neutrality in the conflict playing into the hands of the violent Nazi
aggressors, and ultimately coming to haunt the Swedes of the future. Indeed,
Norway spent the war with a Nazi-friendly administration in the absence of the
country’s exiled legal government. The conflicts of this dark past are i­ mportant
to the background of Nordic noir stories like Larsson’s Millennium, and they
also feature in the backstory to the Norwegian Dark Woods (2003–15) horror
duology by director Pål Øie.
The transnational cultural influence of the Nordic noir crime fiction is
unprecedented in Scandinavian and Nordic history. Its books, films and tel-
evision series have gained widespread international attention over the past
couple of decades (Solum 2016b: 134–5; Toft and Waade 2017: 4–9). Kerstin
Bergman has suggested many reasons for this export success. Among them are
the works’ reputation for quality storytelling, a non-metaphorical straightfor-
ward language, complexity in main characters, gender equality in character
portrayals, social criticism of the ailing welfare state, brand marketing, and
the perceived exoticism of the Nordic setting, which is Sweden in Bergman’s
case (2014: 135). The unique audio-visual aesthetic and sensory appeal of
these works is an important part of their engagement with audiences, including
the books, but what exactly is the Nordic aesthetic?
The books, films and television series of Nordic noir are characterised by
landscapes, either urban or rural, that Anne Marit Waade (2017) has described
as representative of a certain Nordic melancholy. The settings of these stories
are the spaces of a cold and pale north on the edge of the Arctic, where there
seems to be some sort of perpetual autumn or early spring, sometimes also
deep winter. Summer barely exists. As the BBC described it in their 2010
documentary, this is ‘a place of haunting natural beauty, a utopian society
where beautiful people lead idyllic lives. It is the perfect place for murder. [. . .]
An atmospheric setting where nights can last for days, with many lonely places

10
 introduction to norwegian nightmares

to hide a body’ (Solum 2016a: 118). Indeed, this tactile sense of melancholy,
a kind of meditation on darkness, is evident in Norwegian music of many
types, from the classical Romantic works of Edvard Grieg to the modern pop
music of the band a-ha. The latter’s song ‘Sycamore Leaves’, appearing on the
1990 album East of the Sun, West of the Moon (which takes its title from an
old Norwegian folktale), ruminates on ‘wet grounds, late September . . . the
foliage of the trees’, and the dreadful feeling that ‘someone’s lying covered
by sycamore leaves’. This tree is not typically Nordic, but the song’s mood
certainly is, and much of a-ha’s music can be described in terms of ‘a chill,
Nordic, and melancholy temper blowing through the songs’ (Nilsson 2017),
akin to the books, films and series that would later appear. In terms of film and
television dramas in the Nordic noir crime subgenre, the décor and lighting
will tend towards cold blue and grey colours to highlight this pensive mood of
loneliness and melancholia, and the look is often accompanied by the equally
bleak tones of music scores and introverted pop songs.
Despite such aesthetic characteristics, this kind of crime fiction was influ-
enced in turn by American film and literature, and the genre label itself was
partially lifted from the term film noir, which was coined by French critics
in the post-war 1940s to describe the mood and style of a wave of American
crime films that included The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), Double
Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944) and The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946).
These films were based on hard-boiled detective novels by authors Dashiell
Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, respectively, the likes of
whom would often provide the source materials that filmmakers turned into
popular American movies. Film noir is essentially an audio-visual style applied
to crime fiction. There is low-key chiaroscuro lighting and extensive use of
shadows. There is cigarette smoke indoors, and fog and rain outdoors. The
filmmakers create a dark and miserable urban frame and setting for murder
mysteries investigated by jaded and troubled detectives, with an added touch of
social criticism thrown into the mix as well. In retrospect, perhaps this sort
of anti-heroic tale suited the Nordic mood and attitude quite well, that which
British film and literary critic Barry Forshaw has summed up as ‘difficult and
proud’ (2012: 96).
The visual characteristic of cold and gloomy landscapes is a feature that
Nordic noir crime fiction has in common with the admittedly sporadic Nordic
horror cinema. Although there has been much European horror cinema with
considerable transnational significance, Gunnar Iversen has pointed out
that there is ‘no long and coherent horror tradition in the cinemas of the
Nordic countries, and no large and consistent body of horror film production’
(2016: 332). While Denmark and Sweden have produced horror films now and
then as far back as the silent era, Iceland, Finland and Norway have contrib-
uted very few such genre pictures between them, until after 2000. The present

11
norwegian nightmares

book will outline the history of a coherent and relatively consistent Norwegian
horror cinema in the years since 2003, but I will first briefly consider some
examples of horror from other Nordic countries in recent decades, starting
with the cinemas of Sweden and Denmark.
Sweden enjoys a proud art horror legacy through the works of legendary
director Ingmar Bergman, whose films The Seventh Seal (1957), The Virgin
Spring (1960) and Hour of the Wolf (1968) can be seen as precursors to
later folk horror like the British movies Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves,
1968) and The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973), a tradition also exemplified
by the recent Swedish-American co-production Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019).
Supernatural horror in the Nordics is also in large part the domain of Swedish
cinema, and in the years after 2000, Swedish horror would have a particular
preoccupation with vampires.
One of the most influential Nordic horror films of this era has been Tomas
Alfredson’s Let the Right One In (2008), an adaptation of the John Ajvide
Lindqvist novel. The story is about 12-year-old Oskar, a boy who is bullied
at school and ignored at home. One day he befriends the vampire girl Eli, and
his life changes dramatically. The film, like the book, is both a social-realistic
tale of young friendship and a vampire horror story, set in the bleak urban
landscapes of a Swedish 1980s suburbia. Other Swedish films with vampire
stories in the years after 2000 include Frostbite (Anders Banke, 2006), which
sports the rather excellent tagline ‘dawn is just a month away’, and the less suc-
cessful Not Like Others (Peter Pontikis, 2008). There is also the more recent
psychological horror film The Evil Next Door (Tord Danielsson and Oskar
Mellander, 2020), which treads the familiar path of a supernatural thriller, but
Let the Right One In has been particularly convincing in demonstrating the
applicability of transnational horror archetypes in a social-democratic Nordic
setting.
Danish cinema reached two horror milestones in 1994. That year saw the
release of Ole Bornedal’s feature film Nightwatch, which was later remade in
Hollywood by Bornedal himself, as well as Lars von Trier’s influential televi-
sion series The Kingdom. Von Trier would later add to his horror credentials
with the psychological thrillers Antichrist (2009) and The House That Jack
Built (2018), cementing the impression of Denmark’s horror output as being
largely inspired by arthouse cinema. His horror movies also depict nature as a
negative force, characterised by chaos, dissolution and destruction. The trau-
matised couple at the centre of Antichrist experience a descent into hell that is
made all the more horrific by the wild nature around them, a descent that ends
in violence and death.
Danish filmmakers have mostly remained preoccupied with artistically ambi-
tious and arguably less entertainment-oriented horror subgenres, including the
psychological thriller The Neon Demon (2016) by Nicolas Winding Refn,

12
 introduction to norwegian nightmares

an international co-production, and the surrealist horror Koko-di Koko-da

(Johannes Nyholm, 2019), which was a Swedish-Danish co-production.
However, both Denmark and Sweden have also occasioned a certain tradition
for low-budget independent exploitation horror, films that would reach genre
fans on DVD or streaming platforms and not necessarily play in cinemas. In a
similar vein, Greenland, formally a Danish island in the North Atlantic Ocean,
has also produced a horror film, the low-budget Shadows in the Mountains
(2011) by Malik Kleist, which utilises the wild Arctic landscapes of Greenland
to tell a horror story inspired by the country’s mythology.
In the middle of the North Atlantic lies the island nation of Iceland. The
land was settled by Norwegians in the early Viking Age and was a part of
the Kingdom of Norway in the Middle Ages. Later, Iceland came under the
rule of the Danish Crown, before gaining independence in 1918 and finally
leaving the personal union with Denmark in 1944 to become a sovereign
republic. There had been low-budget horror-related movies made for television
in the 1970s and ’80s, but Iceland’s first properly cinematic horror film was the
satirical body horror of Júlíus Kemp’s Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre
in 2009. Set against the backdrop of Iceland’s financial collapse in 2008,
the film utilised well-established slasher movie conventions in telling the tale
of a group of spoiled international tourists going on an ill-fated whale safari in
the waters off the Icelandic coast.
When their boat breaks down, the tourists are seemingly saved by a family
of Fishbillies in their old and rusty ship. However, the whaler Fishbillies
have been put out of business by the combined forces of Greenpeace and the
international financial crisis, and now they channel their energies into hunting
and slaughtering unsympathetic tourists instead. The positive connotations of
Icelandic nature are twisted to become a threateningly negative force, and the
horror genre is used for a critical look at the country’s social and economic
situation. In the subsequent years, there have been a few additional horror
films taking advantage of Iceland’s melancholy settings, like the found footage
thriller Frost (Reynir Lyngdal, 2012) and the horror mystery I Remember
You (Óskar Thór Axelsson, 2017), the latter of which is an adaptation of the
popular novel by Icelandic crime author Yrsa Sigurðardóttir.
There has also been Nordic horror coming from the woods and lakes of
Finland. 2008 saw the release of the monster horror movie Dark Floors
(Pete Riski), featuring the costumed rock band Lordi, and the historical psy-
chological horror drama Sauna (also known as Evil Rising, Antti-Jussi Annila),
which tells a story set during the conflict between Finland and Russia in the
late 1500s. Some years later a slasher movie also appeared: Bodom (2016) by
Taneli Mustonen. The film was based on the true story of the murders at Lake
Bodom in 1960, when three teenagers on a camping trip were stabbed and
beaten to death. The killer was never caught, and Bodom follows four young

13
norwegian nightmares

friends travelling to the lake on a morbid camping trip where they plan to
reconstruct the 1960 events in hope of solving the mystery.
Sauna and Bodom are examples of Finnish filmmakers making use of two
­significant national symbols of Finland, the sauna and the lake, and putting
them into horror tales. The connotations of cleansing and recreation are
replaced by death and destruction, in much the same way that the positive
forces of woods and mountains would be transformed in the horror cinema of
Norway. However, all is not horrific in Finland: the fantastical and comedic
Rare Exports (2010) by Jalmari Helander blends horror elements with a
fantasy tale about Santa Claus, where he comes from, how scary he can truly
be, and how he manages to cover all of the world in the course of just one
single Christmas night. Genre hybridisation lends itself to the fusion of horror
with comedy, and Rare Exports, an international co-production that also
includes Norwegian money and actors, is a prime example.
It is possible to identify certain characteristics in the horror cinema of each
Nordic country, even though this has indeed been a cursory glance. The subur-
ban and sometimes vampiric horror films of Sweden are conspicuous, as are the
psychological thrillers of Denmark. Meanwhile, Iceland, Finland and Norway
all seem very much preoccupied with their respective nature and wilderness as
sources and sites of horror stories. One thing that all Nordic countries have
in common, however, is the fact that the small size of these nations makes
it impossible to sustain a private sector film industry, and thus they are all
dependent on public funding to maintain a national cinema. The relative
absence of horror film in these countries until quite recently is a question
of national film and censorship policies, among other things. As censorship
rules have been liberalised, and as genre entertainment has gained a higher
cultural status than before, the horror film has found a foothold in the Nordic
countries, and in Norway especially.

About the book

This book contributes to the developing recognition of horror genre film-
making in the Nordic countries, and Norway in particular. It is my ambition
that the present work will provide insight into how and why Norway has
become a country with a considerable horror genre tradition since the start of
the ­millennium. The origins and nature of Norwegian nightmares, as they take
form in Norwegian horror cinema, will be discussed in terms of national film
policies, the emergence of key Norwegian filmmakers, and the aesthetic rela-
tion of Norwegian horror films to certain transnational subgenre traditions.
The selection of films in this book is based on the criteria that these are
Norwegian horror movies or horror hybrids that have had a general cinema
release in Norway. This means having regular screenings in cinemas in at

14
 introduction to norwegian nightmares

least three of the country’s four biggest cities: Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim and
Stavanger. Most of the films in my selection have had cinema runs in all
of these cities as well as many smaller cities and towns, even if some of
them are independently funded and not reliant on public support through the
Norwegian Film Institute’s funding programmes.
In making this selection I am leaving out from my discussion short films as well
as a group of low-budget independent feature films, the latter meaning films
made without public funding and which have not been showcased in cinemas
nationwide. Examples of this are some of the exploitation movies by director
Reinert Kiil, films like Whore (Hora, 2009) and Inside the Whore (2012). Tanja
Aas Hindrum discussed these less exposed films in her Norwegian-language
MA thesis From the Underground to the Surface: Norwegian Underground
Horror (2018), a rare academic study of the phenomenon where Hindrum
positions the low-budget underground horror of Norway in aesthetic relation
and opposition to the general cinema release horror corpus that I will treat in
this book.
My reason for selecting what might reasonably be called the mainstream
of Norwegian horror, at the expense of independent underground horror, is that
Norwegian film politics and the mechanics of the publicly funded Norwegian
cinema is of prime interest when tracing the emergence of Norwegian horror
after 2000. With a population of only 5,400,000 at the time of writing,
Norwegian film production is largely dependent on public funding. Political
initiatives and priorities are therefore of great significance in directing the
course of Norwegian cinema, including its horror genre.
The book has nine chapters. Chapter 1, ‘Introduction to Norwegian
Nightmares’, has introduced Norway and Norwegians, and highlighted pecu-
liarities of the nation’s history and its population that informs my subsequent
discussion of the Norwegian horror cinema. Crime and horror fiction have
been prevalent in Norwegian literature and film in the early decades of the new
millennium, and Norway is the only Nordic country with a steady output of
horror cinema since 2000. The following chapters explore the reasons for this
and discuss major works and subgenres of Norwegian horror cinema.
The starting point for Chapter 2, ‘The Source of Horror’, is the fact that
Norwegian horror cinema uses woods and mountains as sources and sites of
death and destruction to an overwhelming degree. Contrary to the national
romanticising of nature that played an important part in shaping the image of
Norway in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Norwegian horror cinema uncov-
ers dread and death in the wild and rural. A subchapter called ‘The Turn to
Genre in Norwegian Cinema’ discusses the cultural and political origins of the
modern Norwegian horror tradition and points out the basic aesthetics that
define Norwegian horror. Since the early forebear Lake of the Dead (De dødes
tjern, Kåre Bergstrøm) in 1958, the horror of Norwegian cinema has been a

15
norwegian nightmares

horror from the deep. The consistent use of nature in Norwegian horror sets
it apart from American and European traditions in the genre. I will argue
that what is specific about Norway’s horror wave is its origin in nature and
its almost exclusively wild or rural settings. A subchapter called ‘“We should
have stayed away from that lake”: Dark Woods’ builds on these observations
and discusses the founding text of modern Norwegian horror, Dark Woods
(Villmark, 2003) by Pål Øie, the movie that initiated a national genre tradition
that would not have been possible at any other time in Norwegian film history.
Chapters 3 and 4, ‘The Slashers of Norway’ and ‘Open Bodies in Rural
Nightmares’, discuss the slasher subgenre of Norwegian horror cinema, with
a particular focus on the popular Cold Prey trilogy that started with Roar
Uthaug’s debut feature Cold Prey (Fritt vilt) in 2006. Carol J. Clover’s con-
cepts of this subgenre were fundamentally important in bringing about the
conventional genre wisdom of Wes Craven’s postmodern milestone Scream
(1996) and subsequent slasher aesthetics. We shall see that the Norwegian
slasher films shed new light on the assumed conventions of this transnational
subgenre, including its gender issues. The archetypes of the slasher movie, the
final girl and the masked killer, were never as clear-cut as popular convention
presents them. Still, the Norwegian slasher films utilise highly generic modes of
storytelling, while removing the action to the terrible places of Norway’s coun-
tryside and wilderness, where archetypical characters and events are framed in
a way that is unique in slasher history.
Chapters 5 and 6, ‘Norwegian Psychological Horror’ and ‘Healing Power’,
discuss the other major subgenre of Norwegian horror cinema: the ­psychological
horror film. Where the slasher focuses on physical threats and bodily harm,
the psychological horror tale looks inside the mind to reveal dark and deadly
secrets. Even in a seemingly serene society, such things exist. However, this
is also where we find Norwegian horror stories that culminate in spiritual
redemption and healing. These chapters will focus on the horror movies of
Pål Sletaune, Next Door (Naboer, 2005) and The Monitor (Babycall, 2011),
and will also consider Joachim Trier’s Thelma (2017) and Eskil Vogt’s The
Innocents (De uskyldige, 2021).
Chapter 7, ‘Fantastic Horror Hybrids’, discusses genre crossbreeds. The
blending of horror with other genres has always been popular, and Norway
has embraced hybrids when combining horror with dark humour in Tommy
Wirkola’s zombie-splatter-comedy Dead Snow (Død snø, 2009), broader
comedy in André Øvredal’s mockumentary Troll Hunter (Trolljegeren, 2010),
and action adventure in Mikkel Brænne Sandemose’s Ragnarok (Gåten
Ragnarok, 2013). These commercially successful films pinpoint a peculiar void
in Norwegian film history: the lack of monsters. Even the culturally significant
trolls had not made an appearance in Norwegian live-action cinema before
turning up in Troll Hunter.

16
 introduction to norwegian nightmares

Chapter 8, ‘Dead Water’, follows the Norwegian horror genre back to its
point of origin, as Pål Øie revisits Dark Woods for a sequel. Like many other
films in the canon of Norwegian horror cinema, Dark Woods 2 (Villmark
2, 2015) shines a light on the shadow side of Norway, in this case including
Norwegian war history. The chapter also discusses the variables and constants
of Norwegian horror in a comparative analysis of the original Lake of the
Dead and the recent re-adaptation Lake of Death (De dødes tjern, Nini Bull
Robsahm, 2019), where my discussion arrives at the ultimate hallmark of our
national horror tradition: its perpetual meditation on the deep and dark waters
of personal and national pasts, and its treatment of a specifically Norwegian
type of downfall. This leads into Chapter 9, ‘The Norwegian Apocalypse’, in
which I also consider the horror-related Norwegian disaster films of recent
years. All horror is to some extent the tale of the end of things as we know
them, the opening of dark chests of secrets, and in this sense the Norwegian
horror cinema has brought about the end of an innocent time when Norway
and its nature was a safe and beautiful place.
The sublime dread and terror of Norwegian horror movies depends on the
existence of dark forces of nature, and in particular the threatening invasion of
dead water. Be it lakes, pools, rivers, or even the snow and ice into which water
can transform, water is indeed the element of Norwegian horror. Dreadful
horror from the deep can invade all aspects of mind and physical reality to
wreak absolute destruction upon the known world. This gothic use of water
in Norwegian horror signifies a national adaptation of a transnational genre.
Norwegian horror cinema has created its own kind of apocalypse through the
recasting of nature as a force of evil, staging the end of the world on the wild
frontier of Nordic civilisation. The characters we follow either die out there, or
they reach a point of no return where their previous lives are irrevocably over.
Norwegian horror is a continuous tale of transformation and apocalypse, in
which the image of Norway is twisted and turned in an effort to identify the
dark essence of Norwegian nightmares.

17
 2. THE SOURCE OF HORROR

Lasse and Per have gone fishing. They are television technicians on a
­team-building trip with would-be colleagues Elin and Sara, spending four
days in the wild woods of western Norway under the leadership of ambitious
television producer Gunnar. Now they need food and approach the lake in the
woods with some trepidation. Being city dwellers, they lack faith in their own
wildlife skills. While waiting for fish to hopefully take the bait, they discover
an abandoned campsite by the waterside. A tent is erected there, cups and
plates are sitting on the ground, but it appears that no one has been there
for a long time. Returning to the site with their weary and grumpy producer,
the boys find a fishing net submerged in the lake nearby. They pull it out
slowly, revealing the naked dead body of a woman from the murky depths. As
the initial shock wears off, the producer argues that they keep the discovery
secret until they return to civilisation. The lake reclaims the body, pulling the
net back down into the darkness. The team-building has already failed, conflict
ensues, and evil has been unleashed.
These scenes are from the early parts of Pål Øie’s Dark Woods (Villmark,
2003), the first film of the modern Norwegian horror cinema, and they con-
stitute the inciting incident that sets the terrible drama in motion. For the
cinematic tradition that Øie initiated, publicly funded Norwegian horror
­
movies with general cinema distribution in their home country and considerable
commercial success, the use of Norwegian nature as a source of evil and a site of
dark contemplation has been all-important. The horror in Norwegian cinema

18
 the source of horror

emanates from water. It often rises up from the deep d ­ arkness of ­desolate lakes,
the kind of water that philosopher Gaston Bachelard has described as ‘blood
which bears death’ ([1942] 1983: 59), and it infects woods and mountains with
its evil. In a country on the edge of the Arctic, the gothic curse of dead water
dominates the horror genre and allows us to see a dark concept of the Nordic
and the Arctic through the lens of Norwegian genre filmmaking.
The horror film festival Ramaskrik Oppdal is evidence of the current popu-
larity of horror movies in Norway. Located not far south of Trondheim, in
or near the woods and mountains that can be seen in André Øvredal’s Troll
Hunter (Trolljegeren, 2010), the Ramaskrik festival has showcased all sorts of
horror features and short films from around the world since 2011. International
and Norwegian filmmakers visit Ramaskrik with new and classic films, and the
directors and producers of Norwegian horror are mainstays: Pål Øie premiered
Dark Woods 2 (Villmark 2) at Ramaskrik in 2015, and Roar Uthaug visited
for a retrospective screening of his 2006 Cold Prey (Fritt vilt) debut in 2019.
In 2018, MovieMaker Magazine named Ramaskrik one of the thirty best genre
festivals in the world, and ticket sales for this particular experience of horror
have grown steadily year by year.
The success of Ramaskrik indicates a maturation of the Norwegian horror
audience and the insertion of the horror genre into the mainstream of Norwegian
cinema. This chapter will delve into the questions of why now and why not
before? What premises have been positioned to pave the way for Norwegian
horror cinema in the period after 2000 that were not in place before? What
led to the success of Pål Øie’s Dark Woods? The answers include government
film policies, professionalised education for filmmakers, the development of a
genre-competent national audience, and general changes in societal attitudes
towards genre entertainment. Ultimately, there is also the appropriation of
transnational genre conventions and aesthetics into a specifically Norwegian
brand of horror, with roots reaching all the way back to the gothic fiction that
essentially created the horror film.

A brief history of horror

All genre films aim to please. The very concept of film genres is predicated upon
delivering a viewer experience that matches expectations to a certain degree.
We expect certain plots and settings from a western film, and we expect sounds
of music and song from a musical. A genre is a framework of expectation, the
contract for communication that exists between the filmmaker, the viewer,
and the critic. It is a template for storytelling, a way in which to structure tales
that ultimately determines meaning. Within the framework, however, there is
always the opportunity to circumvent conventions, a potential for expanding
the boundaries.

19
norwegian nightmares

Fans of horror will debate, and more often than not enjoy debating, what
constitutes the horror genre essentials. The admirably eclectic programming of
the Ramaskrik festival is a case in point. Some will complain that The Shape
of Water (Guillermo Del Toro, 2017) is not a horror film, and should not
have been part of the 2017 festival program, while others will appreciate and
applaud the inclusion of a wide variety of films that in different ways relate to
an aesthetic of horror. As Cynthia A. Freeland once wrote, ‘the genre is just
slippery’ (2000: 10), and it fluctuates hungrily from disgusting bodily destruc-
tions to tear-jerking romantic tragedies.
However, I will suggest a common trait: horror movies aim to scare, or
at least to unsettle, in one way or another. Indeed, their guiding aesthetic
principle is to create experiences of unease, tension, dread and terror for their
audience, but also to facilitate the audience’s enjoyment of such experiences
(Hanich 2010). This goal of creating a certain audience experience is crucial to
the definition of horror film, a definition that can be decided to a large degree
by the external factor of audience expectations, rather than specific internal
elements of iconography or action (Altman 1999: 84–86). Comedy is expected
to make you laugh, and horror is expected to make you scared, even if both
comedy and horror come in a variety of types, subgenres and genre hybrids.
For instance, the pairing of the horrific and the romantic can be traced to an
inescapable source for the development of horror cinema, and also for its
Norwegian branch: the gothic literature of the 1700s and 1800s.
David Punter has defined the gothic as a set of oppositions, the most impor-
tant being the opposition between the modern and the old-fashioned, the
civilised and the barbaric, elegance and crudity (1980: 6). These conflicts, as
well as the gothic tales’ preoccupation with madness, death and decay, can also
describe the horror film. The friction between the rational and the fantastic, a
product of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the subsequent Romantic
reaction, was a fertile ground for the pioneering works of authors like Horace
Walpole, Anne Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, John Polidori, Edgar Allan Poe and
H. P. Lovecraft (Cuddon [1976] 1998: 356; Botting 2014: 1–3). Their novels,
poems and short stories provided a seemingly endless source of inspiration
for the horror cinema that started developing early in the twentieth century in
Europe and America.
From the very beginning, the potential for trickery and effects in the
capture, editing and exhibition of moving pictures lent itself to the fantastic.
In particular, Georges Méliès would be remembered as a film pioneer for
whom the camera was ‘a machine to register the world of dreams and the
­supernatural [. . .]’ (Clarens 1967: 3). The silent era in Europe saw the rise of
significant precursors to horror cinema. German expressionist cinema yielded
the early classics The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920) and
Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922), the latter of which was an unauthorised

20
 the source of horror

adaptation of Bram Stoker’s gothic novel Dracula from 1897. In that same
decade, French impressionist cinema also mined gothic literature with The Fall
of the House of Usher (Jean Epstein, 1928), one of many adaptations of Poe’s
short story. The German silent horror cinema in particular would influence
the American horror cycle that began in 1931 with Universal’s Dracula (Tod
Browning) and Frankenstein (James Whale). These same creatures of gothic
literature would be the crux of the British Hammer horror movies that were
launched in the late 1950s, sporting elaborate Technicolor production designs
and a then-controversial abundance of bloody details.
The American horror film was usually considered a B-movie at best, with
a low or moderate budget and little artistic or commercial prestige. This
would change in the 1970s, when a string of high-profile and more expensive
Hollywood productions put the horror genre firmly in the mainstream, includ-
ing the much-coveted Oscar race. William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973),
Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976), Brian
De Palma’s Carrie (1976) and Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) all contributed to the
growing esteem of the horror genre and would all have long-term influence on
a new generation of filmmakers across the world, including Norway.
At the same time, a contrary trend was established in American cinema: the
independent low-budget horror movies that exploited simple premises and
the shock value of splatter effects. Among the most important movies of what
came to be known as the slasher subgenre of horror were The Texas Chain Saw
Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), Friday
the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes
Craven, 1984). Halloween was the movie that made a huge amount of money
on a very modest budget and thus inspired a long line of similarly constructed
tales of stalking and slashing, often featuring killers who would ultimately
become icons of the genre. Sequels, remakes and reboots would happen and
happen again in the decades that followed, as audiences flocked to experience
the predictable tension and release in stories about rampaging mass murderers
like Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger, and the resource-
ful young people who would narrowly escape them. Although the action
had been removed from European nineteenth-century castles and ­mansions
to the American suburbs and summer camps of the twentieth century, making
the murderous threat of violence all the more horrific, the gothic ­opposition
of the civilised against the barbaric was still clearly in evidence. It is largely
against a backdrop of filmmakers’ and audiences’ familiarity with these
Anglo-American horror cinema traditions and conventions that the coming of
Norwegian horror must be considered and understood.
Within the broad range of horror movie subgenres, the Norwegian p ­ ost-2000
wave of horror has to a large extent taken the shape of either slasher films or
psychological thrillers, subgenres that Freeland would describe as respectively

21
norwegian nightmares

graphic and uncanny horror (2000: 215 and 241). The main difference between
the two is that the threat in the slasher movie is one of physical violence to the
body, while the psychological horror film in Norway deals with emotional
and psychological disorientation. Arguably the most important filmmaker in
the latter subgenre is Pål Sletaune, who has created two movies of this kind:
Next Door (Naboer, 2005) and The Monitor (Babycall, 2011). These films
stand firmly in a gothic tradition, being akin and comparable to such literary
works as Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (1843) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s
‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892), stories that dwell on the gothic horror tropes
of shutting something out or shutting oneself in, in an attempt to somehow
escape from horrific realisation (Reiersen 2011; Andresen 2016: 165–6).
Pål Øie’s Dark Woods, the launching point for modern Norwegian horror
cinema, is just as clearly gothic, as is the sequel Dark Woods 2. In addition,
both films are also quite specifically Nordic horror movies. They revel in the
depiction of nature as an overwhelmingly sublime force, very much in the way
that Freeland conceptualises her uncanny category, and yet they have much in
common with the graphic slasher subgenre. The crossover between the graphic
horror of physical violence and the uncanny presence of supernatural forces of
nature is a significant hallmark of the Norwegian horror cinema that emerged
after 2000.

The turn to genre in Norwegian cinema

Norway, a very small country, has historically produced somewhere between
five and thirty feature films a year. This production has been largely depend-
ent on public funding, these days organised through the programmes of the
Norwegian Film Institute, and thus on government film policies. As a conse-
quence, the film culture of the country has a tradition for debating the purpose
and merits of Norwegian cinema as art or mass entertainment. There have been
cycles of popular genres throughout Norwegian film history, like the different
types of war films that have treated the German occupation of Norway during
the Second World War. Other genres, like the biographical film and the crime
film, have been experimented with at different points in time, but the comedy
is the only major genre that has stayed prolific and popular throughout the
history of Norwegian cinema (Iversen 2011: 145–155, 169–177, 191).
The popularity of Norwegian films as a gauge for success has been a ­contested
issue at several points in history. Should a small Nordic country cultivate artis-
tic and less commercial ambitions in its film policies and funding, or should
it be an aim to attract as many people as possible to Norwegian cinematic
features? After a period of social realism in the 1970s, which ultimately proved
unpopular with critics and had little impact at the box office, Norwegian
cinema took a commercial turn in the 1980s. Hollywood action films became

22
 the source of horror

the template for more immediately popular movies like Orion’s Belt (Orions
belte, Ola Solum, 1985) and Pathfinder (Veiviseren, Nils Gaup, 1987), as the
government worked to increase private investment in Norwegian film produc-
tion through tax incentives (Holst 1995: 58–61; Iversen and Solum 2010:
21–32). This period of action thrills that engaged larger audiences would prove
to be brief, and the commercial value of Norwegian cinema would be debated
again in the 1990s. However, the notion of looking to Hollywood for inspira-
tion had steered Norwegian film production’s early phases in the golden age of
the 1930s, it had given Norwegian cinema a popularity boost in the 1980s, and
it would return with force at the dawn of the new millennium.
As I touched upon in Chapter 1, the Hollywood-orientation in Norwegian
cinema in the 1920s and 1930s was part of an effort to pry the national
romantic Norwegian landscapes and Norway’s literary heritage away from
Swedish filmmakers. Norway’s film production was to be established as inde-
pendent from Sweden’s and Denmark’s, not necessarily as an aesthetic opposi-
tion to Hollywood cinema (Iversen 1997: 112–13; Myrstad 1997). Half a
century later, the action films of the 1980s were certainly inspired by American
genre filmmaking, but nevertheless featured sublime Nordic landscapes, as in
Pathfinder, and also discussed the specific geopolitical situation of Norway in
the Cold War, as in Orion’s Belt and After Rubicon (Etter Rubicon, Leidulv
Risan, 1987). It would therefore be erroneous to state unequivocally that
these films represented an Americanisation of Norwegian cinema, since they
could just as well be seen as a Norwegian appropriation of transnational genre
patterns.
Opinions were divided on the merits of the 1980s action film wave in
Norway. Some critics expressed dislike and concern over this new and com-
mercial direction, while others applauded the effort to engage larger audiences,
and still others claimed that these films did not go far enough in emulating
the Hollywood action cinema of the period (Andresen 2016: 44). However, the
look to America in the 1980s would not deliver a prolonged period of genre
filmmaking in Norway. Certain factors or premises had to be developed for
Norwegian genre cinema to become a bigger and more consistent phenom-
enon: more professionalised film and television education, the coming of age of
a new generation of genre fans, and several specific policy decisions by cabinets
and parliaments.
The Labour Government of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg presented new
film policies in 2001 that were intended to improve audience support for
Norwegian cinema by restructuring the funding system. The increased funding
was split along two tracks: money would be granted either on the basis of a
project’s artistic ambitions, or by considering its commercial appeal and its
potential to reach a wide audience. Inspired by the Danish Government’s 1998
‘Four-Year Plan’ for developing Denmark’s film production (Hjort 2000: 103),

23
norwegian nightmares

this market consideration was reinforced by the new 50/50 mechanism, a

­guarantee of 50 per cent funding if the first 50 per cent of the budget was
secured from private sources. The aim was to encourage filmmakers to create
more audience-friendly movies, and genre cinema has been consistently popular
throughout film history. A consequence of this incentive was a stronger focus
on crime fiction, romantic comedies and horror (St.meld. nr. 22 [2006–2007];
Iversen 2011: 294–5).
The policies worked as intended. Six Norwegian feature films played in
cinemas in 2002, a number that rose to sixteen in 2003 (Film & Kino 2010:
53–5). Audiences increased considerably, as did the esteem of Norwegian
cinema among the critics. This coincided with the 2000 and 2002 graduations
of the first two classes of students from the newly established Norwegian Film
School in Lillehammer, classes that included prolific future filmmakers like
Sara Johnsen and Roar Uthaug. The systematic cultivation of talent along with
the redirected government film policies would be important factors in main-
taining the popularity of Norwegian cinema, which has consistently hovered
at around 20 per cent of the domestic box office ever since, some years even
reaching 24 to 25 per cent.
Prime Minister Stoltenberg’s second Government, the Red-Green Coalition,
followed up his first Government’s film policies with the ‘Pathfinder’ white
paper in 2007. This document evaluated the previous Stoltenberg Government’s
achievements and added several new suggestions that were geared towards a
high output of Norwegian cinematic features and a solid structure of private
production companies. The focus would continue to be firmly on expanding
the popularity and commercial viability of Norwegian cinema, while also
nurturing artistic talent that could provide the country with prestigious awards
abroad (St.meld. nr. 22 [2006–2007]: 41–5).
It is important to note that a big part of the rationalisation behind spending
public resources on developing the production of Norwegian film was the cul-
tural significance with which cinema is imbued. In Denmark, the ­‘Four-Year
Plan’ had the stated aim of using cinema to ‘express and sustain Danish
culture, language, and identity’ (Hjort 2000: 103). This was echoed in the
Norwegian Government’s 2007 ‘Pathfinder’ document, where Norwegian
cinema was considered essential to fostering ‘Norwegian language, culture
and storytelling traditions’ (St.meld. nr. 22 [2006–2007]: 7). However debat-
able these concepts might be, government film policies in Norway were clearly
primed to support much of what would shortly follow in terms of horror
cinema.
In the time between Stoltenberg’s two periods in charge, the second
Government of Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik, a Centre-Right coali-
tion, had overseen a crucial liberalisation of censorship laws in 2004 that
would have an impact on genre filmmaking in Norway. Authorities would

24
 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
If the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund
in writing without further opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set

forth in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’,
WITH NO OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied

warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this
agreement violates the law of the state applicable to this
agreement, the agreement shall be interpreted to make the
maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by the applicable
state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any provision of
this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.

1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the

Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the
Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any
volunteers associated with the production, promotion and
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless
from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees, that
arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you
do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project
Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or
deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any Defect
you cause.

Section 2. Information about the Mission

of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new
computers. It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of
volunteers and donations from people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the

assistance they need are critical to reaching Project
Gutenberg™’s goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™
collection will remain freely available for generations to come. In
2001, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was
created to provide a secure and permanent future for Project
Gutenberg™ and future generations. To learn more about the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and how your
efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 and the
Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.

Section 3. Information about the Project

Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-
profit 501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the
laws of the state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status
by the Internal Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or
federal tax identification number is 64-6221541. Contributions
to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation are tax
deductible to the full extent permitted by U.S. federal laws and
your state’s laws.

The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500

West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact
links and up to date contact information can be found at the
Foundation’s website and official page at
www.gutenberg.org/contact
 Section 4. Information about Donations to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without
widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission
of increasing the number of public domain and licensed works
that can be freely distributed in machine-readable form
accessible by the widest array of equipment including outdated
equipment. Many small donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly
important to maintaining tax exempt status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws

regulating charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of
the United States. Compliance requirements are not uniform
and it takes a considerable effort, much paperwork and many
fees to meet and keep up with these requirements. We do not
solicit donations in locations where we have not received written
confirmation of compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or determine
the status of compliance for any particular state visit
www.gutenberg.org/donate.

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states

where we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know
of no prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from
donors in such states who approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot

make any statements concerning tax treatment of donations
received from outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp
our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current

donation methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a
number of other ways including checks, online payments and
credit card donations. To donate, please visit:
www.gutenberg.org/donate.

Section 5. General Information About

Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could
be freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose
network of volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several

printed editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by
copyright in the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus,
we do not necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any
particular paper edition.

Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,

including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new
eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter to hear
about new eBooks.