Synopsis
“These are not our lands. Our gods don't rule here. Other gods do.”
Circa 1001 A.D., Viking navigator Einarr survives a shipwreck with a handful of Norse Greenlanders on a fog-bound island off the coast of North America. The survivors bury their drowned dead in a forest clearing, laying their swords and axes in the graves with them, and turn to repairing their ship. At first the island looks like salvation. But the place is wrong. No birds cross the sky. No fish move in the shallows. Their food rots overnight, new ropes crumble in their hands, and healthy-looking trees collapse into decay beneath their axes.
Across the water, Indigenous watchers, whom the Vikings call Skraelingar, keep constant vigil. They refuse to set foot on the island, and they do not let the Greenlanders leave. They know what Einarr and his men do not: the island is a prison.
It holds a fallen goddess, banished for rebellion and kept there for generations by a dwindling bloodline of Indigenous keepers. Centuries of rage have stripped her of divinity until only the beast remains. The shipwreck gives her what she has waited a millennium for: fresh corpses to raise against her keepers, and a chance to escape.
She sends the dead Greenlanders out of the fog, mud-caked, black-eyed and carrying the weapons they were buried with. As the corpse-walkers cut down the survivors one by one, Einarr is trapped between shipmates wearing the faces of men he failed and Skraelingar sworn to kill anyone who might carry the curse ashore.
Honors
- Austin Film Festival Screenplay Competition Semifinalist, 2026
- Scriptapalooza Screenwriting Competition Quarterfinalist, 2026
- Creative Screenwriting Feature Screenplay Competition Quarterfinalist, 2023
- Fade In Awards, Horror Semifinalist, 2022, as The Skraeling