October is spooky month, and those who have followed us for a while are probably familiar with Norway’s scariest film festival – Ramaskrik in Oppdal. It’s been a tradition for us to attend this annual event in Spooctober for a while now, and the festival has been going strong for 15 years. Relatively small, it is an amazing horror movie bonanza filled with scares and laughs. As per (sort of) usual, here’s our recap and personal highlights from this year’s festival. Plus a bonus rant for those who enjoy these sort of things…
Overall, we managed to fit in 15 feature films as well as a couple of shorts between Wednesday and Sunday. The highlights for us were definitely Good Boy (2025), No dejes a los niños solos (Don’t Leave the Kids Alone – also 2025), Bernadette Wants to Kill (2024), Hallow Road (2025) and Onsen shâku (Hotspring Sharkattack – 2024).
Honorable mentions go to The Toxic Avenger (2023), Primate (2025, aka. Julius the horror version if you’re Norwegian), Trizombie (2024) and Exit 8 (2025), all of which we also thoroughly enjoyed.
There were others which we liked, but did not quite live up to their potential or just paled a bit in comparison with the others. However, the biggest (and frankly only) disappointment turned out to be this year’s biggest movie, The Black Phone 2 (2025). Now, we usually prefer not to talk too much about the movies we don’t like – we understand the concept of personal taste, and we don’t want to discredit the hard work put in by a lot of people to make any movie happen, and all of that. But we both (individually, without communicating) found ourselves getting increasingly angry while watching this. So allow us a moment to rant (and just skip reading it if this is not your thing – we won’t blame you).
It is important to note that we both loved The Black Phone (2021), and our MVP in that was definitely Madeleine McGraw’s Gwen. So a sequel focused on her should be a win, right? (Spoiler alert: it was not.) (Actual spoiler alert: if you haven’t seen it, we strongly advise you to do that before reading any more, as we will be discussing some important plot points.) Ok, so first off, the originality of the first movie is completely lost in this. Instead of a new and exciting story, we get a mash-up of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) (or, probably more accurately, Nightmare on Elm Street part 3: Dream Warriors – 1987) and Stranger Things (2016). The (now dead) Grabber has become a masked Freddy Krueger, capable of invading people’s dreams and kill them inside them. (Except he doesn’t really do that much – he just shows up, scares them, stumbles around, makes threats, and then just disappears again or is easily thwarted by the kids. He is made less scary every time he makes an appearance, completely defeating the purpose.) The only one who can fight him (eventually), is the formerly headstrong and resourceful Gwen, now reduced to a scared and insecure teenager who worries about going mad and needs boys/men to protect her and tell her what to do and how to do it. A complete character assassination in other words. Even her “sassy” retorts, insults and swears seemed forced in this iteration, and not in keeping with the rest of her character as it appeared in this film. And let’s not even get into the stupid retconning of the circumstances of their mother’s death. Who thought that was a good idea?!?
You can see the difference in the posters as well: the attempt to make the mask look scarier in the sequel has only succeeded in turning it into a generic evil devil mask. The very human eyes and glasses featured in the original make it so much more unsettling.
Our other grievances include the dialogue – it felt like it was written by someone who had never had a human conversation in their lives; how easy it was to find the bodies of the missing boys who disappeared once someone ACTUALLY LOOKED FOR THEM! IN THE AREA THEY DISAPPEARED!!! (It took them two nights… After 30ish years… Sheesh. Clearly, nobody cared about finding them before); the stupid and unnecessary backstory of the Grabber, demystifying him and again making him more generic; and just the general soullessness of the entire thing. Is it all bad? Well, no. The production value is there, and the grainy dream sequences look good (despite their contents being utterly stupid for the most part). It starts off ok, and the acting is decent enough. But we’re left with the feeling that this was an entirely unnecessary movie which to some extent ruined the original which we really, really enjoyed. There, rant over.
Anyway, come to Ramaskrik next October! It’s great fun! In addition to showing new (and old) horror and horror-adjacent movies from all over the world, there are always special events and guests. For instance, this year there was a screening of Jaws (1975) in the pool, Troll Hunter (2010) in the woods, and The Descent (2005) with a visit from Neil Marshall, among other great happenings. It’s also cosy as fuck.
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