Roar Uthaug is a master of genre film. His first directorial feature was the excellent slasher, Cold Prey (2006), and he then helmed Norway’s first disaster film, The Wave, in 20015. His latest is a monster movie – also an action adventure film, a disaster film, and a Norwegian kaiju movie. Released by Netflix in 2022, Troll is about an ancient being awakened by an explosion detonated in the mountains of Norway. The film is fairly self-conscious about its genre origins: one character, early on, suggests that the creature emerging from the mountain is “King Kong” – and in a later montage of “Breaking News” reports, a Japanese journalist asks, “Could this be a Norwegian Godzilla?”
Troll resembles no film, perhaps, so much as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Eugène Lourié, 1953), in which a long-buried dinosaur is awakened from the ice of the Arctic by an atomic blast test. (I’ve written about the politics of that film here.) Indeed, the protagonist of Troll, Professor Nora Tidemann (Ine Marie Wilmann) is, like the protagonists of Beast, a paleontologist, interrupted in her search for dinosaur fossils by the troll’s awakening – and the Norwegian government’s consequent summoning of her as expert. It turns out, moreover, that the troll, just like the rhedosaurus in Beast, is heading toward its “home,” which just happens, in both cases, to be one of the most populated of urban areas: Manhattan in Beast and Oslo in Troll.[i] The film’s respective monsters do some rampaging, of course, on their way home.
As fascinating as Troll is as a monster movie, however, I want to suggest that it also overlaps to some degree with folk horror.
Troll’s folklore
In Beast, the discovery of what the creature is, what it wants, and where it’s going is exclusively the domain of science (paleontologists, specifically). In Troll, however, such answers are offered by folklore. While Nora is indeed a paleontologist, and draws on her scientific expertise to some degree, it is her childhood immersion in folklore and the presence of her folklorist father, Tobias Tidemann (Gard B. Eidsvold), that clarifies the threat that Norway is actually facing. The troll is a creature of folklore, in other words, not a creature that can be categorized by science, as was the rhedosaurus in Beast.
This folklore is, moreover, expressly pre-Christian. Tobias tells Nora, Andreas (the sympathetic Prime Minister’s aide), and Captain Kris (the sympathetic military guy) that trolls once roamed all over Norway but that the “Christianization of Norway” rendered them extinct. Presumably, Christians set out to systematically destroy trolls, which is why they, in turn, attack any creatures of “Christian blood” they smell. The drama staged in Troll is, therefore, a drama expressly between the embodiment of a Norwegian pagan past and a Christian modernity. This particular dynamic is the classic structuring drama of folk horror.
The troll seems heading for Oslo
That the troll awakened in the isolated Dovre mountains and seems determined to devastate Oslo also seems to map the rural-urban conflict, typical of folk horror, onto the pagan-Christian conflict. However, this segregation of the archaic and pre-Christian to rurality and of the modern and Christian to the urban doesn’t quite hold. After all, the troll may have awakened in the remote mountains, but the reason it’s heading to Oslo is because the city is its traditional home. And the people who are capable of believing in the troll – which is all the ‘good’ and heroic characters in the film – are not demarcated in and as some rural enclave, some expressly isolated pagan community: they are all part of “mainstream” society, working not just as folklorists (Tobias) but as scientists (Nora) and for the government (Andreas and his Star-Trek-fan friend Sigrid) and the military (Captain Kris). The film does, as folk horror generally does, divide its characters into “pagans” – those who are capable of belief in trolls – and modern Christians – those who are incapable and who, of course, just want to destroy the troll. But these two sets of people live together, are interwoven, are not divided into separate, bounded communities – which is more akin to how folklore beliefs actually ‘live’ in the real world.
Like much folk horror, then, Troll is centrally about folklore and about a fundamental clash between those who can apprehend the “pagan” and those who deny it – those who show themselves to be part of the Christian Norway that wiped trolls out.
Folk horror’s environmentalism
Troll also veers into folk horror terrain in its deep ecological significance. It is important to note that, for Tobias Tidemann, the film’s folklorist, trolls are real – all the myths are true, and the folk tales about trolls are “meant to cover up the truth.” According to Tobias, trolls are quite simply (and like dinosaurs) part of nature: they are “made of earth and stone.” “Supernature,” Nora writes in her notebook. The film visually reinforces this fact with its multiple shots of the troll emerging from the mountain and lying camouflaged as mountain. Trolls are indeed “of earth and stone” – enmeshed with the mountains they inhabit, so akin to mountains that they are a part of them. Folklore, according to Tobias, emerged to defame these natural beings: “Every recorded fairy tale was designed to tarnish their legacy,” he insists. This tarnishing was undoubtedly to facilitate the destruction of trolls, as they were swept aside by Christianizing Norway – as they were rendered, like so many other creatures, extinct.
The troll emerges from the mountains
Folk horror’s “sacrifice zones”
The troll’s identification with nature itself throughout the film is important because it reorients the notion of “sacrifice” that is so crucial to folk horror. In traditional folk horror narratives, some unlucky character is sacrificed at the culmination of the film – think Sergeant Neil Howie burned alive at the end of The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973) or Dani’s boyfriend Christian burned alive in the bear skin at the end of Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019). These films epitomize the concluding element in Adam Scovell’s well-known “folk horror chain” – the “summoning / happening.”[ii]
I have argued elsewhere, however, that due to folk horror’s fairly common environmental interests, the notion of “sacrifice” is often oriented away from the human characters and toward the land itself. Like other ecological folk horror narratives, Troll fails to offer the typical “sacrifice” central to folk horror and instead represents the land itself as a “sacrifice zone”: the land and the community that lives on the land (in this case, the trolls that used to roam Norway) are ceded to the inexorable processes of (Christianized) development.[iii] Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco, in Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012), define “sacrifice zones” as those areas “that have been offered up for exploitation in the name of profit, progress, and technological advancement.”[iv]
Not only have trolls (and the mountains with which they are aligned) been “sacrificed” in Norway’s past, but there is an ongoing sacrifice in the development of the land – specifically the mountains. The beginning of Troll is critical to this thematic. After a short opening scene that introduces a younger Nora and Tobias and their love of the mountains, the film shifts to the present-day in which the “Troll Peaks” in the Dovre Mountains are being blasted open so that a tunnel for Norway’s new high-speed train can be run through them. The scene includes a crowd of environmentalist protestors holding placards and chanting “Let the mountain live.” When the blast goes ahead anyway, the troll emerges from the mountain, embodying the mountain and its fight to live.
The troll / mountain’s fight to live is, however, futile – despite the fact that the protagonists of the film are sympathetic to both. The “sacrifice” of the mountain that goes ahead at the beginning of the film, regardless of the protestors, is twinned by the sacrifice of the troll at the end of the film. Even though Nora has a change of heart at the last minute and doesn’t go through with her plan to destroy the troll, the logic of the film effects the same destruction anyway: the sun rises and the troll turns to stone. Development is inexorable: the high-speed railway must go forward; Norway’s global economy as embodied by this critical transportation system and by Oslo itself must be saved. This inexorable progress creates the inevitable “sacrifice zone”: the mountain and the troll that is aligned with it. Together, they are what is sacrificed in the ecological folk horror narrative of Troll.
Notes
[i] I discuss the representation of creatures emerging from thawing ice in sci-fi/horror film in “Climate Change, ‘Anthropocene Unburials’, and Agency on a Thawing Planet,” Science Fiction Film and Television Studies, special issue, “Creature Features and the Environment,” edited by Christy Tidwell and Bridgette Barclay, 14.3 (Fall 2021): 375-93, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/815925.
[ii] Adam Scovell, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (Auteur, 2017), p. 18-19.
[iii] I discuss the theory of ‘sacrifice zones’ in folk horror in “Sacrifice Zones in Appalachian Folk Horror,” Folk Horror: New Global Pathways, edited by Dawn Keetley and Ruth Heholt (forthcoming, University of Wales Press, 2023), and in “Forms of Folk Horror in Halloween III: Season of the Witch,” Journal of American Culture 45.4 (December 2022), pp. 373-85. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jacc.13405.
[iv] Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (Nation Books, 2012), p. xi.
