film

Troll (1986)

Did this low budget straddler between fantasy and horror really spark the Harry Potter series…?

I have a fun little story behind the movie Troll, although it probably won’t quite have the impact on you that it did on me.

Have you ever had some vague memory (or perhaps even a vivid memory) of some piece of media as a child – maybe a song, or a scene in a TV show or movie – only to remember it years later, in the age of the internet, and actually try to track this little memory down?  Well I have.  Twice.

The first time originated sometime back in the 4th grade where I’d spend some nights at a friend’s house where we heard a catchy song on the radio (which we’d fall asleep to) and all I could remember was something like “don’t tell Venus…that I’m trying to remember your size.”  Or at least that’s the best I could make out of it.  Of course when trying to look up something like “venus lyrics,” the only thing that pops up is “Venus” from Bananarama and I knew that wasn’t.  I don’t know what happened, but one day I kept digging and finally found the song.  Turns out it was just a little known track that got a slice of airplay back in the mid 90’s known as “Downtown Venus” from P.M. Dawn.  What I was hearing as “don’t tell Venus” was “downtown Venus.”  This doesn’t have anything to do with Troll, but everything I think of some memory like this I remind myself of “Downtown Venus” and do my best to persevere.

Now for the relevant memory!  I was probably even younger when this happened, young enough to where I didn’t pay much attention to “grown up” TV.  I can’t pinpoint the exact time frame, but I’d be willing to bet it was one afternoon around the house while my dad was watching TV.  For whatever reason, a scene caught my attention.  It disturbed me a little and stuck with me.  Here’s how I remembered what I saw:

A little girl is playing with a ball near some stairs.  The ball rolls down the stairs into a basement-ish area with laundry equipment, where an ape-looking character lures the girl into the dark.  I really don’t know what happened directly after that, but I do know that the girl appeared with some sort of green ring.  An indeterminate amount of time, she uses the ring in a room where a man is sitting, and suddenly the room, and the man, are transforming into this mass of vines and plant matter that overtake the dwelling.  And that’s it.  That’s what I remember.

On and off for years I’d be reminded of the scene, some random association or a clip from another movie, and I’d move to the internet to try to find it with searches like “horror movie girl ball” or “girl ball basement creature movie” or “plants in house horror movie” and other such pitiful examples.  No luck.  Nothing even close.  And then a day or two ago I started going through Netflix’s newest additions.  I spotted Troll; besides the fact that I like horror movies, I was encouraged by the fact that Troll 2 makes several “worst movies ever” lists.  I was actually more excited about getting to Troll 2, but I thought I should watch Troll first just so I’d know how far the “sequel” deviated from the original.

After a few minutes, all sorts of bells and whistles and lights and sirens and firecrackers went off in my head.  There was a little girl, playing with a ball, and it rolled downstairs into a laundry room, and there in the laundry room creeping around was the little troll itself (what I had remembered as an ape-ish looking creature).  And then there was the closeup of the ball coming to rest just outside of the shadows and I knew, at long last, I’d found my movie.  Then the “girl” emerged from the dark wearing the ring, and I knew that this scene and all those vines were connected.  (I had entertained the idea that perhaps I’d conflated 2 separate movies since I never could really connect the scenes aside from the green ring.)  The “vine scene” did indeed come a little later, and though it wasn’t exactly how I remembered it, it was unmistakably what had been burned into my psyche probably more than 20 years ago.

Aside from all that, something else really caught my attention.  The boy was introducing himself to a neighbor, and lo and behold his name was “Harry, Harry Potter, Junior.”  Double take!  I then read that Charles Band (producer of Troll and founder of the infamous Full Moon production company) had outright accused Rowling of stealing concepts of the Harry Potter series from the film, not the least of which was the lead character’s name.  Now Band may very well be a few crayons short of the 64-color extravaganza, but Rowling is a little too dismissive of his accusations.

Admittedly, I’m in no position to comment.  I’ve never read Harry Potter and have only watched a few of the films “under duress” as it were, and though general knowledge of the story arc is practically inescapable, I don’t know enough of the details to draw any comparisons to Troll.  Now Band didn’t call Harry Potter an outright rip-off of Troll, he just said that some very specific ideas had been stolen from his film.  Although I’d pegged Troll as a horror movie based on what I knew as a youth, it definitely falls over into the fantasy genre as it develops.  The buildup is a lot like a horror movie, but the climax is a little lighter in tone and touches on fantasy tropes rather than supernatural ones.

It’s definitely a cheesy low-budget creature-feature, but it’s one of the better ones; it seems like back in the 80’s they actually tried to make good movies while working within their limitations.  Nowadays, low budget horror/sci-fi tends to fail because they’re either trying too hard to go above and beyond their means or they’re trying too hard to create a “so good it’s bad” flick.  Anyway, I like movies like Troll, and considering what it is, it has some pretty decent special effects centered around masks, puppetry, and a few well done stop-motion sequences.  Why practical effects have fallen by the wayside confuses me.  I really like these undoctored events that were actually caught on film using actual material rather than being fabricated digitally.

So, who out there is familiar with both Troll and the Harry Potter series?  Do we have a (mostly) forgotten 80’s film to thank for one of the largest pop culture phenomenons ever?  I’d be curious to hear arguments on both sides…

Written by The Cubist