Don’t let the title fool you. Trollhunter sounds like it could be a cheap creature feature — the kind of film that turns up in a bargain bin with a CGI monster on the cover and nothing else to recommend it. It is not that film. Not even close.
Written and directed by André Øvredal — who would later go on to direct Autopsy of Jane Doe and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark — Trollhunter is one of the most original found footage films ever made, and one of the most purely enjoyable. It takes a mythology that most of the world associates with plastic airport souvenirs and children’s fairy tales, and turns it into something genuinely cinematic. The trolls in this film are not cute. They are not small. And the Norwegian wilderness they inhabit is vast enough to hide almost anything.
I find it difficult to explain why Trollhunter works as well as it does without simply telling you to watch it. But I’ll try.
Trollhunter (2010)
The Story: Three Norwegian film students set out to make a documentary about a suspected bear poacher. He is not hunting bears.
🎬 Our verdict: Deadpan, visually stunning, and completely serious about its Norse mythology — in the best possible way. Otto Jespersen is one of the great found footage performances. The finale is genuinely epic.
Director: André Øvredal · Cast: Otto Jespersen, Glenn Erland Tosterud
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What Trollhunter Is About
Three film students from Volda University College — Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), Johanna (Johanna Mørck), and their cameraman Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) — are following a man they believe to be a bear poacher. His name is Hans (Otto Jespersen). He drives a battered Land Rover, travels alone, and wants nothing to do with them.
Then one night, deep in a Norwegian forest, something enormous comes out of the trees. Hans runs toward it. The students run away. And when they regroup, Hans has one thing to say:
Troll.
It turns out Hans is not a poacher. He is a government-employed troll hunter — the only one in Norway — operating under the Troll Security Service, a bureaucratic organisation whose job is to keep the trolls contained, keep them hidden, and deal with any that stray into populated areas. He has been doing this for years. He is exhausted, underpaid, and — crucially — finally willing to talk.
The students keep filming.
The Trollhunter Trailer
Review: Trollhunter (Spoiler-Free)
The first thing Trollhunter gets right is Hans. In lesser hands, a government troll hunter would be either a comic figure or an action hero. Otto Jespersen plays him as neither. Hans is a civil servant — tired, methodical, faintly resentful of the paperwork — and that mundane exhaustion is the film’s secret weapon. When he explains troll biology with the weary patience of someone who has given this briefing too many times, you believe him completely. The mythology lands because he treats it as fact, not spectacle.
And the mythology is genuinely worth landing. Øvredal didn’t invent his trolls from scratch — he drew directly from Norwegian folklore, specifically from the fairy tales of Asbjørnsen and Moe, illustrated by the artist Theodor Kittelsen in the 1850s. The trolls in those drawings are enormous, ancient, and deeply unsettling. The trolls in this film feel like their direct descendants. They can smell the blood of Christians. They turn to stone — or explode — in UV light. They have territories, habits, hierarchies. The film builds a taxonomy of troll species with the kind of internal consistency that most fantasy blockbusters with ten times the budget can’t manage.
What I find most impressive is how seriously the film takes its own premise without ever losing its sense of humour. Trollhunter is funny — genuinely funny, not in a winking, self-aware way but in the deadpan tradition of Scandinavian comedy, where the joke is always that nobody is treating this situation as remarkable as it clearly is. Hans negotiates with a government bureaucrat about troll disposal paperwork. The students debate whether their documentary footage will be credible. The Norwegian Wildlife Board insists the bear killings are being handled. The gap between the institutional response and the actual size of the problem is where most of the comedy lives, and it is consistently effective.
Did you know?
The film’s final minutes include a real, unaltered news clip of Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg — who would later serve as Secretary General of NATO from 2014 to 2024. In the clip, Stoltenberg states matter-of-factly that “Norway has trolls, so more power lines are needed.”
He is actually referring to the Troll oil field off the Norwegian coast — but taken out of context, the statement works perfectly as an accidental confirmation of everything the film has been building toward. The press at the conference didn’t notice. The film did.
The found footage format serves the film better here than in almost any other creature feature I can think of. The trolls are revealed gradually — a flash of light in the trees, a sound from somewhere impossible, a shape in the fog that takes a moment too long to resolve into something recognisable. By the time you see a troll in full, you have already been convinced they exist. That sequencing is precise filmmaking, whatever the format.
The Norwegian landscape deserves its own mention. Western Norway — fjords, mountain plateaus, ancient forests — is one of the most visually spectacular environments on earth, and Øvredal uses it with genuine intelligence. This is not incidental scenery. The wilderness feels old enough and large enough to conceal something. It earns the mythology.
If Trollhunter has a weakness, it is pacing. The middle section occasionally loses momentum — there is a stretch of car window scenery and student banter that tests patience before the next troll encounter arrives. And some viewers will find the tone too light for a horror film, too heavy for a comedy. I’d argue that ambiguity is precisely the point — Trollhunter is a fantasy film in the truest sense, and it doesn’t owe allegiance to either genre’s conventions.
The finale, however, delivers everything the film has been building toward. I won’t describe it. I’ll say only that it earns the word epic in a way that found footage films almost never do — and that the final minutes, including a genuine news clip of the Norwegian Prime Minister that the film uses with extraordinary nerve, are among the most satisfying endings in the genre.
Verdict
Trollhunter is what happens when a filmmaker takes folklore seriously, casts the right actor in the lead role, and trusts that a camera pointed at something genuinely impressive is enough.
If you think found footage is only capable of dark corridors and jump scares, Trollhunter will take you somewhere considerably larger — and considerably older.the impact. I find it a defensible creative choice — the film is less interested in surprise than in dread, and dread requires knowing something is coming.
Where to Watch Trollhunter
Similar Films to Trollhunter
The Blair Witch Project (1999) — The film that made found footage mainstream. Three students, a forest, and something in the trees that never fully shows itself. Where Trollhunter gives you the creature, Blair Witch withholds it entirely. Two different philosophies, both effective.
Cloverfield (2008) — The big-budget American answer to the found footage monster movie. Less mythology, more spectacle — but the same core idea: ordinary people with a camera, caught in something they can’t comprehend.
The Bay (2012) — Found footage environmental horror from Barry Levinson. Less fantasy, more dread, but shares Trollhunter‘s interest in institutional cover-ups and government incompetence in the face of something they can’t control.
Exists (2014) — Bigfoot found footage from Eduardo Sánchez, one half of the Blair Witch directing duo. Plays it straight where Trollhunter plays it dry. Worth watching as a companion piece.
Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) — Not found footage, not horror. But if what you loved about Trollhunter was the deadpan tone, the wilderness, and the unlikely human at the centre of it all, Taika Waititi’s film scratches the same itch. Warmer, funnier, and quietly devastating.
