The White Reindeer (1952)

directed by Erik Blomberg
Finland
70 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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It seems like there's a decent amount of horror movies coming from Finland today, but as far as early forays into the genre go, The White Reindeer is among the oldest I've seen. If there wasn't such a consensus that it's definitely a horror movie, I might not even regard it as such, but I guess certain elements- the air of general mystery, some weird vampire-like business, and a feeling of danger- do place it firmly enough in genre territory.

I was surprised at how little happens in the first half of this movie, and for maybe ~50 minutes you could watch this and be unaware that it has any kind of horror bits at all. The majority of it is just reindeer stuff. As a rule of thumb I don't trust dramatized films to have any kind of ethnographic bent or be an accurate window into whatever kind of cultural practices they attempt to depict, but there's shots in this that would have been difficult to show had they not taken place during actual, non-staged reindeer herding events. In other words, there's just too damn many reindeer in here for all of it to be staged. So if you're into reindeer and/or reindeer herding, this is the film for you.

The plot appears to have been based off of a folktale, and I'm guessing that the fact that folktales are often just large blocks of plot with little extraneous material between them is responsible for why it was necessary to spend so much time on filler to make this not be 45 minutes long. It follows the standard format of many folktales and fairytales where a woman gets punished in various ways for doing something deemed inappropriate for a woman to do. In this particular case, she gets lonely when her husband is away for a long time, so she takes matters into her own hands and visits a shaman who makes it so that "no reindeer herder will be able to resist her". Somehow this goes wrong and she becomes... basically a vampire, except instead of turning into a bat, she turns into a reindeer. For a brief moment her character wields power, escaping life as a woman and becoming an unstoppable reindeer, but she's eventually brought down in the end.

What was surprising to me was that this movie just feels so chill. It's very beautiful, and the score got stuck in my head all night afterwards which almost never happens with orchestral scores. It progresses down the road these things usually progress down, and ends tragically for everyone involved, but for a while there it's just fun snowy shenanigans. It stands out from cheesier 50s horror (and boy, did horror go through a cheesy period in that decade) by using lingering shots of faces and longer, tracking outdoors shots to create a haunting and sometimes powerful atmosphere. Black and white is probably the best format for this to have been in.