Looking for a good horror movie to start 2025? The Damned starring Odessa Young should be on your to-watch list. As a slow burner of a horror movie, it creates a suffocating atmosphere full of dread based on Nordic folklore. It surrounds Eva, a young widow in the 19th century who happens to be the new owner of a remote Arctic fishing outpost after her husband has passed away. However, her slim crew of fishermen is having a tough time catching fish. Survival is key, and they manage to just barely hold on day after day. After witnessing a shipwreck near their coast, hard decisions have to be made. Unfortunately for the crew, it seems as if they have suddenly unleashed the draugr among them, a folklore legend about a spiritual entity that will haunt and possess the victim.

I personally love slow burners like The Damned. It’s definitely not for everyone, but when it comes to horror, that slow buildup of tension and dread for all the characters involved, climaxing to an ultimate climatic showdown, is what I ultimately look forward to. It’s also more intriguing that the events took place in a 19th-century remote Arctic post rather than in modern times. Folklore legends and spiritual entities seem more authentic and have a heavier presence to add to their myth when it occurs in older times—times when folks were much more pious and God-fearing. Days before the Internet. One of the only things that I got irritated about was the use of cheap sound scares. Thankfully, there weren’t a lot throughout the movie, but I felt the rage that once again, a good horror movie had to succumb to these cheap tactics in attempts to scare the audience. The story and atmosphere of the movie did enough at producing the horror elements. Why mess that up with cheap sound or jump scares?

So regarding the ending, I initially thought that Eva just killed an innocent survivor of the shipwreck. The trauma the crew went through was more than enough to drive anyone insane. Their situation was also very strenuous considering that they were still fighting for their very survival, and now that they had to also contend with the possibility of having to deal with an evil spiritual entity likely broke every single member. It wasn’t until a little after that I remembered that towards the beginning there was a scene where one of Eva’s crew members found a watch-like device on one of the shipwreck victims that washed up to shore. There was also the scene where they found one of the caskets empty upon their first encounter with the draugr. It was then easy to put together that the “survivor” whom Eva shot was likely a manifestation of the draugr. I’m led to believe that the draugr did actually existed and were tormenting the crew members. Although they were all under very stressful conditions, grief alone likely wouldn’t have driven them to behave like they did by harming not only each other but themselves as well. We are led to believe that these folks are used to the harsh living conditions and that only something not of this world could have driven them to madness.

The Damned is not a movie that should be missed for horror fans. Definitely hope for more like it in the future!