Terror Night (Epadunk) had its international première at Tribeca 2025, 6 June
You can think of the English-language title of Jakob Arevärn’s short film as foreshadowing. For Terror Night promises the generic thrills of a horror film – and indeed there really was a Nick Marina slasher from 1989 with that very name. Yet the short’s original Swedish title Epadunk suggests something else: a very particular local subculture. EPAs are slow-moving vehicles constructed from the scrap parts of other cars, with a single bank of seats in the front. Their low speeds mean that they can be legally driven with a moped licence from the age of 15, making them popular among Sweden’s rural teenagers. Arevärn has previously co-directed (with Frederik Oskarsson) the feature-length documentary EPA (2022), tracking seven young women who own and drive such vehicles. Meanwhile Epadunk is a poppy electronic music genre, with irreverent lyrics and heavy bass, associated with this Swedish vehicular subculture – and so the title advertises a portrait of a parochial youth movement.
Sure enough, young Josefin (Edith Vallo) has customised an old Volvo, and fitted it out with a “killer bass box” in the rear so that, as she drives through the countryside and woodlands of Bjurholm in Sweden’s east, she can play her beloved music loud enough to wake the dead – or at least to annoy any older locals. All this presents as coming-of-age comedy. For Josefin and her best friend Natta (Zarah From Gonzáles) head out at dusk to an outdoor party, where Josefin hopes to attract the attention of Billy (Toft Svedjeland), and maybe to get some private time with him.
Josefin’s plan succeeds, as Billy accepts her invitation to go for a ride with her in the stereo-enhanced A-tractor. It is at this juncture, out in the woods and the dark and the rain, that the two very different genres promised by the short film’s variant titles intersect and switch, with young fumbly romance shifting gears into hard horror. “Creepy” old man Hägglund (Sven Björklund) appears out of nowhere to interrupt the adolescents’ canoodling. Upset and obviously deranged, he insists that they turn the music down as it keeps his wife awake – even though his wife is long dead. Very quickly all these elements (young love, music, madness and ghosts) will surreally come together in an unexpected explosion of sex, violence and intergenerational strife.
Terror Night (Epadunk) is a pink-coded paean to the power of music, and A Swedish Love Story for the 2020s. Do stay for the mid-credits coda, which brings another turn of the screw to these bloodily transgressive rites of passage.
strap: Jakob Arevärn’s short horror comedy exposes a rural Swedish youth subculture to an angry, unhinged older generation
© Anton Bitel
