1 - Introduction to Norwegian Nightmares

Summary

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 incarnation 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 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 desolations 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?