Nordic Horror

NORDIC HORROR [1950-1990]

Instead of calling this category "Scandinavian countries," which to some would simply include Sweden, Denmark and Norway, I'm using the more generic term "Nordic" here, which will also include Finland, Iceland, Åland Islands, Faroe Islands, Svalbard and Jan Mayen and, because it's sometimes though not always included, Greenland (which is sometimes grouped with North America). That's my best option considering most other countries under the Nordic umbrella had next to no film industry, at least not until here recently, and don't really merit their own page. 

To my knowledge, no pre-1990 horror films were produced in four out of the nine countries in this grouping. Greenland's first horror film didn't come until 2011 with Malik Kleist's Qaqqat alanngui, while the first (and thus far only) feature-length horror film from the Faroe Islands appears to be the "dark psychological drama" Ludo (2014) directed by Katrin Ottarsdóttir. Åland Islands, which has a population of just 28,000, Svalbard, with just 2,500 residents, and Jan Mayen, with no permanent residents as its a volcanic island, all show no horror films on a search. Hell, the former shows no films period while the latter two are made up almost exclusively of documentaries made there by outside crews within the last 10 years. That leaves us with just the original Scandinavian trio plus Finland and Iceland, each of which will get their own write-up on their own page. None of these countries were uber prolific in the genre during the 40 year block of time we cover here though most are worth discussing for several benchmark films.

NORDIC COUNTRIES

Click on one of the flags below to learn more...

If I dig up other information about any of the countries without a page, I'll make sure to post it.

Ruka (1965)

... aka: Hand, The

Directed by:

Jirí Trnka

The protagonist in The Hand is content. Very content. He's so content that he even has a smile on his face while he's sleeping. Instead of being like many of us, moaning and groaning every morning as soon as the alarm goes off, this guy is so excited about facing the day that he does literal cartwheels as soon as he gets out of bed. And it's easy to see why: He's able to do exactly what he wants to do all day, every day with minimal distractions. In this case that's make pottery for his beloved plant, which he hopes will bloom into a beautiful flower one day. Hey, we all have that one hobby or interest or love or goal that keeps us going, right? It doesn't really matter if nobody else understands that one thing we have. We know how it makes us feel and that's enough. However, there's always the possibility of whatever that is being taken away...

One morning while he's making a pot, a knock sounds at the door. When he tries to answer it, no one's there. And then a white gloved hand suddenly comes barging through the window, knocking his beloved plant off the window seal and shattering the pot. He tries to be polite and greet the hand, but it goes right over to his potter's wheel and destroys his current pot; molding the clay into a pointing hand instead. In other words, it's not the least bit interested in his wants, but only in its own. The man shoos the hand back through the window, closes and locks it... but it's not going away so easily.

The hand next forces its way back through the door and pushes a cardboard box in. An annoying ringing noise prompts the man to dig through it. He finds a phone and the hand is on the other line, still insisting on its hand sculpture and even offering to pay. The man throws the phone out of the window but it isn't long until the hand returns, this time with a TV set that plays nothing but hand propaganda, showing the scales of justice, the Statue of Liberty's torch and, more ominously, a boxing glove, a skeletal hand and a hand holding a pistol. The hand even threateningly points a finger at him just like a gun. There will be consequences if he doesn't do what he's ordered to do.

The potter finally puts up an effort to physically fight back but he's no match for such a powerful figure. The hand turns black and, using puppet strings, forces him into a cage where it directs his every movement in sculpting a towering white hand. He's fitted with a laurel wreath and given medals for his cooperation but decides to destroy his creation and make a run for it, which leads to tragic consequences.

While I've seen multiple interpretations of this piece, when you read more about the director's life in then-Communist Czechoslovakia, and how his work was frequently banned there, the original intent is pretty obvious. The potter is an artist unwilling to compromise his artistic drive / vision despite insistence, harassment, coercion, bribery, threats of violence and even the possibility of death, while the hand is representative of a restrictive, totalitarian government out to either control or stop the artist's message. No matter what you personally get out of this, it's a brilliant mix of stop motion and puppetry and is clever, sometimes funny, often bleak and disturbing and, ultimately, actually quite sad.

Trnka was mostly prolific as a children's book illustrator, but made over a dozen animated shorts. This was his last and many consider it his finest work. It won numerous awards, including the Grand Prix at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival. Later, Annecy also gave it a special award as the best short shown there up until 1990. Trnka passed away in 1969 at the age of 57, just after winning the Hans Christian Andersen Award for his illustration work.

★★★1/2

Glerbrot (1988) [TV]

... aka: Broken Glass

Directed by:

Kristín Jóhannesdóttir

Glerbrot checks a number of boxes that interest me right out of the gate. First, it's Icelandic and, as per my last count, one of just eight genre films produced there prior to 1990. Second, it was made by a female director. Though having a female filmmaker at the helm of a horror film is not an uncommon occurrence nowadays, it was back when this was made. Jóhannesdóttir even went one step further by also co-scripting, editing and shooting this. Third, this features alternative pop star Björk (credited under her full name Björk Guðmundsdóttir) in the lead role back when she was still with her band The Sugarcubes and years before her 1993 solo breakout album, Debut. Prior to this, Bjork had acted in the black-and-white art film The Juniper Tree (filmed in 1987 but not released until 1990), which was witchcraft-themed and also made by a female director, the late Nietzchka Keene.

Unlike Glerbrot, which runs just 50 minutes and was an Icelandic TV movie made for RÚV (basically Iceland's equivalent to PBS), Juniper played in theaters around the world and took home a few festival awards. Still, it was and still remains a film of limited interest due to its art-house-ish-ness and seldom been viewed despite getting a DVD release in 2002 from Rhino and a Blu-ray release in 2019 from Arbelos Films. Glerbot, on the other hand, doesn't even have that luxury. I couldn't find a single VHS or DVD release for this title. The best that's currently available is a copy ripped from TV.

And, finally, this is just plain weird. I couldn't quite figure out what it was attempting to say or why it was even made. It's sort of a mix of women-in-prison film, nunsploitation film (minus nuns if that makes any sense!) and sane (maybe) person locked up in a corrupt asylum film with flashes of horror, torture, surrealism and religious iconography.

An unkempt old man (Helgi Skúlason) with the biblical name of Theofilus is washing clothes in what appears to be a laundromat located inside a cave but just turns out to be a cavernous laundry room (?!) inside their home with TEN stacked washing machines and dryers. The man's bitchy, miserable daughter-in-law, Liney (Margrét Ákadóttir), walks in and starts arguing with him about how much she hates both him and his son. He tells her she has no room to talk because, back in her younger years, she partied a lot and was far from a pristine virgin. When her drunk husband Jon (Pétur Einarsson) comes stumbling home, the two get into an even worse fight with her chastising him for being a drunk and him chastising her for being a whore. It gets a little physical and has to be broken up by Theofilus.

The married couple both want to send Maria (Björk), his crazy-haired teenage daughter from an earlier marriage, away because she's got a foul mouth, emotional issues and is staying out all night doing God knows what. What she's actually been doing, unless it is all being imagined (certainly a possibility given the the rest of the film) is shooting some kind of music video on a massive sound stage with a crashed airplane and lots of swirling fog.

After yet another screaming match, the parents get their way and two stern older women (Kristbjörg Kjeld and Margrét Guðmundsdóttir); a doctor and the director of the asylum (which they call a "boarding school") show up, get the parent's permission to "be rough with her, if needed," and then drag a screaming Maria off. They drive out into the country to the seaside asylum, walk down a corridor and then throw Maria into a cell with just a bed and crosses on the walls. When she starts acting up, they threaten to drug her. They then make her strip naked and one of the women gropes her while asking her to pray to God for forgiveness. In other words, a typical religious establishment.

Maria is haunted by frequent nightmares of a cross being thrust in her face and the doctors coming at her with scissors (probably trying to give her a butch haircut). The staff is entirely female and also entirely lesbian. The lez asylum director tries to grope Maria again; justifying that by informing her that the devil lives inside men and that messing around with them will make her suffer in hell for all eternity. Yet doing it with her is apparently OK. The sin, according to the director, is entirely masculine and she's so dead set in her beliefs that the asylum cat also has to be female. Some of the other inmates start indulging in PG-rated girl lovin', even out in the open, and the staff slip sleeping pills into the milk at night to make sure they don't cause any problems. After her idiot parents stop by for a visit and prove they're still utterly useless, Maria plots to break out with help from her sort-of boyfriend, Vinur (Björn Baldvinsson).

So what is this all about? Well, uh... Fairly early on, Maria is shown overdosing on drugs she buys from some guys on the set. That leads me to believe she's either in the process of dying and this is kind of a delirious jumble of her final beliefs / thoughts / memories or that it's all some kind of drug-induced delusion. Religious imagery is all over the place, and the final scene of her going off into the blindingly bright snow and then lying down to sleep is obviously a death / afterlife metaphor. Making all of the asylum staff predatory, evil lesbians whose chief objective is to turn their young charges against men, and her savior finally coming in the form of a man, is a story point that has me even more befuddled. I doubt they intended this to be offensive, but if anyone decries this homophobic I can certainly see why!

As for Björk, she gets to wear weird clothes, have weird hair, make weird faces, do a little bit of singing and shriek, curse, cry and scream in hysterics most of the time, so nothing out of the ordinary for her. She appears topless during a scene, but that isn't much of a surprise since she'd go on to pose nude plenty of other times. This almost seems like a precursor to when Lars von Trier put her through the emotional ringer playing a death row inmate in Dancer in the Dark (2000).

★★