Draug

The Good: The plot is fairly straightforward and makes for good horror/mystery.

Sets and surroundings are very good. The use of Swedish summer wilderness saves a lot of money and provides a suitable mood.

FX are servicable, but only barely so.

The Bad: Suffers from a lot of problems with pacing The use of filters to simulate night time/darkness is a bit overdone.

The actors tend to overact, as is often the case with Swedish actors in my experience.

A little bit more exposition would have made things easier to follow.

Summary: All in all it is, as is so often the case with low-budget productions, a film of unused potential.

Still, the effort was valiant and the choice of topics was comparatively inventive.

Expect no masterpiece because this is not it. Nonetheless, if you're into (late) viking era stuff and horror and norse mythlogy, it can provide you with some entertainment.

As a huge fan of Scandanavian lore, I really enjoyed this film.

The set design and the locations are very good but the acting and the story is absolutely terrible. It's rare I dont finish the film and i had only 10 mins left

It is the story of an area in 11th century Sweden which had been converted to christianity and where some local folks had been too hard on some of the pagan remnants. When a missionary disappears in this forested area, a village deputy gets a "posse" together to go onto the forest to retrieve him and his companions. The searchers are attacked by bandits at the edge of the forest and then, as they get further in, they are attacked by something else. These are the Draug.

As a historical movie it is very accurate; nothing anachronistic to distract in the dialogue, costuming, or sets. The acting was very good and the scenery was exceptional. Both used to advantage in telling a spooky story based on Norse mythical creatures. We loved it

Draug has a very small budget, probably even a microbudget, and it shows. Most of the critical reviews I've read of this movie on here really just read like people couldn't quite get over the fact that this movie didn't really have the budget to be doing a whole lot differently than it did. Really, if Draug had a hundred times the budget and had the special effects to match, some of these people would probably be head over heels about this movie.

If you get over the budget, this movie is fine. The pacing is good, the atmosphere is dark and brooding, and the colour palette fits the tone. The special effects are about as good as you're really ever going to get with a movie on a total shoelace budget like this. Overall, this is a very creepy movie and I think it's a good example of how to do a horror movie on a microbudget.

None of this is to say that this is a perfect movie. There are times when the pacing isn't quite perfect. Like, most of the comic relief moments are very heavily weighted towards the start of the movie, while I think it would have been better to have them spread out across the entire thing.

But is it terrible? God no. It does the horror elements very well, and that's basically what you want from a movie like this.