“May the Lord protect you from hidden rocks, harmful sea creatures and dangerous pirates.”
So toasts Eva Magnusson, recent widow and now owner of a tiny, seasonal fishing station. She’s supervising that station now, braving the cold and dark on a rocky, sea-torn outpost. Her employees, fisherman hardened by years or decades of this salty work, sit around the table and respectfully listen to her wry toast.
But in truth, the station’s immediate concerns are not monsters or pirates, but food.
The midwinter catch has been abysmal. The fish have gone. Or if they remain, they aren’t biting. And since they’re fishing in the cold, remote waters of the 19th century, that means help is months, not minutes, away. Fishing this bad doesn’t just mean less pay at the end of the season: It might mean the end of them.
And it’s dangerous work even in the best of times: The small graveyard by the station testifies to that. The day before Eva’s prayer, the crew started eating the fish they’d brought for bait. If the catch doesn’t turn around, they just might starve.
Ragnar, the crew’s salt-crusted leader, says they’ll make it through, just as they always have. It’s not the first time they’ve had a rough time of it. “We may as well tighten our belts, stop complaining, because no one’s going anywhere,” he says.
The next day, as the crew prepares to hit water, they see a ship caught in some rock formations known as the Teeth. And as they watch in horror, the ship … sinks.
Some of the men want to sail out to the Teeth immediately—to save as many men as they can. “It could be us out there!” One says.
“But it isn’t!” Ragnar says. “We can barely feed ourselves! There might be 10, 20 people still aboard.”
It’s not Ragnar’s decision to make, though: It’s Eva’s.
“I’m afraid Ragnar is right,” she says, eyes cold and glassy. “Helping those men would put your own lives at risk, and I cannot do that. I cannot.” And she announces that they will not fish today. “Out of respect,” she says.
The next morning, a barrel full of salted meat washes ashore at camp. Eva and the men know more provisions may be in the wreckage. Their own plight continues to worsen. Perhaps they should sail out and recover what they can.
Surely, the sailors aboard the sunken ship won’t be needing them anymore.
Will they?
When you live on survival’s edge, the concept of morality can take on complicated folds. We can laud the men who lobbied to rescue the doomed sailors. But we should acknowledge that Eva’s initial stance—prioritizing the safety of her own men—also could be conceivably justified. (It is, perhaps, analogous to pulling firefighters out of a burning building when it seems as though the entire structure is about to collapse.)
Later decisions are much, much harder to justify, and the story takes on the vague shape of a cautionary tale. But even in the aftermath of those bad decisions, we see some isolated moments of heroism and a desire to save other lives.
As you may have surmised, Eva and her crew do find survivors stranded on the Teeth. Not only do Eva’s people leave them behind, but actively beat them back—killing one of them outright. When the bodies of the now-dead sailors wash up near the outpost, Eva’s men build coffins for them. But Helga—a cook and the only woman besides Eva at camp—worries that the sailors might rise from the dead.
While the pronunciation Helga and the men use for the creature feels a little different than what I’m used to, I believe that they worry that one could turn into a draugr, zombie-like creatures from Norse mythology. “Most of it’s skin and bone and blood, just like us,” someone tells Eva of the draugr. “Only there’s no life in it anymore. Just hate.”
And it’ll not stop, Helga worries, until every one of them is dead as it is.
Helga offers a number of solutions to the camp’s supposed draugr problem: tying the corpses’ arms, nailing their feet to the bottom of the coffin (with iron nails) and turning those coffins around three times—to confuse the dead’s sense of direction. Helga also stuffs a bit of wood from the sunken vessel above the bunkhouse door, as it’s supposed to serve as a kind of ward.
Helga’s superstitions are initially shrugged off by most, though Eva and the rest eventually decide to follow them. But as conditions in the camp grow more dire, one deeply religious fisherman named Jonas believes that it’s Helga, along with the crew’s hedonistic attitudes, that is putting their lives in jeopardy. “Devil needs just a single sinner,” he says, rattling off the station’s issues with “graven idols, gluttony, intemperance.”
Later, Jonas says that Eva’s to blame for their misfortunes, and that the camp is guilty for using “the devil’s tools [that is, Helga’s superstitions] as protection.” He insists that the men abandon fishing for the day to erect a cross on the hill above camp. (The rest of the men ignore him, but Jonas erects the cross by himself.)
Still later, Jonas apologizes for singling out Eva as the cause for their trouble. Everyone was culpable for what happened, he admits. “The guilt, the burden of it, should not be yours to bear alone.”
We should note that Eva and others begin to see what appears to be a draugr, haunting the campsite. The movie plays it coy as to whether the thing is real or simply a hallucination—a manifestation of their shared guilt. Another fisherman, Daniel, admits to Eva that he’s seen dark shapes. But he tells her, “It’s no ghost: It’s worse than that.”
Eva prays with what seems to be a rosary. We hear her dinnertime blessing as noted in our introduction. Helga tells a ghost story. Crosses mark the gravesites of fishermen who died on duty. A drinking song includes a verse about how a “troll seeks Christian blood.” We hear a reference to mermaids. When the ship originally sinks, a fisherman prays, “Almighty God, protect these men and give them the help that they need and save them from the perilous sea.”
When Eva asks Daniel to teach her how to use a rifle, they engage in a close-quarters lesson, with Eva taking less interest in the firearm than in Daniel. Daniel leaves the room, however, before anything happens.
We know that Eva is a fairly new widow; her husband was killed in an accident the winter before. She tells Daniel about how he proposed. Several fishermen have wives and sweethearts waiting for them at home, and Eva tells the group that the women will be happy to see them when they return. “The only thing they’ll be happy to see is the money in our pockets!” a fisherman jokes.
When Eva and her crew row to the Teeth to salvage the ship’s provisions, they see survivors—most of whom dive into the water and try to clamor aboard. Fisherman beat them back with paddles, and one is chopped in the face with an axe, killing and mangling the man horrifically. (A fisherman is also knocked overboard, and he apparently dies out in the cold water.)
Gray bodies of the dead wash ashore the next day. One—he of the very mangled face—has something grotesquely stirring in his abdomen. (We see movement underneath the skin.) A fisherman slices the man open, and both eels and intestines pour out of the gaping wound.
Someone hits a man on the back of the head with a hammer, killing him. Another guy cuts his own throat (in a very, very bloody scene). Someone’s stabbed. Eva shoots an apparent attacker. A man falls, or jumps, from a cliff; his broken body is surrounded by his own blood. Someone freezes to death.
A character breaks a glass, and a huge shard of it sticks out of her hand. She slowly and painfully pulls it out, her hand covered in blood. A building is set on fire. Someone is nearly choked to death.
Four f-words and a few other profanities, including “b–ch,” “b–tard,” “d–n” and “h—.”
The very name of the film could also be considered a profanity—but in this case, the title is meant quite literally to suggest spiritual condemnation.
There’s not a lot of entertainment to be had out there in the middle of snowy nowhere, and many of our characters fill their nights with drinking. Eva blames a spectral sighting on having too much to drink, and one character is told that he drank so much one night that “it was a miracle you remembered your own name.” The crew recovers, among other things, five bottles of brandy from the ship wreckage. Someone remarks that drinking liquor can “calm the nerves.”
Fishermen gamble, and Daniel admits they even bet on whether Eva would show up this season. A rare good day’s catch is stolen. People wretch upon seeing eels pour out of a corpse’s gut.
“It’s never too late to admit our sins,” Jonas tells Eva, after the fishing station’s survivors have been whittled down to a scant few. “Did you ask for forgiveness, for all we did?”
And that hints at the mystery lurking in the workings of The Damned. Is a draugr killing them? Or is it their own unspoken, unforgiving guilt?
That sense of guilt haunts this story, and it can’t be banished by something as simple as hammering a nail through its foot. Sin and guilt—in The Damned and in our own lives—can destroy us. Jonas, for all his finger-wagging, understands this principle, and he knows the cure.
Those underlying themes of sin, guilt and confession raise The Damned from being just another horror flick. This film has something to say. And it says it with more decorum than you might imagine. The movie’s moments of true grotesquerie are relatively few.
But those few? Boy howdy.
When blood is shed, it’s shed in torrents. We see corpses sliced open and living faces hacked up. This film is all about long stretches of creeping terror suddenly broken by horrors that leave you squirming. That’s too bad, because the film is strong enough that it really didn’t need any of that gratuitous bloodshed. Add to that some R-rated profanity, and The Damned will be, justifiably, cast out of many viewers’ watch lists.
Folks watching The Damned might well say to themselves that Eva et al. should’ve left about 30 minutes into the film. Arguably, one might say the same thing about those folks watching, too.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
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