The creature at the center of the first Ithaqua teaser is being billed as the first entirely new monster Hammer Films has put on screen in more than 60 years.
That claim needs an asterisk. The asterisk is the most interesting thing about the movie.
Ithaqua is directed by Casey Walker, who wrote the script with Peter Vicaire and Pascal Trottier. Luke Hemsworth plays an American mercenary sent to a remote 1800s fur-trading outpost in the Canadian north to find out why a nearby Indigenous settlement has gone silent. Kevin Durand, Michael Pitt, Craig Lauzon and Leenah Robinson co-star. Hammer’s own logline is admirably blunt: “A remote 1800s fur-trade outpost is plagued by an ancient evil with an insatiable hunger for flesh. The cold is the least of anyone’s problems.”
The film had its world premiere at FrightFest in London on August 29, takes its North American premiere at Beyond Fest on Sunday, September 27, 7 p.m. at the Los Feliz 3, with Walker on hand for a Q&A, and is set for release in early 2027 through Kaleidoscope.
Where the Wind-Walker Came From
The creature comes with a long paper trail. August Derleth introduced Ithaqua in 1933, in a story called “The Thing That Walked on the Wind,” building him out of Algernon Blackwood’s 1910 novella The Wendigo — itself Blackwood’s pass at Algonquian folklore. Derleth gave him a name that sounded native to Lovecraft’s universe and filed him into the Mythos as the Wind-Walker, though Lovecraft himself never wrote a word of him.
So Hammer has its first new monster in 60 years, and that monster has been in print for 93. Both statements are true at once. It is a tidy piece of positioning, and it is also why the film gets to skip the part where a horror movie stops to explain what its monster wants. Everybody already knows what walks behind you in the snow. For the longer version of how Derleth’s bookkeeping turned into everyone’s shared mythology, we went through the best Lovecraftian horror movies earlier this year.
What the Teaser Actually Shows
Very little of the creature, which is the right instinct for something whose whole appeal is that you hear it before you see it. The cut is built on the outpost instead: dwindling supplies, a shrinking number of people, the particular suspicion that sets in once the cold has gone on long enough. It plays closer to The Thing and Ravenous than to anything with a zipper up the back, and Walker has form here — he produced The Void, the Steven Kostanski and Jeremy Gillespie film that remains one of the best practical-effects cosmic horror movies of the last decade.
Hammer describes it as “a haunting folk horror experience where isolation, hunger and myth collide.” The studio also says “this is horror as it was meant to be,” which is the kind of thing a 90-year-old brand is contractually required to say about itself.
Why Thunder Bay Matters
Executive producer Jamie Anderson has described the shoot in plain terms. “We shot it on location in Thunder Bay, Ontario, in conditions that were not kind,” he wrote, “and leaned hard into practical effects and prosthetics.”
Ithaqua shot in Thunder Bay, Ontario in January 2025. Kevin Durand was born in Thunder Bay. Durand — the vampire in Abigail, and the reason our Clown in a Cornfield conversation went as well as it did — went home to northern Ontario in the dead of winter to make a movie about a thing that eats people in the snow.
Nobody has said whether that was deliberate. It should have been.
