In True Hollywood Style? Localized Emulations of American Genre Film in Contemporary Swedish Cinema

This essay explores a selection of Swedish feature films that were made with the explicit intention of emulating elements and conventions associated with American action, thriller, disaster, sci-fi, and horror films. Via case studies of Angry (Yohanna Idha and Christopher Schönning, 2010), Operation Ragnarök (Fredrik Hiller, 2018) and The Unthinkable (Den blomstertid nu kommer, Crazy Pictures, 2018), the article address how the intention to draw on American cinema informed production processes and marketing, how these films combined ostensibly American genre elements with local features, and how the resulting Swedish-American hybrids were received by critics. The analysis emphasizes the heterogeneity of films, filmmaking practices, and conditions of production—genre filmmaking in Sweden is often hampered by financial constraints and institutional obstacles, but there are also opportunities to break through, and the general trend is toward a mainstreaming of genre films in a national cinema that has historically been strongly associated with art films and social realism. A shift along such lines is also evident in the critical discourse, which displays an increasingly generous attitude toward genre filmmaking, nourished by hopes that such films will revitalize Swedish cinema. This implies a recalibration of the relationship between the national cinema and Hollywood’s commercial mass culture, which no longer necessarily functions as an a priori bad Other to oppose, repress, or resist.