Ithaqua (Frightfest 2026)

It’s the 19^th century in Northern Ontario, Canada. The winter is harsher than usual, and the fur trade is in decline. Food is scarce, and tension is plentiful. The woods are quiet. Too quiet. It’s the late 1970s. England’s beloved home-grown horror studio Hammer Film Productions is struggling in the face of the public’s changing tastes, and the gothic – no matter how gruesome or gorgeous – has fallen out of fashion. The studio enters a period of hibernation, and – like an ancient terror from beyond the veil – it slumbers, dead but dreaming, waiting until the time it can rise once more to spread darkness across the land. It’s the 29^th of August, 2026, at Tubi FrightFest in London. Hammer is alive, and brings with it a feast of flesh to satisfy a decades-long hunger, as well as their first new monster sixty years after The Reptile (1966) slithered onto screens – Ithaqua.

Heavily inspired by classic works of weird fiction such as August Derleth’s ‘The Thing That Walked on the Wind’ and Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Wendigo’, Ithaqua is the second feature film to be released under the banner of John Gore’s Hammer revival – the first being the deeply underrated Doctor Jekyll (2023). Directed by Casey Walker (who also directed another of this year’s FrightFest selections, Home Bodies), Ithaqua tells the frosty tale of Cole Franklin (Luke Hemsworth), an American mercenary stationed at a remote outpost in the frozen wilds of 1800s Ontario; following a series of unsuccessful hunts and a bar-room brawl, Cole is forced to lead an expedition to the village of a nearby indigenous tribe in the hopes of finding food (not to mention any sign of life), or else his First Nations partner Ahnung (Leenah Robinson) will be turfed out into the icy wilderness. Unfortunately, the party’s search for supplies and salvation leads them to discover a fleshy, hungry horror that rides on the winds, whilst something foul has already made its home in the ice-house back at the fort – the curse of the Wendigo has struck the land.

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Unlike the aforementioned Doctor Jekyll, Ithaqua is not immediately recognisable as a Hammer production – it’s a polished, modern take on a historical gothic-western which bears a far more Canadian sensibility than it does a British one, and has its roots in stories drawn from North American publications such as Strange Tales as well as native folklore surrounding the cannibalistic Wendigo. Yet I believe Casey Walker (and Hammer themselves) have taken a smart stance here by placing one foot firmly forward towards the future of what a Hammer horror production can be, by applying the tradition of the grand, gory gothic to new locales, cultures, and subgenres, whilst also keeping its eye on storytelling tradition and what made a lot of the studio’s classic pictures so compelling. It’s also quite thematically interesting and surprisingly political, avoiding a lot of the traps present in films tackling indigenous folklore such as that of the Wendigo, and even though the film has a white big-name lead, First Nations faces and voices are placed front and centre throughout; the monsters themselves are an interesting interpretation of the age-old legend, too, with the flesh-eating colonial upper-classes exploiting the desperate and starving for their own gain in a manner reminiscent of some of Hammer’s classic vampires. I half wonder if Hammer’s decision to release a new remaster of Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974) in advance of this was no coincidence, as Ithaqua feels like a long-lost cousin to it, both thematically and tonally.

The strongest aspect of Ithaqua is its script – I’m a sucker for witty and bold theatrical dialogue, which was a large part of the joy of the old Hammer horrors, and it’s even more impressive that said dialogue is still just as sharp in multiple languages, with characters conversing in English, French, and the native Haida dialect. The film’s pace and the actors’ deliveries don’t always do the lines justice, though they’re rarely (if ever) bad – Hemsworth is game and consistently solid, and Robinson is arguably the MVP of the piece. Structurally, the movie fluctuates between moments of horror-western excitement and lulls where characters wander between buildings in the dark, and perhaps the film runs a little too long even given its semi-epic ambitions, but there are also enough crowd-pleasing shock moments and scares to keep a festival audience engaged and entertained.

I’ll confess that Ithaqua isn’t my personal favourite flavour of Hammer, but that doesn’t make it “bad” in the slightest, as it’s a well-constructed genre romp with some interesting historic, cultural, and literary underpinnings. It’s also an interesting new (but also old, in a way) take on the Wendigo, which – in spite of their prevalence in American festival folk horror – is a rare sight to behold in this day and age, complete with some nicely grisly and macabre occult visuals which make a nicely nasty connection between colonialism and cannibalism. Even the variable CGI work throughout, which is sometimes impressive and other times a little rough-looking, feels like an old friend in our current age of Generative AI – and even classics like The Devil Rides Out (1968) had the inconsistent effect or two, and that doesn’t affect my love of them whatsoever.

Ithaqua may not be everyone’s favourite new Hammer monster (which would be difficult feat in any case, given it’d be up against Lee’s Dracula and Cushing’s Doctor Frankenstein), but it’s a welcome new resident for the classic house of horror, and yet another good sign of things to come following the darkly comic Doctor Jekyll. Here’s hoping for even more old-school macabre filmmaking from the studio for years to come!

ROBYN’S ARCHIVE – ITHAQUA