Camera, Creatures, and Conflict

Every culture has its own mystical, mythical creatures. The English have their grindylow; the Irish their leprechaun; the Americans have bigfoot; the German their doppelgänger; the Greeks have their cyclops and gorgon; the Scandinavians their kraken; the Arabs have djinns; the Slavs have vampires; the Scots have the Loch Ness monster; the Jewish have their leviathan; the Japanese have oni; while we, the Hindus have our danavas, rakshasas, and icchadhaari nags.

In his second directorial venture, Trolljegeren a.k.a. TrollHunter (2010) the Norwegian director André Øvredal has brought to life a similar legendary creature from Nordic folklore—the troll, which is typically a hideous cave-dwelling being that is as old as the mountains and forests in which it dwells. 

Narrated in a found-footage format—a genre pioneered by Ruggero Deodato in his notorious Cannibal Holocaust (1980); that includes The Blair Witch Project (1999), Paranormal Activity (2007), REC (2007), Cloverfield (2008), and Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)—we are informed via a disclaimer at the beginning of the film that what we are about to see is an uncut version of almost five hours of footage found in two hard drives. Unlike most other examples of this particular genre, which jar the senses and leave behind a feeling of motion sickness due to the epileptic seizures that seem to grasp the camera in a stranglehold every now and then, the found-footage style actually works for Trolljegeren. This is simply because it treats the narrative style not as a gimmick, but as a visual representation of its basic premise—fairy tales.

After all, in our childhood, those stories were brought to life by someone else—our parents or even our grandparents—who read them to us. We saw in our mind’s eye what they described while narrating the awe-inducing worlds hidden within those pages. In Trolljegeren, we see what three college students: Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterus), Johanna (Johanna Mørck), and Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) encountered while they accompanied Hans (Otto Jespersen), an unsung hero of Norway—a hunter whose identity and profession are both a national secret—in his perilous missions aboard his UV-floodlight equipped, armoured with iron spikes Land Rover.

It is a classic fairytale set up. Three characters, who depict our mind (Thomas, the reporter), eyes (Kalle, the cameraman), and our ears (Johanna, the sound recordist) befriend an intrepid hunter of mythical creatures and embark on the adventure of their lifetime. As the trio gradually eases their way into Hans’ life and livelihood, we, too, find ourselves warming up to this gruff, physically scarred man, and beginning to buy into his eccentricities.

We learn how Hans, an ex-Navy man, is the sole troll hunter in the whole of Norway—a job he has been silently carrying out for over three decades. We realise how officials from the country’s wildlife advisory board are involved in creating a smokescreen about trolls’ existence, by hoodwinking the general public in believing that it is bears or tornadoes that are uprooting trees and shifting boulders. Most importantly, we get an insight into these centuries-old creatures. While tracking trolls with remarkable names such as raglefant, tusseladd, and dovregubben, Thomas, Johanna and Kalle find out that some trolls have three heads, while others are giants; the best way to avoid being sniffed out by a troll is to rub one’s body with troll stink; they love to chew on old tyres, though their normal diet is rocks; they are nocturnal creatures, who can detect Christian blood from afar; and that ultraviolet rays are fatal to trolls—a burst of it and they are likely to turn to stone or simply explode. 

But such pedantic knowledge pale in comparison to the first-hand experience of coming face-to-face with a three-headed tusseladd. The initial fear of having a giant creature stomping towards the camera while uttering a blood-curdling roar soon makes way to the glee that follows the realisation that the bedtime stories one had listened in rapt attention to during our childhood were in fact true! We find this emotion writ large on Johanna’s face once Hans calcifies the monstrous creature using UV ray floodlights. Øvredal had, in fact, portended that the character who would be the first to embrace the fact that trolls could be around us had to be Johanna when he had focused on her playing with a stuffed tiger that looked like Hobbes. Surely, a girl who believes in a talking tiger would be more susceptible to a towering troll!

Like a seasoned storyteller, the two-film-old Øvredal, and his co-writer Håvard S Johansen are both aware that the spine of any story, fairy tale or otherwise, is conflict. While the clash between man and beast is evident in the title of the film itself—with a reference to the adverse effect of global warming on flora, fauna, and wildlife thrown in for good measure—there are other, more subtle, allusions, as well. Hans reveals he hates his job, not so much because the pay is meagre and he has to work nights, but because he regrets having to massacre pregnant, and even young trolls, who can barely walk. At a more broad level, the perpetual discord between fantasy and reality—and our preponderance to find a ‘natural solution’ to everything—is brought to the fore when Øvredal offers a faux-scientific explanation to why trolls cannot stand sunlight and any other source of ultraviolet radiation. It is as if sunlight is a metaphor for the light of knowledge and rationality that turns these walking mythical creatures into immobile rubbles of stone. And therein lies a similarity with us. While for humans it is ashes to ashes and dust to dust, these concrete-eating creatures return to stone.

In keeping with the fairy tale flavour, Øvredal has also peppered his film with humour. It is impossible to keep a straight face when a ghillie suit attired Hans burst out of the jungle screaming ‘Trolls!’ or when a Polish guy expresses in broken English his desire not to ask questions because it might lead to problems he would love to avoid by uttering, ‘Why problem make when you know problem have you don’t want to make?’ Perhaps, the best example of humour occurs at the fag end of the film. In sync with the essence of Trolljegeren, which mixes fantasy with reality, Øvredal takes an actual footage of a press conference by the Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, where he had mentioned the word ‘troll’. Though the context was different—the politician was actually referring to an oilfield beyond the Norwegian coast, which has the same name as the mythical creature—the innovative editing does elicit smiles. 

As a filmmaking fraternity, the Nordic industry has been experiencing a second coming of late. In 2009, Norway burst into the limelight with the Nazi zombie flick Død Snø, or Dead Snow. A year later, the Finns turned the concept of Santa Claus on its head with the superlative Rare Exports. Now, with Trolljegeren, Øvredal has succeeded in something that has for a long time been the realm of directors like Spielberg—reliving our childhood, revisiting our infantile fantasies, and reaffirming our belief in them.