Twelve years is a long time to carry a film around. Ithaqua has its world premiere at FrightFest in London on Saturday 29 August, and I still find that slightly hard to believe.
It is the first Hammer film since John Gore Studios took the company on. Casey Walker, who made The Void and In a Violent Nature, directs from a script he wrote with Pascal Trottier and Peter Scott Vicaire. Luke Hemsworth, Kevin Durand, Michael Pitt, Craig Lauzon and Leenah Robinson star.
The story is a survival horror: an American mercenary investigates a sudden silence at an Indigenous settlement during a brutal Canadian winter, and finds something ancient still lingering in the wilderness. As the fear spreads to Fort William, hunger and paranoia do the rest.
We shot it on location in Thunder Bay, Ontario, in conditions that were not kind, and leaned hard into practical effects and prosthetics. That is the Hammer way, and also, I would argue, the frightening way. There is no substitute for a thing that is physically present in the room with the actor.
FrightFest is the right room for it. If you are there on the 29th, come and say hello.
