The turn to genre in Norwegian cinema after 2000 created a tradition of Norwegian horror. The slasher film in particular had proven popular with national audiences, but the psychological horror subgenre had also provided commercially and artistically successful films. Taking the entertainment value further, filmmakers would soon rip another leaf out of Hollywood’s book and combine horror tropes with comedy, action-adventure and found footage in high-concept genre hybrids. The debate about Norwegian cinema’s relationship with Hollywood would continue, while audiences in Norway flocked to genre entertainment.

There is much genre fiction among the most popular films in Norwegian film history, examples being the animated comedy The Pinchcliffe Grand Prix (Flåklypa Grand Prix, Ivo Caprino, 1975), the action movie Pathfinder (Veiviseren, Nils Gaup, 1987), the comedy Elling (Petter Næss, 2001), the war film Max Manus (Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg, 2008) and the disaster movie The Wave (Bølgen, Roar Uthaug, 2015). The Norwegian horror movies are no commercial match for these, but some of them make an impressive showing in cinemas. In particular, horror tropes have seeped into broader cinema entertainment in the form of genre hybrids.

Tommy Wirkola’s Dead Snow (Død snø) from 2009 was a zombie movie where dark humour mixed with splatter horror, and André Øvredal’s Troll Hunter (Trolljegeren) from 2010 was a found-footage mockumentary that also mixed comedy and horror. Furthermore, the action adventure was combined with monster horror in Mikkel Brænne Sandemose’s Ragnarok (Gåten Ragnarok) from 2013. Indeed, when horror has taken part in Norwegian genre hybrids, it has usually done so in the shape of monsters.

The monsters of Norway: Trolls and zombies

One might think that trolls have been regulars in Norwegian cinema, but they have not. Apart from the puppet short films of animator Ivo Caprino in the 1960s, these mythical beasts of the wilderness have been conspicuously absent from Norwegian movies. Most likely they would have been too complicated and costly to realise in the days before CGI, but perhaps one also needs to view Norwegian culture, history and folklore from the outside to appreciate their significance and uniqueness. These creatures have finally entered Norwegian cinema with a new generation of filmmakers who are more naturally attuned to Hollywood aesthetics than before.