Three college students making a documentary. One woman and two men (including one bearded, easily-spooked cameraman). Unspeakable danger lurking in the wilderness, amounting to much more than the trio bargained for when they took up this school project. A framing story that says this is found footage, and that the students are missing.

Twelve years after The Blair Witch Project and this meme, like any good horror monster, just won’t die. Most of its imitators, however, don’t hew to the basic setup of the source material quite as faithfully as Trollhunter. Yet, highly derivative as it is, this Norwegian spin on the material will probably play better a decade down the road than Blair does now, and not just because the camera operators don’t appear to be barely suppressing seizures while filming.

Trollhunter‘s band of student filmmakers — on-camera personality Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), sound technician Johanna (Johanna Mørck), and cameraman Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) — begin the movie attempting to make a movie about bear poaching. In Norway, bear hunting licenses are difficult to come by, and there’s a rogue, Hans (Otto Jespersen), on the fringes of the community of licensed hunters that everyone insists is flaunting the regulations. Thomas and his crew pursue the gruff, bearded figure with dogged persistence, finally tracking him down in the middle of the night in the woods, just as he’s fleeing his prey: a troll, so he says.

The students, still skeptical — despite the fact that it seems unlikely that it was a bear that destroyed their car and ate all the tires while they were hiking in the woods — accept Hans’ invitation to film his hunt the next night. There, they come face to knee with a massive figure right out of Norse legend.

There are a few different directions available in bringing the stuff of scary bedtime stories to life: you can go for the straight horror of childhood fears coming true, or opt to mine the fantastical premise for something a little more subtle, meaningful and even funny. Writer/director André Øvredal heads in the latter direction, finding ample opportunity for both dark comedy and social commentary.

Otto Jesperson, cast as the titular hunter, is a popular and often controversial comic in Norway, but plays the role completely straight. That incongruity may elicit extra laughs in Norway, but even without that context, there’s a grim humor in the character’s gruff superiority and “I’m too old for this shit” exasperation. He’s the only troll hunter in the country, a tired civil servant tasked with keeping trolls in their territory, covering things up when they get out of line and killing them when the situation warrants it — using powerful lights that replicate sunlight, which turns the trolls to stone.

The documentarians provide him the opportunity to blow the whistle on a government that is unappreciative of his efforts, and more concerned with appearances than with actual public safety, or with the lives of these creatures he considers to be just another form of wildlife. He’s essentially a game warden taking orders to carry out hits on an endangered species that’s ostensibly under his care.

Øvredal can be a little on the nose when going after his targets — the pig-headedness of bureaucracy, repression of the media, the tendency of government to try to solve problems with blunt force instead of critical thought. But the winking humor keeps it from getting too heavy handed: in one scene, he recreates an image out of “Three Billy Goats Gruff” situation, as Hans baits a troll with three goats tied to a bridge while Johanna, a caricature of the concerned student activist, raises concerns about animal cruelty.

As for the trolls themselves, when stationary, they’re gorgeously detailed ancient-looking creature creations. But their digitally animated motions are a little too jerky to be believable, sometimes revealing the limitations of Øvredal’s budget. He wisely chooses to give them limited screentime, but it’s a decision that works just fine: we know already that the trolls are inhuman beasts, but it’s man’s own inhumanity that is Trollhunter‘s primary concern.

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Trollhunter
Written and directed by André Øvredal
Starring Otto Jespersen, Glenn Erland Tosterud, Johanna Mørck
Running time: 90 minutes
Rated PG-13 for some sequences of creature terror.
Opens today at E Street Cinema.