Ithaqua (2026) Review: a Bloody Anti-Western

 

This year’s Grimmfest, in our native Manchester, had a particularly strong lineup for period horror enthusiasts, with Victorian Psycho, Marama and Ithaqua all promising to drag audiences back to less comfortable chapters of history. Of the three, Ithaqua makes for a particularly grim journey into the past, trading the familiar trappings of the Western for something far more primal, savage and downright unpleasant.

Directed by Casey Walker (A Little Bit Zombie), Ithaqua takes the vastness of the frontier and turns it into something deeply unsettling. There’s a certain anti-Western sensibility at work here, stripping away any romantic notions of the pioneering spirit and replacing them with a brutal struggle for survival against a landscape that seems determined to swallow its inhabitants whole.

The grandeur and sheer vastness of the land are captured beautifully but this is frequently juxtaposed with locations that feel oppressively claustrophobic. Cabins, fortified walls, makeshift tents and even the fragile boundary of a campfire’s light become places of desperate confinement, surrounded by the terrifying blackness that the flames can barely push back against. The wilderness might be enormous, but there’s precious little sense of freedom to be found in it.

These men don’t gallop across the plains, beholding the majesty before them; they trudge. Every step feels laborious, every stretch of open ground another potential death sentence. It’s a welcome rejection of the romanticised frontier imagery that has long defined the Western, presenting instead a world in which the land offers no promise of prosperity or adventure, only desperation and the possibility of a slow and miserable death.

Of course, there are considerably worse things out there than the elements. Enter the film’s antagonists - vampiric flesh-eaters with an insatiable hunger borne of the fabled wendigo’s curse.

With that, there’s plenty here for the gorehounds. The film isn’t shy about its bodily horrors, serving up grisly scenes of bodily excretions alongside a healthy helping of dismemberment, mutilation and general monster-related unpleasantness. Thankfully, the practical effects are fantastic, lending the carnage a pleasingly tangible quality that makes every torn limb and mangled body feel all the more stomach-churning. There’s a tactile nastiness to the best of these moments that digital effects can rarely replicate, and genre fans should find plenty to savour.

It’s difficult not to think of Ravenous when considering a period horror film that turns cannibalistic appetites and frontier desperation into something so grotesque. That film’s blackly comic sensibility gave its horrors an extra dimension, allowing the absurdity of its characters’ predicament to sit alongside the genuine brutality. Ithaqua could perhaps have benefited from a little more of that same irreverence.

A stronger vein of humour might also have helped fuel some chemistry between the leads. There’s fun to be had in watching characters thrown together in such an unforgiving situation, particularly when the threats facing them are as outlandish and vicious as these, but a little more banter or black comedy could have given their interactions extra spark. The film’s relentless grimness occasionally leaves you wishing it would loosen its grip long enough to let the characters breathe.

Still, there’s no shortage of entertainment to be found in its more gruesome pleasures. People get chewed on, bits of them get lopped off, and others are mauled in all manner of imaginative ways. The film understands the appeal of practical creature effects and bloody set pieces, and it delivers enough of both to keep genre enthusiasts engaged even when the character dynamics could use a little more seasoning.

Ultimately, Ithaqua works best when it leans into the hostility of its setting and the sheer physicality of its horror. This is no nostalgic celebration of frontier life but a bleak, blood-soaked anti-Western in which the landscape offers no salvation and the darkness beyond the campfire conceals horrors that make ordinary human suffering seem almost m

erciful.