☆❀☆

I first watched De dødes tjern | Lake of the Dead (1958) several years ago. There was a brief period where I would put it on every weekend and watch it. I'm weirdly fond of it; there's something strangely comforting about it.

It's a weird little movie, one of Norway's first horror films, though in many ways it's much more a mystery than a horror. The story features a group of people at an isolated cabin out in the wilderness, who go up there because their friend, who was staying at the cabin, has gone missing. The titular lake is said to be haunted by the ghost of a murderer, and those who stay at the cabin are said to be compelled to drown themselves. In the end, the question of whether anything supernatural was involved is up in the air.

Since I've enjoyed the film for so long, I was really looking forward to reading the novel. At one point I had even considered trying to get my hands on a copy of it in Norwegian and trying to read that. Well, Lake of the Dead by Andre Bjerke only received a proper English translation in 2022, and it's just now that I was able to get around to reading it.

I was surprised to find out that it was written in 1942. The film has late '50s setting and I guess I supposed the novel had been written around that time too. The author was originally a poet, but switched to writing thrillers, partially because it was easier to get those published during the Occupation (apparently, according to the introduction).

Unfortunately for me, I didn't enjoy the novel very much. The general premise is very good, but it's soured by the narrator - the first-person narration from the character Bernhard is quite sexist. And like, I honestly don't expect a lot from a novel written in the 1940s, but it kept popping up all the time and messing up the vibe, if you know what I mean.

In addition to that, there were a lot of parts that felt over-explained - the finale where the psychologist Kai Bugge lays out the explanation of all that happened (with possible not-so-scientific things) keeps going on and on for pages and I think by that time I was just sick of it.

I rewatched the film tonight, and I would say that I still enjoy it a lot. A lot of the things that bothered me about the novel are either absent or streamlined in the film. The sexism in the novel is almost entirely in the first-person narrator's internal monologue, and since we don't have that in a movie, it solves the biggest issue I had with the book. (And Bernhard as a character is much more likeable in general in the film than the novel.) And the over-explanation and whatnot, both at the end and in other places, was snipped and streamlined.

There is one scene in the film that I really really like. When Bernhard and Kai Bugge are reading through the diary that their missing friend left behind, the screen shows us what the creepy account is describing. By modern standards, the bit with the ghost isn't scary at all, but I think by 1958 standards it was well-executed.

Too bad about the novel, but the movie really holds up (as far as I expected it to, anyway). There doesn't seem to be an official English release, which I find slightly surprising - but only slightly. My understanding is that in Norway, it isn't obscure at all, and both the book and the movie are part of the foundation of Norway's modern horror tradition. But outside of Scandinavia, it isn't well known. I would speculate that it isn't scary enough, artsy enough, dramatic enough, or unique enough to make much of a splash.

...But I still find myself weirdly fond of it. Well, the movie, at any rate.