‘The Damned’: New Folk-Horror Thriller Will Give You Nightmares

A chilling folk-horror thriller which reconfirms that January is often a fertile time for under-the-radar genre fare, The Damned, which hits theaters Jan. 3, tells a sinister campfire tale of guilt, need, fear, and madness.

Recalling everything from John Carpenter’s 1980 classic The Fog to Paul Duane’s 2024 gem All You Need is Death, Icelandic director Thordur Palsson’s 19th-century period piece has a slow-burn menace and air of insanity that crawls under the skin and into the darkest corners of the mind, which is precisely where its characters find themselves haunted by a mythic malevolent entity. Concise, clever, and unnerving, it’s a perfect film for the onset of winter.

In 1871, Eva (Odessa Young) runs a fishing outpost in the middle of snowy nowhere that’s inhabited, each season, by a collection of fishermen. These rough-and-tumble workers were once led by Eva’s husband Magnus, but he died the prior year in a tragic accident at an outcropping of jagged rocks known as “the Teeth.” Now, their helmsman is Ragnar (Game of Thrones’ Rory McCann), who appreciates Eva keeping the business afloat and maintains a positive attitude despite the fact that the racks upon which they hang and dress their catches are all but barren. With no way to reach civilization—the roads that wind through the imposing surrounding mountains are impassable—their prospects are bleak.

Ragnar is the leader of this motley pack, and certainly its oldest member; his second in command, in spirit if not title, is Daniel (Joe Cole), who’s decades his junior. The eldest inhabitant of the remote settlement, however, is Helga (Siobhan Finneran), who helps with the cooking and cleaning and who, during one evening’s revelry, recounts a spooky fable about a handsome man who murdered his sibling in order to steal his beautiful wife and fine house, only to be visited—to fatal ends—by his slain brother’s ghost. The specter of those who’ve perished at sea hangs over this enclave and its residents, and that presence mounts when, the following day while heading out for the day’s campaign, Eva and her male compatriots spy a foreign ship caught in the Teeth.

Though Eva’s instinct is to aid these desperate souls, Ragnar counsels otherwise, arguing that it’s too great a risk to launch a rescue mission and, furthermore, they have no provisions to spare. Eva agrees, and on a walk the next morning, she spies a rope in the sand and seaweed. It’s connected to a barrel filled with delicious fish. Tempted by the thought that the wreck might have left further rations floating in the water, she and Ragnar agree to venture out to the site of the calamity. Once there, alas, they recover merely a single box of semi-useless goods (lamp oil, booze) and are beset by survivors, who attempt to commandeer the boat. To stave off this invasion (which will sink them all), Ragnar and his men bludgeon the strangers with oars, and to save Eva from being pulled under, Daniel splits the head of an assailant with an axe.

The director sets this scene with a minimum of fuss and a plethora of evocative imagery, from an early shot of Eva silhouetted in her attic bedroom by light through a small window (that passes through a thin curtain veil) to panoramas of Eva’s wooden buildings dwarfed by the towering, icy natural landscape. Palsson and cinematographer Eli Arenson’s compositions are beautifully ominous, as is Stephen McKeon’s score, and the economy of The Damned enhances its discomforting power. That’s true at outset, and even truer after Eva and her employees—minus Ragnar—return from their traumatic expedition and discover that things are no longer what they seem.

Superstition abounds in a place like this, as becomes clear when Daniel explains that the dead (who’ve washed ashore) must have their hands tied with rope, their feet nailed down, and their wooden coffins rotated three times in order to constrain and confuse their spirits. Such precautions are necessary because, as Helga reveals, the deceased will otherwise return as a Draugr—an undead creature of Nordic lore that’s composed of skin, bone, and blood, emerges at night, is fueled by hate, and is driven to get inside its victims’ heads. To protect them from this being, Helga employs arcane talismanic carvings. Yet it’s not long before things go from bad to worse to seemingly unholy, beginning with Eva encountering a crouched black figure near the fish racks, and continuing with a series of disappearances, accidents, bouts of mania, and violent clashes that gradually decrease their ranks.

The Damned is light on gore, instead roiling the stomach via the sight of a corpse’s belly slit open—causing intestines and a giant eel to fall squelchingly to the ground—and the sound of the Draugr’s squishy footsteps as it shuffles in the shadows. The real source of its tension, however, is the troubled visage of its protagonist, whose eyes are eventually encircled by rings as her predicament devolves in increasingly dire ways. Young’s performance provides the emotional anchor for the material’s escalating mayhem, and her rapport with Cole—established in one romantically charged scene and then solidified through subsequent shared glances—adds an apt and welcome measure of longing for warmth. Of that, unfortunately, there’s precious little, although the fact that a Draugr can only be felled by fire proves foreshadowing for a climax that marries brutal cold with sweltering heat.

With skillful compactness, Palsson carries his premise through to its natural conclusion, foreshadowed by Daniel’s warning that “the living are always more dangerous than the dead.” The Damned has no interest in casting its story as a leaden metaphor for contemporary societal ills; rather, it’s content to be the type of spooky nightmare that’s best shared under a full moon or cloudy nighttime sky, the better to rattle listener’s nerves and ruin their sleep. Like the best folk-horror, it casts an ancient spell, and suggests, in the process, that its Icelandic director is an up-and-coming filmmaker to watch—hopefully courtesy of more resourceful, disturbing, and diabolical efforts such as this.