By Gareth Jo

André Øvredal’s career was launched with this humorous and remarkably poignant found-footage love letter to the traditional trolls of Norwegian folk tales.  Before moving on to The Autopsy of Jane Doe and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Øvredal used the limitations of the found-footage horror genre to challenge his team to create something innovative and entertaining.  The story is simple.  A bear is suspected of killing livestock in the Norwegian countryside and may also have killed some tourists.  A team of college film students decide to investigate, and they uncover more than they could ever have imagined.  The aesthetics of the genre greatly benefit the low budget nature, but the special effects are still impressive 13 years after its initial release. I definitely recommend watching it in the original non-dubbed format. I recently watched it in the dubbed format, and it greatly influences your experience and perception of characters in a negative way. I can still remember what it was like to watch the film at midnight in the crowded library theater at the Sundance Film Festival.  I was fully immersed with that audience and went out into the snowy landscape, looking carefully for any evidence of trolls in the mountains of Utah.

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