Genre films and speculative fiction often orbit around the idea of the Otherness, the non-normative subalternities opposed to hegemonic views. In genres such as the fantastic, for instance, otherness is frequently incarnated in supernatural benevolent creatures, whereas in other genres, like horror, it is embodied in uncanny outrageous, although not always frightful, characters. In science-fiction, otherness also works as a persistent menacing presence. However, it doesn’t matter if it comes from technology, fables, or nightmares; a robot, a troll, or a zombie, the outsider is always there as a hazard, threatening the future of human beings, who are the epitome of the normative. In those contexts, human beings are usually presented as the vulnerable victim of the otherness, who need to defend themselves against the menace. However, sometimes things turn around, and humanity becomes the threat: a majority opposing defenseless minorities, the other, by grabbing their uniqueness for their own benefit.
This chapter analyses two Swedish contemporary speculative fiction films that dialogue with the idea of the otherness’ struggle to survive in a world where humanity is a threat for them. The Unliving, a 2010 medium-length film by Hugo Lilja, portraits a post-pandemic dystopia in which infected people are administered a drug that annules their consciousness and are used as dehumanized unpaid workforce for those tasks that the livings ones don’t want to perform. In Border, by Ali Abbasi (2018), two trolls, creatures from traditional Swedish folklore, meet in a human-ruled world where they struggle to survive in different ways: fitting and fighting, opposing their otherness to human normativity. In both films, Otherness is relegated to ostracism through the subaltern position of oppressed minorities. The present work analyzes how the Other, the different, has gone from incarnating a threat to normativity to an opportunity for hegemony to take over alterity and absorb its agency, taking advantage of the difference to reinforce the norm.