Remember that spooky campfire tale that opens John Carpenter’s The Fog? It’s an old-fashioned yarn about a wrecked ship deliberately sacrificed to the sea with the crew all returning to the shore as vengeful ghouls preying upon the descendants of the guilty citizens in the port town. Well, that seems like an inspiration for the plot of The Damned, a quietly intense horror film directed by Thordur Palsson. It even features the nighttime fog that rolls in, seeming to bring the vengeful ghouls in with it.

An internationally produced chiller set and shot in Iceland, The Damned concerns a young widow named Eva (Odessa Young), who’s inherited from her late husband, Magnus, a remote Arctic fishing settlement. “We shouldn’t be here” is the first line in the film, spoken in voice-over narration, and we have to agree with her when contemplating the bleak isolation of the snowscape.

The fishing has been going badly all winter, and she and her crew of men are down to eating the fish they’d been saving for bait. At that precarious time, they witness a ship foundering on the jagged rocks they call “the Teeth” at the far end of the bay. There’s an argument about whether they ought to try to rescue the survivors, with helmsman Ragnar (Rory McCann) making a fierce case for leaving the passengers and crew to their fate rather than sharing the last of their food only to all starve together. But it’s Eva’s decision — she owns the boat and employs the men — and she decides she won’t risk her men’s lives to save the lives of strangers.

That fateful choice seems to spell their doom, which they compound by taking their boat out the next night to search the waters after the ship’s gone down, seeking any barrels of supplies that might tide them over. To their horror, there are still survivors clinging to the rocks of the Teeth, screaming for help in a foreign language. As Ragnar orders the crew to turn their boat back to shore, desperate survivors dive into the water and swim out to the boat, fighting to get aboard. Fearing they’ll be capsized, Eva, Ragnar, and the crew fight off the survivors, who drown before their eyes.

Ironically, after this harrowing event their luck finally turns, and they have a plentiful fishing day, with the promise of “plenty more where that came from.” So it turns out they could, in fact, have sustained themselves and the survivors too, but everyone’s so relieved that nobody stops to even consider that. “Let’s celebrate,” says Eva, and it’s during the lamplit feast with singing and dancing that it becomes clear these people will all have to pay.

Eva and the others begin suffering from nightmares and visions of an undead survivor, still dripping wet and bent on revenge. According to Helga (Siobhan Finneran) the superstitious middle-aged housekeeper, they’re being stalked by a draugr, a Nordic revenant motivated by hate that can infiltrate people’s minds to create dark hallucinations and terrifying dreams and drive them to feverish states of murder and self-destruction.

They should’ve secured the bodies that washed ashore, Helga tells them — tied them with rope and driven nails through their feet — to prevent any of them from rising again. Once loose, a draugr can only be destroyed by fire, Helga says. When they check the coffins on the icy shore, they find one of the bodies is missing.

And from then on it’s a fight for survival, with each night more terrifying than the last as the crew members turn on each other and go insane under the pressure of guilty dreams and ghastly phantasms.

It’s a pretty scary movie in a Gothic atmospheric kind of way. The severe limitations imposed on the film are its main strength: the desolate icebound landscape and its surrounding mountains, the crude wooden buildings, the boat, the sea, the group of fisher-people growing ever smaller as the casualties mount. The black nights lit only by firelight are filled with shadows that readily take on the form of the draugr as it’s about to rise from the dark corners of rooms. Eli Arenson’s cinematography extracts all the dreadful power from these images.

And The Damned is only eighty-nine minutes long. A blessed eighty-nine minutes in a world of films routinely running two-and-a-half hours! It’s wonderful, the feeling of being propelled through a lean narrative, unimpeded by pointless excess and padding.

Though some might find the stark elements of the film make for repetition, I found it scarier — the deadly rhythm of days with the settlers attempting to address their terrible situation in practical ways followed by looming nights of steadily rising terror. The film’s only fault, in my view, is the ending, which is far too rushed and seems implausible.

The pared-back narrative allows for plenty of time to consider the film as a pretty clear allegory for the current state of the world. As the Haves hoard up imperiled resources and heartlessly sacrifice the Have-Nots to the elements spinning out of control in intensifying catastrophes, most of us can see pretty clearly that we’re the more and more desperate survivors in the water being beaten back by the oars of the Haves bent on keeping everything for themselves, even if it’s bound to mean ultimate destruction for all.

It’s an interesting experience, coming to identify with the draugr, but then again, it’s not at all unusual for horror films to split audience identification. We’re mostly pushed into identifying with Eva as the main protagonist, but her flinty ability to shrug off the lives of the “foreigners” makes this an ever-uneasier position to occupy, while the scary draugr has the right on his side.

Those settlers have all got to pay, that’s all.

It’s one of the benefits of the perpetual popularity that horror maintains, notably in recent years with production companies like Blumhouse and A24, that odd and interesting experiments in the genre such as The Damned can be made without too much risk. Minimalist horror, period horror, horror set in remote and unusual settings — the genre consistently finds its audience. The revival of period Gothic horror is a particular thrill of mine, with Robert Eggers (Nosferatu, The Witch) leading the charge and films like The Damned a great example of what atmospheric dread can be achieved on a modest, stripped-down scale.

If you’re also a fan of this subgenre, I recommend hurrying to see The Damned while it’s in theaters. You want the deep shadows onscreen to be matched by the deep shadows all around you, in order to feel properly disturbed about what might be lurking at the edges of your peripheral vision, or — heaven forbid — right behind you. Pro tip: sit in the back row!