2 - The Source of Horror

Summary

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 constitute 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 emanates from water. It often rises up from the deep darkness 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.