All you need to know about Swedish indie horror 'Marianna'
A while back Swedish writer/director/producer Fillip Tegstadt let us know that he was going ahead with his psychological horror drama Marianne. Doing so, on his own and self financed, the first teaser trailer has dropped and Filip also sent along a number of images from the film that you can find below...
Filip has also provided a large amount of information about the folklore surrounding the Mare which you can also find after the break...MARIANNE is a psychological horror drama about a broken family in the small isolated town of Östersund, located up in the Swedish northlands. Among the pine oods, the lakes, the snowy mountains and the midnight summer sun, the story takes place on the fuzzy border where fantasy and reality meet.45 year old Krister's wife Eva has just passed away in a car accident, and now he's alone with the 18 year old daughter Sandra who hates his guts, and a 6 months old daughter who he doesn't really know how to take care of .At night he's haunted by bad nightmares about what happened the night Eva died, and guilt for the pain he's caused Sandra over the years as an absent father.He experiences visits in his sleep from a woman dressed in green, looking for revenge. Someone who comes to him via his dreams. Someone he knows already is dead.Sandra's boyfriend, who's interested in old Swedish folklore, soon realizes Krister is haunted by a Mare - a female creature of the night or a woman possessed. He tries to guide Krister by helping him get rid of her, while Krister tries to regain his family and reestablish some sort of order in his life. But having a bad reputation in a small town makes it hard to regain the trust of someone you've let down so many times before.Krister finds himself in a jungle of guilt and anxiety, superstition and nightmares, mental and physical illness, and has to find the best way out.Is the Mare real, or only in his mind?
The monster in the film, Maran, or The Mare in English, is a Scandinavian folklore dream creature. She is similar to a succubus, but human, and in a way related to the werewolf. The difference is, she is not an animal shape shifter, but a nightmare creature. Depending on what part of the country you're talking about, a Mare can be slightly different.In the South of Sweden, a Mare is a woman who was never married, and at night her body transforms to green mist without her knowing about it and she re-appears in the houses of men, and sits on their chests, giving them awful nightmares. Hence the word "night mare" or "Mardröm" ("Mare-dream") in Swedish.According to folklore, if you find out who The Mare who rides you is, and you wake up during her visit, you can say her name and that will wake her from her curse. Another way of trapping her is to plug the hole in the wall where she came in as mist. It can be any tiny hole or crack.Some folklore stories goes, a man is visited by a Mare, he says her name to wake her, and they start talking. Soon enough they become friends and after a while they marry and stay married for several year. One day, they have an argument, and the man mentions once waking her from the Mare curse, where upon she remembers the curse and disappears forever.Other folklore tales tell the story of how a man visited by a Mare plugs the crack in the wall before she gets out completely. He is later visited by a woman lacking a finger or a limb, thanking him for saving him from the curse.In the north of Sweden, a Mare is a more sinister being. It's a woman who is filled with bitterness and hate, or who is looking for revenge for something. Unlike in the south, where she is more an unwilling victim of a curse, the Mare in the north is actually evil.One way for a woman to become a Mare is, if a woman is pregnant, and she's terrified of a painful birth, she can crawl three times through the birth membrane of a cow. If she does this, she will experience no pain during the labor, but if she gets a son, he will be a Werewolf and if she gets a daughter she will be a Mare.The word "Mara" or "Mare" comes from Germanic and means "Press" or "Crush", as The Mare sits on her victims, crushing their chests and giving them terrible nightmares.
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