There is a gothic tradition in Nordic literature and film dating back to the Romantic period. Nordic writers and filmmakers have frequently employed gothic tropes and narrative strategies to evoke feelings of terror and horror; their works have been produced in response to the international tradition of gothic with references to works published and produced outside the Nordic countries. Since the beginning, Nordic Gothic has been densely intertextual while at the same time it has been adapted to the local audiences. Due to the notoriously realism-prone literary tradition in the Nordic countries, it was not until the 1990s that the existence of gothic fiction was systematically examined by a number of scholars (Leffler 1991, 2013; Fyhr 2003, 2017; Wijkmark 2009; Johnsson 2009; Kastbjerg 2012, 2013). Most of the early studies were dealing with nineteenth-century literature and canonised writers. In the last decade, there has been a growing interest in gothic stories in different media after the millennium (Troy et al. 2020; Leffler 2013; Kastbjerg 2013; Launis 2013). Building on these studies, this chapter will begin by giving an introduction to the Nordic tradition of gothic from the early nineteenth century until the present moment. Thereafter, three works will be discussed in detail: John Ajvide Lindqvist's vampire novel Låt den rätte komma in (2004; Let the Right One In), Leonora Christina Skov's transgendered gothic story Silhuet af en synder (2010; Silhouette of a Sinner), and André Øvredal's mockumentary Trolljegeren (2010; Troll Hunter). This will highlight some distinct features in today's Nordic Gothic, such as a combination of gothic and social realism, a transgendered version of Female Gothic, and the uncanny wilderness and environmentalism in Nordic stories. It will also demonstrate in what way Nordic Gothic engages with globalgothic, that is, gothic in a globalised space, and then in particular with globalisation and global threats from a specific regional vantage, the Nordics.

The Rise of Gothic Fiction in the Nordic Countries

By the end of the eighteenth century, many of the first English, German and French gothic novels were translated into the Nordic languages. For example, Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) was published in Danish and Swedish in 1800 and 1800 to 1804 respectively. Five novels by Ann Radcliffe were distributed in Swedish between 1800 and 1806, among them The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1794).