The White Reindeer

I just streamed an interesting folk-horror film, White Reindeer. By today’s standards most people who hesitate to call it horror, but it is no less horror than some of the Universal Monsters movies we grew up watching at Saturday matinees at the local theater for $1 an afternoon. Maybe we’ll just call it macabre.

The movie was filmed in 1952 in Finland and runs just over an hour. You can stream White Reindeer here, with English subtitles for free if it is anything you think you might be interested in watching. The movie service is legit, run by the Finnish National Audiovisual Institute which provides a database of about 150,000 films created or screened in Finland, so no one will come after you for copyright violations, should you choose to watch it. As far as I know, White Reindeer is not available for streaming or for purchase at any of the big streaming services or stores — it appears to be out of print for American regions.

Valkoinen peura (The White Reindeer), won a special jury award for Best Fairy Tale Film at Cannes in 1953, apparently at the urging of Jean Cocteau, and won the 1956 Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Film. So, for a horror movie, it’s got some accolades behind it.

The core plot is simple: a Sámi woman wants to keep her herding husband home more often and seeks out a love potion from the local “shaman”. As part of the price she must pay to make her husband come home more often and stay longer, she must sacrifice the first living thing she sees on her way home to the stone sieidi of the Old Gods The first living thing she sees happens to be a white reindeer fawn her husband gave to her as a gift.

As these have a way of happening, something goes awry with the ritual and the wife starts transforming on full moons into a… you guessed it… a white reindeer. And the “witch-reindeer” ends up bringing death to all of the male hunters who pursue it. Eventually, her condition is “resolved” — within the last three minutes of the film.

While there are negative “witch” tropes and poor portrayals of the non-Christian Sámi, the rest of the film gives what I understand is an apparently accurate representation of the Sámi reindeer herders’ community at the time, including those biases against anything supernatural in the more Lutheran-converted communities. I found it fascinating, between the sleds, reindeer games, herding and the day-to-day portrayal of life on the fells. It definitely eliminates any romanticism that people might harbor about living under such conditions (Sámi are portrayed here as semi-nomadic — fixed home for the families, roaming for the herders). There’s snow, everywhere and plenty of it. The scenes are not glamorous at all, made all the more stark by the movie having been filmed in black and white. Seeing people on skis made me want to pick up a set and get back into cross-country skiing, something I last dabbled in about 40+ years ago.

It appeared as if they used Sámi for the extras and some of the roles, so I image some of the traditions portrayed might be fairly accurate. But there is always a good chance that they were tweaked beyond the people’s recognition. I’ll have to see if there is any cultural commentary about the movie out there.

As some of you know, there is a decent (but unconfirmable) possibility that one thread of my ancestry leads back to the Sámi people by way of my maternal grandfather. While I’ve accepted that I may never know if that connection is real, I remain drawn to their culture for other reasons.

Regardless, it was a fun impromptu viewing of a movie that I have been meaning to watch for several years now. If you end up watching it, or have watched it in the past, please comment below any impressions you might have of the film.