Daniel Lehmussaari

Daniel Lehmussaari is a film director who was born on the 6th of july 1976 in Gällivare, Sweden. A huge fan of Italian horror movies from the 70’s-80’s, with a great love of Dario Argento’s work, Lehmussaari started playing around with a video camera around 1992 that he borrowed from a local association when he had just enrolled in high school, as there wasn’t much to do in Gällivare, and he started to make some low budget action films with his friends.

In 1995 he made his first film, a 25 minutes long gore movie called Chainsaw Charle goes to the hospital, together with his friend and fellow horror fan Oden Nilsson who would go on to star in some of Lehmussaari’s early films including Death Academy (2005). Around the 2000’s Lehmussaari along with Mikael Stridsson and Pauli Raitaniemi founded their own independent film studio Cruzical Film&Media.

To this day all of his films have been filmed in and around Gällivare.

In the 2010’s Felix Nord of Monte Fjanton Creations started a series of reviews for his review show “Felix Recenserar” (dedicated to mostly bad movies that were either originally from Sweden or dubbed into Swedish) where he covered Lehmussaari’s movies starting with Death Academy. Felix’s reviews and eventual interview with Lehmussaari was one of many contributing factors that helped in bringing in a broader audience to Lehmussaari’s films. Around 2016 Lehmussaari met Roger Bergström who’s usually the chairman of the Arctic Light Film Festival who is also rather fond of Lehmussaari’s work and the Arctic Light Film Festival has showcased his films on multiple occasions and has become a staplein their program. Bergström ended up in contact with organisers of the Dead North Film Festival which he thought Lehmussaari and his team should make a short film for the festival which they did and Lehmussaari ended up winning a best scare award.

Lehmussaari is currently working on Death Academy 2 which is set to release in 2025.