Johannes Nyholm’s Koko-di Koko-da traps a grieving couple in the woods with three carnivalesque tormentors and one increasingly horrible repetition. FolknHell asks whether a film with a private mythology, a recurring rhyme and a psychological landscape can still count as folk horror.
This time FolknHell heads into the woods with Johannes Nyholm’s Koko-di Koko-da (2019), a Swedish-Danish nightmare about grief, repetition and a camping trip that goes catastrophically, then repeatedly, wrong.
Andy Davidson, Dave Houghton and David Hall pick through the film’s strange machinery: the child’s music box, the grotesque trio who seem to have walked out of a poisoned children’s story, the shadow-puppet interludes, the deliberately distancing car scenes and a time loop in which escape never quite means escape. There is also the small matter of a man repeatedly fleeing through the forest in his underpants, because grief apparently has no dress code.
The main argument is the one FolknHell keeps coming back to: is this actually folk horror? Andy makes the strongest case for yes, arguing that the couple effectively manufacture their own folklore, landscape and isolated community inside the nightmare. Dave can get behind that psychological version of the framework. David is more cautious, seeing the film as more allegorical than traditionally folk horror because the threat does not straightforwardly come from the land.
What everyone agrees on is that the film is more disturbing and relentless than conventionally frightening, and that its grotesque figures are far easier to warm to than its shattered central couple.
A disputed but strongly folk-horror-adjacent piece of psychological horror. Its woods, folklore and ritual repetition may exist primarily inside the couple’s grief, but that is exactly what makes the genre argument interesting. Strange, cruel and hard to shake, with three nightmare figures who feel as if they escaped from a children’s book nobody should have printed.
21 out of 30
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🔗 IMDb: Koko-di Koko-da
🔗 TMDb: Koko-di Koko-da
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