.jpg "Hold the Dark (2018)")
Most of what I have been watching has been from 1984 to 1987, but as I was watching, I began to think about something specifically for my Valhalla, Alaska, setting. It has wolves, isolation, strange local beliefs, and the tournaq, or tornrak, wolf-demon.
Hold the Dark seemed like a good choice for all of this.
Hold the Dark (2018)
Medora Slone (Riley Keough), a young mother from the Alaskan backwater of Keelut, puts in a call to wolf expert and naturalist Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright), with an urgent request. Her six-year-old Bailey is gone, and with two other children having vanished in much the same way, she believes wolves are to blame. She wants him to come up north and put down the animal before her husband Vernon (Alexander Skarsgård) comes home from his tour in Iraq.
Core makes the trip thinking it will be a hard but straightforward job. He is relieved of that notion rather quickly. What he uncovers about Bailey is far worse than Medora let on, and when Vernon does return, he sets off on a course of violence all his own. In time, the film sheds its missing-child premise for something stranger and harder to pin down.
You could almost, but not quite, call it a werewolf movie or even a supernatural horror in the conventional sense, yet for most of its running time it leaves you in doubt as to whether it might be one. I find that uncertainty to be its best quality.
Take the wolves themselves. They are present from the start, though the film is cagey in how it presents them. Core will study them and insist they are animals, not moral agents; he can make sense of a pack culling its own young as a matter of nature, which is violent but not evil. The villagers of Keelut have a different take. Once Core gets to the bottom of what happened to Bailey, some are quick to say Medora is under the influence of a wolf-demon, or tournaq as the movie puts it.
You will not get a tidy resolution on that here. There is no scene of Medora breaking out in fur, nor does Vernon undergo a full-moon metamorphosis. No one is on hand with an old tome to lay out the rules. The wolf imagery is there in the hunting and predation, in parents turning on their children, and in people acting on instincts others cannot fathom. Whether you see it as supernatural or merely human is left open, and that is more to my liking than a run-of-the-mill creature feature.
Then there is the village of Keelut, perhaps the most effective horror element of all. It feels cut off from the world, not by some contrived fantasy setting but because the distance imposes its own order. An outsider like Core will notice right away: the people know each other, and they know things they are not sharing with him. The landscape is vast, cold, and indifferent. It is exactly what I was looking for in this movie. Alaska is a character in and of itself, it was one of the reasons I began Valhalla, AK.
Director Jeremy Saulnier and writer Macon Blair seem to have an eye for dark fantasy rather than for Alaskan realism. As someone considering an Alaska setting for inspiration, I can put that aside. Hold the Dark is not a documentary, but it is invaluable for atmosphere. The silence and the sense that the modern world thins out once you are far enough from the centers of population are very well done. There is something about the cold, the dark, and the isolation that keeps ideas like Valhalla, AK alive for me.
The masks in the film do this well. Vernon and Medora both wear them, and the movie leaves us wondering what they mean. Ritual, identity, a change in the person beneath without any physical alteration. That could serve Valhalla nicely. A wolf-demon need not make a man into a werewolf; the mask is transformation enough. Wear it and your thinking changes. You stop feeling the cold; you smell blood and recognize fear. There comes a point where you can no longer fathom why the rest of the world is so put off by your actions. That's a different sort of creature.
Violence Without Explanation
What makes Hold the Dark violent is its suddenness and brutality. You have an extended gun battle at one point that could be mistaken for something from another film, yet it serves to make a point: here, violence is hard to put a lid on once it starts. Saulnier has a way of rendering it ugly instead of heroic, and this story requires that. Vernon is as dangerous as they come but never an action hero; he is unsettling because his conduct follows a logic that eludes everyone else. Medora is no different. They are both driven by something older and more instinctive than what we would call morality. Whether one wants to call it supernatural is beside the point. For Core, it might as well be. My wife kept thinking they were werewolves. I don't think she was wrong.
Valhalla, AK and the Tournaq
My Valhalla is quirkier than Keelut, somewhere nearer Northern Exposure and Resident Alien, where the oddities and monsters are local complications rather than an unending tragedy. But humor only goes so far. You need places where the jokes end. Put some miles between you and town, lose the road and the radio, and you will hear wolves. Then you are in another place entirely.
I went to see the movie for the wolf-demon. The film refers to its possible wolf-spirit as a tournaq, but I would not put much stock in that as a mythological artifact. Inuit lore has its share of helping spirits for the shaman or the hunter, but "wolf-demon" is the film’s own construct.
If I were to put Valhalla on paper, I would fictionalize it. Let us say the locals use the term tornrak for it, though no one can tell you where the word originates. An anthropologist will say the name is incorrect, and an old-timer will reply, "Yeah. So is the thing." That is the sort of place Valhalla is.
The beast is not a werewolf in the sense of a man becoming a wolf. A tornrak is what gets people to become wolves in every way but the physical. It latches on to someone who is already isolated or angry. At first it is just a presence at the periphery of vision, a wolf at the window with no tracks in the snow to account for it. Then there are the dreams of hunting and running with blood in the mouth and snow on bare feet. When the person wakes, he feels better than he has in years. One should not overlook that. A proper supernatural corruption gives you something before it takes anything: strength, a release from guilt or fear, the means to endure the cold. Before long the victim is thinking in pack terms. Family is pack, outsiders are to be put down, and instinct has done away with moral choices.
And then the tornrak wants something. Hunger does not require words.
Final Thoughts
There is a strangeness to Hold the Dark. It sets out as a mystery over children being killed by wolves and devolves into a crime thriller of the most violent kind, all while skirting the edge of the supernatural without fully committing. You could be left frustrated by the ambiguity and the questions the film has no intention of answering. Even the director and writer seem content to let the atmosphere be dark and mythic rather than literal. To my mind, that is precisely what makes it such good material to draw from.
I don't want the tornrak explained. I do not want somebody to find a nineteenth-century book saying it has 8 Hit Dice and can only be killed by silver. At least not at first. I want people in Valhalla to disagree about whether it even exists. I want the old locals to tell contradictory stories. I want the rational explanation to remain possible long after the players have stopped believing it.
And I want the wolves to remain wolves.
Because the most disturbing possibility in "Hold the Dark" is not that human beings can turn into animals. It is that maybe there is not as much difference between humans and animals as we would like to believe.
October Horror Movie Challenge 2026
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