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Norwegian director André Øvredal talks about his clever horror film Trollhunter during its run at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

To describe Trollhunter as “The Blair Witch Project meets Scandinavian mythology” might be accurate, but the shorthand sells the droll mockumentary woefully short.

While director André Øvredal leans on the “found footage” conceit popularized by the jittery 1999 horror flick, his movie delivers a much more compelling story. By bringing trolls into the modern world, he effectively re-imagines the frightening fairy tales and storybook illustrations he describes as “childhood memories” from his Scandinavian upbringing.

“They were meant to scare back then,” he told Wired.com, describing troll drawings from the 1870s that helped bring folk tales to life in books read to Norwegian children. “Today, troll depictions are usually very cozy and sweet, even Norwegian depictions of them, but back then they were really frightening creatures. And I wanted to go back to that when I made the troll film.”

With Trollhunter, his PG-13 movie that opened last week in New York and expands Friday into new markets, Øvredal has cleverly updated those legends, crafting a low-budget film that bubbles with dry humor and visually arresting monsters. You get plenty of shaky-cam footage of people running through dark forests, but by focusing on the troll hunter rather than the inexperienced team of documentarians out to reveal the mysterious man’s secrets, Øvredal shakes up the tired found-footage genre.

(Spoiler alert: Minor plot points follow.)

Trollhunter’s title character, Hans, is played by Otto Jespersen (“the most famous comedian in Norway,” said Øvredal during an interview at a San Francisco hotel). A veteran hunter who lumbers around the countryside looking like a dour, Norwegian version of Hank Williams Jr., the bearded Hans catches the attention of student filmmakers who suspect he’s a poacher. At first dismissive of their request for an interview, he eventually relents and lets them accompany him on his late-night hunts.

Hans utilizes various tricks of the trade in his quest to eliminate trolls from the countryside. Bright lights, funky-smelling troll extract and spare tires — used to attract the dim-witted trolls — help him combat the mammoth creatures.

Just as Hans baits his troll traps, Øvredal sprinkles believable bits throughout his film to imbue Trollhunter with a remarkable sense of realism that prevails despite the English subtitles.

“The tires were great because, they’re, you know, [the trolls'] chewing gum, basically,” Øvredal said.

The 37-year-old director also built traditional elements of troll mythology into his thoroughly modern movie.

“Trying to put all these ideas in one story has not been done,” he said. “You know, like the fact that they can smell Christian blood, the fact that they turn to stone and they can explode — all these things are part of the troll stories, but you know, here I’m trying to put it all together in one world.”

Four specific types of trolls appear in Trollhunter, creatures with particular habits and habitats. (See some troll concept art in the gallery above.)

“There’s mention of more, and there are more on the drawing board somewhere,” Øvredal laughed, “and I’m guessing there’s more out there as well.”

Øvredal described the moviemaking process as highly collaborative, with members of the production team pitching in to help him expand his new troll mythology. For instance, high-tension power lines spotted by location scouts in the beautiful Norwegian countryside looked so good that the team figured out a way to incorporate them into the film.

“When we saw these power lines, they were like, ‘These are amazing things, we have to put them in the film, at least visually,’” Øvredal said. “We started with that…. The [director of photography] said, ‘Well what if the trolls are being kept in by these things?’ And I said, ‘That’s fantastic, I will put that into the script.’ And that’s the next thing I did.”

Øvredal said he rewrote the Trollhunter script several times, “more or less driving my poor producers into madness.”

“I wasn’t pleased with the script that we actually got the money on,” he said, “so I started over again, from basically Page 1. And then I did that the third time, and the fourth time. And then the fourth time, I finally figured out what the film was about.”

The government cover-up of trolls, a master stroke suggested by the movie’s producer, came in the final draft. The addition of the conspiracy element, handled in a comic way, lends Trollhunter much of its delicious sense of absurdity and gives Jespersen a perfect opportunity to inject his character with a sense of cynicism as the beleaguered troll exterminator’s story unfolds.

The found-footage setup, novel in 1999’s Blair Witch and growing thin by 2009’s Paranormal Activity, works wonders in this film. It was a calculated move, according to Øvredal, that paid off by cutting costs and lending a certain style to the story.

“Obviously, shooting basically Jurassic Park on a Norwegian budget isn’t gonna happen,” he said. “So, sometimes you have to actually be able to turn the camera away.”

Trollhunter was made for a modest $3.5 million, with roughly $1 million of that spent on creating the expressive CGI trolls, Øvredal said, adding that “the effects capabilities in Norway evolved so much during the process of making the film, it opened up doors as we were making it.”

‘I think that the sense of humor wouldn’t come through if you shot it as a regular film.’

Aside from budgetary concerns, the documentary style also added to the movie’s tone, according to the director, who cut his teeth making commercials.

“I think that the sense of humor wouldn’t come through if you shot it as a normal, regular film,” he said. “Because you’d never have all these people sitting talking directly to the camera, seriously describing to you how all this works out. So I think that really helps the absurdity of the film.”

The faux documentary format and reliance on real-world weapons — like a battery-powered light generator that turns the mammoth trolls into stone — add a certain realism that works like magic.

“It’s just part of creating a reality so that everything apart from the trolls is real,” Øvredal said. “That’s kind of the idea.”

Photo of André Øvredal: Jim Merithew/Wired.com. All other images courtesy Magnet Releasing