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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2023
Dark Woods (Villmark) aligned the past of the Norwegian horror classic Lake of the Dead (De dødes tjern) with a modern genre expression, and Cold Prey (Fritt vilt) embraced a specific subgenre to become the first diecast Norwegian slasher film. Of great importance to this kind of horror film is the opening of the body, the suspenseful stabbing and slashing that constitutes the arguably greatest attraction of the subgenre. After a relatively subdued launch with Dark Woods, the more self-consciously generic Cold Prey revelled in this hallmark, guiding the Norwegian slasher into a much more graphically intense landscape.
The horror genre is by nature transnational, but the slasher film found its form in American independent cinema. Roar Uthaug’s Cold Prey is essentially a Norwegian take on the classic American slasher that came into being in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and its commercial success prepared the ground for other slashers to follow. What they all have in common is the rural and wild settings that hide threats of death and destruction, a landscape that is mythical in its portraits of degenerate countryside people and at the same time nationally specific enough to set the Norwegian subgenre apart. One motif encompasses most Norwegian slashers: tense anxiety, and sometimes violent conflict, between the urbane and the rural, between townspeople and country folk.
Mutilation and murder in rural Norway
The title sequence of Cold Prey presents a montage of real news coverage from papers and television: short bursts of headlines and reports about missing persons in the mountains and desperate search and rescue missions. Time and time again people are feared to have perished, and the montage lingers on the headline ‘Lost without trace’. In this way the filmmakers try to connect their slasher movie to the recognisable horror that news coverage imparts on us every day in real life. Their goal is a sense of authenticity and realism, the opening of a dark journey into a somehow credibly Norwegian fictional universe.
Cynthia A. Freeland has pointed out that the attraction of the slasher movie is very similar to the attraction of news coverage: horrific acts, violent attacks on the body, the suffering of innocent victims.
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