How Scary is Human Anyway? (Trollhunter: Where Jump Scares Fear to Tread)

Today we discuss Trollhunter,

Source

Where man fears to tread.

I love this movie and for the longest time, I couldn't exactly put my finger on why. 

I rewatched it as a part of fellowship, the sharing with a community of artists, and I think I finally figured it out:

The trolls are not the monster.

 Trolls:

So we start the entire experience following an amateur Norwegian film crew attempting a big scoop for their university. 

They are plucky, young, and nervous: you know...the audience. 

So they go through the gorgeous Norwegian countryside in search of a bear poacher, which they establish early on is a very bad thing. 

The kids follow a man called Hans (bear poacher) as he goes deeper and deeper into the wilderness only to discover he is out hunting trolls. 

This is about thirty minutes into the movie and we haven't seen anything yet. 

No jump scares.

Not a damn thing. 

And around this point my inebriated compatriots are just about ready to turn this film off and why aren't we watching something else god bless it?! 

And then this happens...

And the entire game changes!

Suddenly there is action and desperation and a really well done transformation scene I was not expecting from a B sci-fi flick.

Suddenly we are excited to see what happens next.

Well, the kids follow Hans after that and start believing him, which leads us to our next bit:

The Hunters: 

This is Hans.
And he has been doing this job for too long.

He reveals that there are different types of trolls and they cause all kinds of problems, but ultimately, they are just animals.
Animals with a lot of aggression and life span, but animals still.

He is a bully.
A redeemable bully, but any one who goes into a tunnel system and murders dozens of troll mothers and children and fathers for an underground train is not a nice guy.
And he knows it.

Suddenly, we start seeing the truth of the movie:

The trolls are not the monster.

The bureaucracy is the real monster.
It is the cold, calculated, almost farcical cover up of a breed of animal that nobody believes exists, but is absolutely willing to exploit.

Things like a bear cover up:

Source

Where government officials bribe a Polish paint delivery company to shoot a bear and smuggle it across borders and deposit it on the site of a rampaging troll to hide the mess.

Here are the Polish bear hunters on the issue:



It is absolutely preposterous!

The trolls are not the monster! The bureaucracy is the monster here.

The Team.

But, the story keeps devolving.

The kids have the footage; they can go public any time they want.
The cinemotographer (Tomas Alf Larsen) wants to turn back.
Tomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), the reporter wishes to press forward.
Johana (Johanna Morck) wants to stay together.

They all follow along with the ride to see where it all leads...



It does not end well.

The kids are way out of their depth.
However, they follow behind Hans (Otto Jespersen) with full faith that he will lead them right.

They end their story on the side of the frozen wastes high in the Norwegian wilderness.

And there they meet the mighty Jotnar:

Source

It is a giant, perhaps 200 foot tall beast that is on a psychotic rampage.
Suddenly, we believe that we are justified in our original feelings toward the trolls.
This thing needs to be put down.
And why?
Because it is killing things, driving the other creatures away: the other trolls, you know the good ones.

See it is usually at this point I check out of films.
Films like:
Warm Bodies that explore this Us vs. Them mentality often have a simple solution.

Here we have the protagonist white male character in "R" and his inexplicably relateable zombie cohorts:

Zombies! (people)

Source

 These are the "people," the ones that we are going to relate to throughout the entire film.

Next up:

Humans! (other people)

Source

These are the ones that we are not rooting for.
They have a military fetish and big guns and blowhard attitudes, so we do not like them at the start, but our protagonist does.
We will inevitably come to understand and respect their ways or they ours because hey, they look like us.

The Lovers (they're people too!)

Source

How will their love flourish?!
Simple...
By introducing someone worse than both:

The Boneys (the real zombies)

Source

These guys are alien and other and weird.
They don't talk like we do.
They don't look like we do.
They are scary and mean and I hate them and why don't they all just go ahead and die already!

That is the argument of the movie.
Accept the other.
Love the other.
That is how love springs.
But, not too other.
Those guys are weird and still deserve to die.

If you are wondering why this sounds familiar, this structure is used in a bunch of films.
So I assumed it would apply to Trollhunter.

The Kids (our people)

Source

These guys are sweet and nerdy like me, I like them and want them to succeed. 

The Trolls (the other people)

Source

These guys are mean and scary at first, but ultimately prove they are too big and dumb to know what they are all about.
I can't hate them.

The Lovers (they're people too)

Source

How will their love work?!

Simple, by introducing a bigger, scarier troll:

The Jotnar (the real troll)

Source

Except it wasn't.

It wasn't that way at all.

See...it has rabies.
You heard that right rabies.

The Jotnar is a rabid animal.

And they put it down.
And Tomas and company are there to witness every moment of it.

At this point in the film everybody tends to get real quiet.
The humans survive, there are more scuffles that happen.
The rest of the plot, an abrupt edit, some attempt at credits.

But, for me, where this film really shines is the idea that the simplest answer isn't quite right.
See, I would maintain that

The humans are the "Other"

&

The trolls are the "People"

No other movie has so successfully masked the idea that the monster we are chasing the entire time are the ones holding the camera.

At no point in The Blair Witch Project do the kids put down the camera and think:

"Maybe we are just terrorizing an old lady in the woods."

That just doesn't happen in modern horror.

Trollhunter may be a mockumentary making fun of the documentary style of films like The Blair Witch Project as Roger Ebert maintains.
But, I must disagree entirely with his assessment that this film is designed to make light of the genre and therefore, does not fail as a comedy, but succeeds as a tragedy.
This film is about extinction.
This film is about the horror of what we do to the planet and how ignorant we all are and how ignorant we are kept by bureaucracy.

I sincerely hope you will take my recommendation and watch it.
It's available on Netflix for pity's sake.

Conclusion

Trollhunter is a horror film in its truest sense. 

Many horror films rely on a monster, an "other". 

This character is removed from us by things like: 

Death as in the case of The Unborn

or 

Belief as in the case of The Exorcist 

or 

Understanding as in the case of The Poltergeist

These movies (some of them timeless classics) can be distilled down to a single moment or event or person or thing. 

That is okay, sometimes that is good story telling as in the case of Bram Stoker's Dracula or Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. 

However, movies like Stanley Kubrick's The Shining can aim at a certain feeling and provoke something deeply internal within all of us. 

The atmosphere and the sense of a thing disturbs us more than anything.

We are presented with genuinely unknown and unknowable factors that drive us to despair.
That is true fear and true horror. 

Movies like The Shining do not rely on jump scares for their ability to inspire horror.

Instead, they rely on carefully crafted methods of disturbing or displacing the observer.

Dramatic shifts in camera or sound create dissonance with the mundane nature of the present moment. 

Ultimately, it boils down to an atmosphere and a writing style that provokes deep internal distress.

I do not think that Trollhunter lives up to The Shining. 

However, I do wish to contend that it is in a similar class or genre of film.

Where horror is treated as it is in life: a thing ultimately unknowable and unappreciated upon first viewing, but is deeply unsettling and causes inner strife. 

The trolls are not the enemy, but neither are the people.

The truest enemy of people and troll population is a bureaucratic establishment that is sprawling and impossible to contend with. 

It drives and forces everyone to do what they do for things like salary or compensation or prize money, but punishes the troll community at every turn and by extension, their human oppressors. 

This is the main tension of the film that is ultimately unresolved.

Hence, my unease.

Hence, my horror. 

Genre (It Feels Pretty Useless, unless we are talking about Style)

Today let us discuss genre.
Genre is a way of organizing art into categories.
That is literally it.

Now, we can talk about the different classes of theatre, but the essential idea of genre comes down to just that:
Classification.
Therefore genre is the classification of theatre (or other art forms) into more manageable parts.

SO let us start with the biggies:

Tragedy and Comedy!
You know these masks.
Everybody knows these masks.
I hate these masks.
But, they are perhaps the two biggest and broadest categories of theatre:

• Comedy where everything ends for the best for the protagonist: They get the girl, they get the job, they get money, their parents weren't really dead the whole time, and "Everybody lived happily ever after"
• Tragedy where everything ends for the worst for the protagonist: They do not get the girl, they end up a pauper and alone, their parents were poisoned, and everybody DIES. THE END.

Now, you may have noticed something about what constrains these two genres:

Everything comes down to how they end!

Does it end happily or unhappily?

Why so much emphasis on the end?

Because until the end, comedy and tragedy are identical.

Why do I say that?

Because of Murphy's Law.

Murphy's Law states: 

"Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."

-Murphy

What does this have to do with comedy/tragedy?
Everything.
Because it is an innate principle of story:
Anything that can go wrong will.

Look at Romeo & Juliet

• A Montague bites his thumb at a Capulet
• They fight and people are killed
• The families are banned from ever quarreling again
• The Capulets throw a big celebration
• The Montagues sneak in
• Romeo falls in love with Juliet (masked)
• They get married
• Romeo's best friend is killed by Juliet's cousin
• Romeo kills Juliet's cousin
• Romeo is banished
• Juliet is courted by a new suitor 
• She fakes her death to avoid another marriage
• Romeo hears of her death and goes to her tomb to die with her
• Just before he takes the poison, Juliet wakes up and they elope
• The families agree to never fight again for the sake of their children

And they all lived happily ever after!

Now, for those who don't know the play, I may have lied.

The second to last point is incorrect.

Textually Romeo takes the poison before Juliet wakes up.

She discovers him and we get a double suicide.

But, that is how easily it all could have gone right!

If Juliet were awake when Romeo got to the tomb, the whole play could have gone differently.

So Tragedy and Comedy come down to the second to last point (otherwise known as the final climax, just before the denouement)

Well...sort of.

See genre also tends toward something called style.

Style is the way in which something is presented.

I just described a comedic Romeo & Juliet.

However, Romeo & Juliet is a tragedy.

And it is: nobody ends the play happily, certainly not the main characters.

Therefore, the play is by my definition a tragedy.

So the play is often designed and acted like this:

Tragedy (classically, I won't say all of the time or even most of the time) is construed as being heavy in tone, therefore,

• darker/muted colors with dramatic flashes are used (note the red of Juliet's dress and Romeo's neutrals), 
• extreme locales or surrealistic sets with intense symbolism (note the fallen leaves and falling down the stairs as opposed to up)

However, if a play could be either comedy or tragedy until the end, it stands to reason that a valid interpretation of Romeo & Juliet might be something like:

Comedy (again tends, not as a rule) is construed as being lighter in tone, therefore:

• lighter/brighter colors (notice the pinks and yellows of Juliet and the greens/gold in Romeo)
• settings punctuated for comedic/picturesque effect (Juliet is literally sparkling right now)

It is entirely dealer's choice.
It depends on what the artists wish to accomplish with their performance.

• Are the themes of destiny/fate of the star crossed lovers to be highlighted and hinted early on, suggesting it was never going to end happily?
• Are the themes of love triumphs to be highlighted and that ultimately at any point this could have been prevented if the families had paid more attention to their children?

Thus, when talking about genre it is important to keep style in mind, but they need not be dependent on one another.

Remember genres can be as many and varied and nuanced as:

• Tragicomedy
• Burlesque
• Farce
• Light Farce
• Black Comedy
• Minstrelsy 

Or schools of thought like:

• Epic Theatre
• Theatre of Cruelty
• Theatre of the Absurd
• Holy Theatre

So what is the point of genre for artists?

I believe it is meant to be a kind of shorthand.

I have had conversations that literally went inside of rehearsal:

"Well, this is a comedy. We all know what that means. Yuck, yuck."

-Unnamed Director

One of my favorite sayings about style came from our discussions on Romeo & Juliet

"We will discover the 'style' through rehearsal."

-Blair Anderson

Because ain't that the frigging truth?
We work on style collaboratively and make it out of whatever stuff the actors/directors/designers bring to the performance.
I firmly believe Romeo & Juliet is a comedy until it isn't.
Therefore, in productions I direct or act in, I attempt to bring that energy to the performance.
I say attempt because there are absolutely those who think antithetically to me.
And that includes the audience.
Some believe R&J is a tragedy and they should be crying for five acts and are afraid when they chuckle.
I have spoken with these people.

So style is something dynamic that the performers/audience collaboratively create.
What about genres?
I don't find them a useful shorthand in my work.
In fact in trying to discuss genre, I am at a loss for what to say mostly because it is an abstract idea.
I can talk for hours about tragedy or comedy, but genre? *shrugs*