Arctic Carnivalesque: Ethnicity, Gender and Transnationality in the Films of Tommy Wirkola

This chapter examines the way in which Sámi filmmaker Tommy Wirkola ironically appropriates contemporary Hollywood films such as The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003-4) to create ironic, postmodern genres films that address questions of ethnicity and gender. Iversen examines the way in which Wirkola’s films made in Norway such as Kill Buljo: The Movie (2007) and the ‘Nazi zombie horror splatter comedy’ Dead Snow (2009) appropriate the horror genre to tell stories about traumatic events in Northern Norwegian history -- such as the German invasion during Second World War -- while incorporating visual references to European and Scandinavian art cinema. Iversen also analyses the representations of masculinity in Knut Erik Jensen’s Cool and Crazy (2001).