Arguably, the horror film is the most frowned upon film genre, perhaps only surpassed by the porn film. Historically, the horror film has often been seen by Nordic film critics and film censors since the 1930s as something foreign or as yet another sign of unlawful Americanisation. Although the production of genre films has been prominent among all Nordic film industries ever since the silent film period, these genre films have mostly consisted of comedies and, especially in recent years, crime and detective films. The Nordic horror film in all its shapes and forms has been an anomaly in the Nordic countries, and this argument does not include the somewhat anachronistic genre labelling of films such as The Phantom Chariot (Körkarlen, Victor Sjostrom, 1921) and The Vampire (Vampyr, Carl Theodore Dreyer, 1932).

This historic rejection can be explained by three interrelated factors: (1) a weak tradition of horror in Nordic film and literature; (2) an officially sanctioned aversion from depictions of horror which was seen as ‘brutalizing, arousing, or creating confusion to law and order’ (Skoglund 1971: 18) via the establishment of national film censorship boards in all the Nordic countries; (3) the difficulties of financing horror films as a consequence of this publicly sanctioned aversion. When state-funded film institutes were established in the Nordic countries between 1955 and 1972, they did not fund ‘low-brow’ horror films. This in turn created two outcomes. First, only a few feature horror films have been produced in all of the Nordic countries and, consequently, compiling a precise list to cover these is not the easiest task. Nevertheless, all in all there have been approximately ninety feature films produced that could be labelled as horror films. These range from Iceland's two horror films, The Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre (Julius Kemp, 2009) and Frost (Reynir Lyngdal, 2012) to the fifty or so horror films produced in Sweden. Second, and the main reason for the difficulty in compiling a list, is the fact that these feature horror films have been produced, almost without exception, with extremely low budgets and outside the regular film industry.