Hello all! Welcome back to my weekly reviews of Hilda. This week we move on to the sixth episode of Season 1 – ‘Chapter 6: The Nightmare Spirit’.

 ‘Chapter 6: The Nightmare Spirit’, Season 1, Episode 6

Synopsis – After waking up from a nightmare in which he, Hilda, and Frida were trapped in a sewer and attacked by a swarm of rats, David heads out to meet with his friends. While they try to decide what to do that day, Hilda notices a teenage girl loitering nearby and wonders who she is. They try to follow her, but she disappears after entering an alley. David admits to his nightmares and his theory that they are being caused by the adventures that Hilda has been dragging him and Frida along for. Hilda decides that they should go to the sewer to find the Rat King so that David can face his fears head on. Their trip is made more harrowing when the sewer unexpectedly floods, but they eventually encounter a mass of talking rats known as the Rat King who offers to trade secrets with Hilda. The Rat King reveals that David’s nightmares are actually being caused by the mysterious teenage girl they had followed earlier.

That night, while David sleeps, Hilda and Frida keep an eye out for the girl. They spot her nearby – and see her transform into a green mist to get away. They manage to follow her to a forest on the outskirts of the city, where they witness her and a group of similar girls gossiping about all the nightmares they are causing. Hilda attempts to confront them but they flee, so the next day the trio heads to the library to try and learn more. Overhearing their conversation, the librarian gives them a book about ‘marra’. Leafing through the book, they discover that marra are mischievous nightmare spirits and that they can be trapped using a leather belt. Hilda hatches a plan.

That night, Hilda and David disguise themselves as each other and switch places. The marra arrives in David’s room prepared to give him more bad dreams, but realizes too late that it is actually Hilda in David’s bed. Hilda and Frida manage to wrap a leather belt around the marra’s legs, preventing her from escaping. Hilda challenges the marra, saying that if she is unable to scare Hilda then she will leave David alone forever. The marra initially struggles to find an angle of attack, discovering that typical methods of scaring people aren’t working. It eventually realizes Hilda’s true fear – not fitting in, exemplified by her not knowing how to ride a bike. Meanwhile, Johanna discovers David in Hilda’s bed and brings him back to his house. They burst into David’s bedroom to find a sleeping Hilda in clear distress. Not wanting Hilda to suffer, David tells the marra to stop and that she can haunt him however much she likes.

The next day, David reveals that he didn’t have any nightmares that night. At that point the marra shows up and says that it is no longer any fun to haunt David anymore and that she will leave him alone. Hilda offers to stop taking Frida and David on adventures but they refuse. Relieved, Hilda asks her friends if they could teach her how to ride a bike.

My Thoughts – As with ‘The Troll Rock’, this is an episode that, on rewatch, turned out to be much more interesting than I remembered. Part of that is the visuals. I’ve long been a fan of dream sequences in animated series, as they often allow the writers and animators to get much weirder than they would in a normal episode. There were a lot of great such flourishes in this episode, from the rats surrounding David to the clock melting to the phantom bicyclists swarming Hilda. The dream sequences in this episode do a particularly good job of rapidly escalating the tension, creating the strong feeling that both the characters and us are being overwhelmed. Even beyond the dreams there were a lot of great visual moments in this episode. The night scenes were all quite gorgeous, and the way the marra initially approached Hilda in David’s room, with it limbs all at strange angles, was very unsettling.

There were also a lot of great character moments in this episode, particularly for Hilda and David. Hilda had to reckon with fear on two levels. Not only does she realize that she isn’t as fearless as she always thought, she is also forced to recognize the amount of stress that her adventures are causing David. We have seen before that once she gets an idea for an adventure in her head that little can stop her from trying to fulfill it – and that usually ends up pulling those around her into it as well. She doesn’t seem to understand David’s fear, thinking that all she needs to do to snap him out of it is push him into another adventure in the sewers. It is only through the marra-induced nightmares, in which she has to reckon with her own fears of not fitting in or being able to do things that the city kids can do, that she gains some empathy for David’s plight.

On the flip side, David learns to deal with his fears in his own way. Initially he wants to get rid of his nightmares in any way he can, even if that means avoiding adventures with Hilda and Frida. Upon learning about the marra, he is content to let Hilda and Frida deal with the spirit for him. It is only when seeing Hilda struggling with her own nightmares that he is willing to stand up to the marra. This shows some great strength of character for David – he may be worried about his own safety, but when he sees his friends in need of assistance he is willing to do what it takes to help them. He’s no longer going to allow his fears to control him.

Episode MVP – David. He faces his fears and in the end is rewarded with an end to his nightmares.

Folklore Connections – In Norse mythology and across Scandinavian folklore, ‘mara’ or ‘mare’ were female spirits or demons who would sneak into a person’s bedroom through the keyhole at night, sit on their chest, and give them bad dreams. All of this is demonstrated quite accurately in the episode – all of the mara were girls, they created nightmares to torment their victims, and they traveled through doors via the keyholes – except that the mara floated above David and Hilda while inducing their nightmares. Often associated with succubi and etymologically connected to the word ‘nightmare’, these days it is believed that mara may have been used as an explanation for sleep paralysis.

Rat kings (warning, pictures of dead rats) occur when a large group of rats get their tails tangled together and are unable to extricate themselves, creating a mass of stuck-together rodents. Although a number of specimen exist (mostly in Germany), there is much skepticism as to whether they can occur naturally or whether they are all hoaxes. There have been naturally-occurring squirrel kings that have been documented, so it is possible but still uncertain. It is also unclear where the name came from, although some accounts indicate that it was believed that rat kings relied on younger rats to bring them food – like a royal.

My Totally Arbitrary Episode Ranking – A strong B+.

Trivia/Stray Observations –

• “We’ll be the first Sparrow Scouts to earn a badge before it’s invented! There should be a badge for that.”
• “At least the last thing I ever did was be right!”
• “What do you think is causing them?” “Don’t take this the wrong way, but…you, obviously.”
• “At least I know what my next nightmare will be about.”
• “Also, I just remembered…I’m terrified of heights.”
• “That’s not fair. I deserve a royalty, or something, don’t you think?”
• “It’s not easy falling asleep on purpose, you know.” Yes, I know all too well.
• “They’re cute, in that ugly sort of way.” No, no they are not. I draw the line at spiders.
• “Eating people won’t fill that void.”
• “The street hasn’t got a woff lane, has it?” It should.
• I really should keep a running tally of every bug found on David.
• The show’s aesthetic works very well with nighttime scenes.
• Twig sure is a speedy little fellow, isn’t he?
• I love the moody electronic theme that plays during the chase sequence:

• That was not the smoothest deception there, David and Hilda, but it worked. Where did they get those wigs on such short notice, though?
• I guess all those elf records are useful for something.
• The librarian, one of my favorite side characters, is introduced in this episode even if she doesn’t have much screen time yet.
• If the marra seem to have to travel through keyholes to pass through a door, why didn’t they think of blocking the keyhole?

That’s it for this week! Next week we will continue with ‘Chapter 7: The Lost Clan’.

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Thanks for reading!