Yes, it is folk horror. No, it is not good folk horror
No one will ever hold Claudio Fragasso’s 1990 film Troll 2 up as an example of quality filmmaking. They will hold it up, however, as an example of so-bad-it’s-brilliant filmmaking. Not one component of the film, from the stiff cinematography to the awkward acting to the comical costumes, works on a cinematic level.
It’s also hard to categorize Troll 2’s horror genre. The original Troll fits perfectly well into the Gremlins knock-off films about little monsters causing mayhem. But Troll 2 doesn’t really fit into that, seeing as how the goblins – not trolls – are seldom even on screen. The film incorporates shades of slasher films and dark fantasy. It even veers into territory explored by Stephen King’s Children of the Corn with its insular town and its fanatic belief system.
However, there is one genre—one that has been codified relatively recently—that Troll 2 surprisingly fits neatly into: folk horror. Folk horror is a term that came into the popular lexicon after Mark Gattis in BBC’s History of Horror referred to three iconic films, Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, and The Wicker Man, as the core trilogy that inspired the genre. Gattis did not create folk horror as a genre, nor was he the first to use the term folk horror. The term was first used in 1970 by Rod Cooper, a writer for Kine Weekly, who aimed to describe The Blood on Satan’s Claw’s unique brand of fear.
However, Gattis did help draw attention to how many filmmakers, writers, and artists over the years have drawn their horror from the unique combination of folklore, belief-centric worldviews, and isolation from greater society.
The tenants of folk horror can be found in Troll 2; or, at least, its foundational principles, done horribly wrong. Troll 2 embodies all the core tropes of folk horror, but does them wrong. In doing so, it actually helps illustrate how folk horror is effective as well as how it can easily be mangled. It becomes an effective lesson to those hoping to create stories that embody this haunting genre.
The Tropes of Folk Horror
As fans have discussed and analyzed the genre, folk horror has transcended beyond Gattis’s initial description. Initially, folk horror was associated with stories set in England or Colonial America’s remote regions, drawing from predominant pagan or Christian beliefs in its iconography. Modern films like The VVitch or A Field in England fit squarely in this category.
However, many have gone on to categorize several other films in the genre as well. Several international films that predate Witchfinder General, such as Finland’s The White Reindeer or Japan’s Onibaba, fit into the established tropes of folk horror. Recently, Severin released a box set of multiple films from around the world that can be categorized as folk horror, as a companion to their recent documentary on the genre, Woodlands Dark & Days Bewitched.
The core tropes of the genre emphasize rural, isolated lifestyles and folkloric beliefs. It is the infusion of these two tropes that are most essential. There are plenty of horror films that draw from old folklore.
Often, society’s association with either the natural world or religious cosmology is a key element of folk horror. Much like cosmic horror, the natural world or religious world is meant to either showcase humanity’s small place in existence or motivate people to do horrendously cruel things to one another.
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Witchfinder General has no supernatural elements whatsoever in it. But the religious fever that overtakes society allows a monster like Matthew Hopkins to murder innocent folks for profit, all in the name of slaying witches. The same can be said for The Wicker Man. There, belief in an isolated island community drives a commune of neo-pagans to sacrifice lives for good crops.
However, as is seen in The Blood on Satan’s Claw or The VVitch, demons and monsters do sometimes make their presence known. They often manifest as extensions of religious fanaticism or as a means to showcase humanity’s smallness in the face of an uncaring, cruel universe. There’s a core distinction between cosmic and folk horror. In cosmic horror, the monstrous other is not of our world, while in folk horror, humanity settles in that great other.
However, all beliefs need to be associated with some folklore native or prevalent in the region. Much of it draws from neo-pagan or pre-reform Christianity in some way or form. However, it is not limited to this. In reference to Onibaba, the folk horror draws from Shinto belief. Witchcraft of some kind is often a major element. The horror ultimately has to feel primordial, from the old world, interrupting or altering the progress of society.
So How Does ‘Troll 2’ Embody the Tropes of Folk Horror?
This begs the question: how is Troll 2 a folk horror story? Troll 2 on paper fits very well into the formula. It centers on a family who trades houses with another family. They are taken from the city into a rural farming community, where everyone shares the same cultish beliefs. Flesh, they feel, signifies humanity’s eventual decay and filth. Using ancient magic—specifically, one of the stones of Stonehenge—they can create magical material to turn people into plant matter.
These individuals also happen to be goblins, disguised as humans in order to properly lure humanity to their doom. However, none of these goblins know how to properly behave like people, resulting in off-kilter, inhuman behavior. The family has been lured here as a sacrifice, and a single mistake can result in their untimely deaths.
Only the young son Joshua knows about the goblins, thanks to the apparition of his grandfather, Seth. He may also be condemned to Hell for unknown reasons. The only link to the outside world the family has is the eldest daughter’s boyfriend and his group of friends. This connection, however, is ultimately broken both by the goblins and the family’s bizarre envy of the boyfriend’s divided attention between his social and romantic circles.
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On paper, all of this sounds like traditional folk horror. On paper, it even sounds compelling. Much of the plot sounds remarkably similar to both The Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Wicker Man, with a willing victim coming into an isolated rural community filled with people who all act…off. The Wicker Man’s Summerisle’s off-kilter environment is even more overt than that of Troll 2’s Nilbog; people openly talk about sexuality and engage in orgies out in the grass. Both the goblins and the Summerisle cult are fixated on vegetation and neo-paganism, which comes in contrast with the family’s more modernized sensibilities.
Goblins themselves are figures from various folklores. However, to make these goblins stand apart, they exist less as demonic entities and more as the plant kingdom’s agents against the flesh. They are primordial adversaries of flesh and seek to turn flesh into plant matter. Humanity has planted its foundations in the heart of the woodlands. In some ways, the goblins are less evil and more the woodlands fighting back.
The goblins even have a central witch figure, Creedence Leonore Gielgud, who manifests the darkness of druidic magic to wage war on humanity. In many ways, Creedence exists as a parallel to The Blood on Satan’s Claw’s Angel, a young girl who takes the role of a priestess for a demon, overtaking children from the inside.
So Why Does ‘Troll 2’ Fails as a Folk Horror?
The tropes are all present. So why is Troll 2, aside from the terrible acting and clumsy writing, such a failed attempt at folk horror, despite fitting its confines so well?
To understand this, it’s important to draw a comparison between The Wicker Man and its American remake. One of the core reasons why The Wicker Man remake doesn’t work is because the film does not commit enough to depict the folklore or rural isolation as a source of fear. Nicolas Cage’s character does not have any committed beliefs, so the culture shock, when confronted with the pagan cult, lacks impact. We do not understand the cult the same way we do in the original, nor is the rural element emphasized in the same way.
The best folk horror emphasizes the isolation and ancient customs as a source of horror. When you fail to emphasize true isolation and a true sense nature’s power, your folk horror fails. If Nicolas Cage can just punch everyone in the cult and run away, they are ultimately far less impactful. If Cage can shout and scream over the chanting of the cult, the cult stands out far less compared to Cage.
Much as with The Wicker Man, Troll 2 fails because the acting, direction, and writing are so absurd that it’s impossible to take the threat the goblins pose all that seriously. On top of that, the goblins are so powerless in the face of the family that it’s impossible to feel threatened by them.
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Most often, the source of fear in folk horror is either too abstract or too powerful to defeat. Satan isn’t defeated in The VVitch. Nor is the dominating presence of fanatical belief or humanity’s failed attempts to take care of one another something you can cut with an ax. Even when you can stop the villain, as is the case in Witchfinder General, something of great value is lost in the process, like sanity.
In Troll 2, goblins go down pretty easy. They’re only a threat if you consume their radioactive-colored food, which looks repulsive. You can only be threatened if you go to their town of Nilbog. Even then, the goblins are content to stand outside your house for hours on end rather than break in and just kill you. Furthermore, the goblins themselves go down easier than zombies in a Romero film. They’re vulnerable to any violence and so repulsed by meat that even holding a bologna sandwich is enough to ward them off.
Furthermore, the family essentially plays on easy mode against these easy adversaries. This is thanks to Grandpa Seth’s ability to manipulate time, the weather, and elements. He offers the characters countless warnings regarding the goblins. When Grandpa Seth freezes time to prevent the family from sinking into food that looks drenched in Nickelodeon-grade slime, all fear of the natural world’s wrath evaporates.
Then there’s the belief system. The goblins have a religious order. We do see druidic witches and preachers. But the muddying of neo-pagan and Protestant iconography results in a supremely muddied depiction of what the goblins actually believe. While it’s clear that Troll 2 draws from folklore, it never commits to which folklore it’s drawing from.
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Part of this has to do with the cultural problem of goblins. The term goblin has been applied to several different folklore monsters from various different societies. If the creators of Troll 2—like the creators of the film Troll Hunter, The Hollow, or, for that matter, even the Leprechaun films—leaned into the folklore roots of goblins, then they might have developed a better folk horror story. But, alas, we get a strange mix of goblin tropes.
It also goes without saying that the family is never once actually isolated. While the goblins reign supreme in Nilbog, just leaving the city behind is enough to escape them; that is, of course, until the cruel twist ending. In a sense, the twist ending, where it turns out the goblins left food for the family at their home and have proceeded to devour the mother as a result, only serves to undermine the core of folk horror.
Folk horror works because we can’t escape fanatical beliefs or the cruelty of nature. However, the twist ending shows that nature can infect urban life. That’s a very different variety of horror. It’s one you see more in mainstream horror at the time like Gremlins or even the original Troll film. In folk horror, you cannot escape a force that dominates everything. But likewise, that dominant force can’t invade a society that has dominated nature already.
How ‘Troll 2’ Could Have Been A Good Folk Horror Film
If you were given the assignment to rewrite Troll 2 into something that works, you’d need to do the following. Isolate the main family. Remove any outside force that could save them. Make it so the family actually faces adversity that can stand up to more punishment than smelling processed meat.
By removing Grandpa Seth and the boyfriend, the family is completely alone in a kingdom of goblins. They’d have to figure out the off-kilter world, deal with these monsters, and ultimately be destroyed by forces outside their control. The film seems so afraid of genuinely hurting the main characters, which robs the film of the only possible scares it could conjure.
The idea of folk horror should be that, despite humanity’s attempts at cultivating society, the natural world is far bigger than anything we can create. Troll 2 doesn’t fail simply because it’s a bad movie with insane scenes like a boy peeing on food or the weirdest popcorn sex imaginable. It fails because it doesn’t really understand how terrifying its premise could have been.
