Norway is a very small country, and public funding has long been necessary to maintain a national cinema. Against this background, commercial film genres (with the sole exception of the comedy) had never taken permanent hold at any point in Norway’s cinema history, until shortly after 2000. Since then, popular genres like the action film, the romantic comedy and the war film have proliferated in Norway. Norwegian horror fiction also came to a massive turning point in 2003: that year saw the release of Dark Woods, the first clear-cut and successful Norwegian horror film to hit cinemas since Lake of the Dead in 1958. For the past two decades, genre entertainment has reached unprecedented popularity in Norwegian cinema, including the previously shunned horror film. In fact, Norway has become the only Nordic country to cultivate a regular output of horror, both in underground moviemaking as well as the mainstream cinema which is the focus of the present book.

Besides Dark Woods by director Pål Øie, my book will give particular attention to the Cold Prey trilogy of slasher films that started with Roar Uthaug’s Cold Prey in 2006; the psychological horror films Next Door (2005) and The Monitor (2011) by Pål Sletaune, and Joachim Trier’s Thelma (2017); as well as the horror-related genre hybrids Troll Hunter (2010) by André Øvredal, and Ragnarok (2013) by Mikkel Brænne Sandemose. These films are major works of commercial and artistic importance in Norway’s horror cinema tradition, although many others will be discussed along the way. I will also chart the changes and continuities that are discernible in the development of Norwegian horror from the original Lake of the Dead by Kåre Bergstrøm in 1958 to the modern re-adaptation of the same source novel, Nini Bull Robsahm’s Lake of Death in 2019.

This book follows on from my PhD research into popular Norwegian cinema, a project which was designed to serve the need for a closer look at how and why horror became a mainstay in Norwegian national cinema, and how this tradition relates to the major global force of Hollywood genre cinema. Genre entertainment, including horror fiction, enjoys great popularity in Norway these days.