So, has anyone else watched the new Netflix Katla series? It’s a dark, eerie atmospheric thriller set in the small town of Vík, or to give it its full name Vík í Mýrdal, on the south coast, in the shadow of a year-long eruption of the volcano Katla. Vík and Katla are both real. Vík is home to about 300 souls plus every tourist heading east – if you’re going to the glacial lagoon or circling the Ring Road, you’ll almost certainly stop for fuel, food or a leg-stretch in Vík, even if you stay no longer than a few minutes. Katla is also real, the big sister of 2010’s Eyjafjallajökull. If you’re in Europe, you’ll certainly remember the airborne mayhem Eyja caused and Katla is ten times the size. I will laugh hugely and bitterly if it erupts in the near future because it’ll certainly shut down flights in Europe for a while. But if there’s one positive about Katla it’s that newsreaders will actually be able to pronounce her name.
First I’m going to talk a bit about Katla the series and then I’ll give you a quick tour of the sights from the show that I’m familiar with and a few other things to see and do in the area.
So, the series. I want to talk about the actual content, so read at your peril. I’ll put the big bold starred thing at the bottom so you can scroll past it for real life Vík & Katla details. But in short, this is what I wanted Fortitude to be and while it’s kind of eerie and kind of melancholy, on the whole I liked Katla.
***** MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD ****
I don’t know if anyone watched Fortitude a few years ago. It was a similar sort of thing, in that it was filmed in Iceland and it was creepy. Except that Fortitude went full-on body horror. I didn’t watch beyond season one.
The new Netflix Katla series is what I wanted Fortitude to be. It’s beautiful and atmospheric and it tells a story that keeps you interested without resorting to prehistoric wasps or any of the other horror that Fortitude got into. I found Katla scary and I kept waiting for horror and mercifully, it never materialised.
I knew that an ashen body came out of the volcano and from the atmosphere of the teasers, it looked very much like this could become too scary for my taste. By the end of the first episode, it was looking like zombie horror. Then along came Mikel and it looked like full of bloodbath horror and that kept me nervous for most of the series. I kept expecting that this would be the last episode I’d be able to watch and I’d have to find a summary to find out what happens in the end. But the horror never came and I persevered and it turns out other than Mikel’s little murder, it mostly remained merely creepy and tense and always beautiful, in a really desaturated ashy bleak sort of way.
Yeah, the huge volcano Katla has been erupting for a year and the tiny settlement of Vík has been mostly abandoned. A few people are clinging to their old life in a town that now can’t be home to more than ten or twenty people but almost everyone else has moved to Reykjavik. The area is sealed off at the big river/floodplain and you can only cross on the ferry with a permit issued by the police (unless there’s been an accident and the police are looking the other way). That’s a novelty in itself. If Katla actually erupted in real life, it would be swarming with geologists and volcanologists from all over the world, journalists, photographers, anyone with a drone and then anyone who just wants to see an eruption. I’d be there. Take a look at the small tourist eruption happening on the Reykjanes peninsula right now.
Among the remainers are Gríma, who’s a farmer and ICE-SAR (Icelandic Search & Rescue) member, who goes on rescues up on the glacier and deals with accidents and catastrophes. A lot of Icelanders are ICE-SAR volunteers. I think it’s just something in their national psyche; they have a natural inclination to help people. Gríma’s hanging onto Vík because the day the eruption started, her sister Ása was lost on the glacier. It’s been a year now and between loss of hope and the damage to her mental health, they’ve given up on actively searching for Ása but Gríma can’t bring herself to move away.
The first person to emerge from Katla is Gunhild, a Swedish tourist who was in the area twenty years ago and having an affair with Gríma & Ása’s father Þór, an ex-glacier guide now turned mechanic. However, Gunhild is still alive and she comes flying over to find out what’s going on – I mean, wouldn’t you if a woman appeared who claimed to have your name and seemed to think she was having an affair with the man you did twenty years ago? Next comes Ása, found in a hut up by the glacier camp. Neither of them have any idea what happened to them, where they came from, where they’ve been, how long has passed or indeed, why they’re covered in a mix of ash & clay that makes them appear demonic as they walk slowly towards town.
Gradually you realise that people are coming back from the dead – and not just people. Katla drives the point home with a raven with a white feather that lives outside Þór’s house, which keeps dying and reappearing beside its own grave. Then some ashy horses appear, clearly lost in the eruption a year ago. Then some sheep. Then the flowers outside the house. And yet Gunhild isn’t back from the dead because she’s still alive and is standing there having a conversation with herself.
Þór actually kind of figures it out and takes it very calmly. Life is just a series of things happening over and over again, he says. The sun rises and sets and rises and sets and so there’s evidently no problem whatsoever with his lover from twenty years ago reappearing as the girl he knew twenty years ago, while the version of her that’s been living in Sweden for twenty years is standing right there with them. He knows they’re the same person and it doesn’t bother him. Almost everyone else is stuck at the “you have the same name and you look very alike, you must be related” stage.
Where it takes a turn for the terrifying is Mikel, the eight-year-old son of Darri, a geologist studying the eruption and his soon-to-be-ex wife Rakel. Mikel died three years ago, hit by a car. They saw him dead and yet here he is in Vík, in his father’s bed at the camp. It’s fine at first. He’s a kid, with perhaps not enough appetite for someone who hasn’t had a meal in three years, who doesn’t enjoy being hidden in the glacier camp because Darri can’t let anyone else see his kid back from the dead. But then he tries to hide him in a shed and that turns Mikel from lost and confused to evil demon child who ends up slashing the throat of a would-be rescuer.
But what’s actually going on? Well, there’s some folk tales about the Hidden Folk and changelings, via the hotel proprietress who reads tarot and teacups and doesn’t half look like Wench, the seer from Ragnarok. I’m fine with that. If they’d stuck with that, I’d be good. But then they went into some mumbo-jumbo about a psychic asteroid from another galaxy which is being scattered over the town in every eruption and creating people from the locals’ memories. I can cope with fantasy. If they’d stuck with “magic is doing this”, I’d be very happy but they’ve tried to “make it science” and what they’ve managed is some codswallop that makes me roll my eyes so hard they almost fell out.
Ultimately, the volcano-clones have appeared so that people with issues can address them and find closure. Gríma finally learns the true fate of her sister, says goodbye and moves on. She also finally deals with her decaying relationship with her husband, playing literal Russian roulette with her volcano-clone for who gets to live out her life with him. Darri and Rakel reconcile over their loss of Mikel and Darri learns to think of bits of Mikel’s life other than his attempted arson-murder and the mutilation of a pet parrot. He thinks it’s dwelling on these memories that made the volcano-clone so murderous and terrifying. He’s also a walking representation of Darri and Rakel’s divorce, so there’s a lot on an eight-year-old’s head there.
Gunhild learns that her son’s disability was just a genetic thing and nothing to do with her unsuccessful abortion attempt and father and son learn of each others’ existence and meet for the first time. Gisli, the local policeman, is trying to cure his wife’s advanced cancer with herbal remedies – he finally learns to put his faith in medicine rather than the Almighty when his wife’s volcano-clone appears and they end up running off together. And bearing in mind how few people knew about most of the volcano-clones, who’s to say that there aren’t a couple of other Vík residents raking over their pasts in secret.
It’s actually quite a depressing ending. Well, the entire series is kind of depressing. You certainly don’t watch this for fun. There’s a trigger warning before the last episode about a suicide scene. No warning on the previous episode, which also had a suicide scene, and no mention of the scene I personally found a bit more shocking, the resolution of the story of Darri, Rakel and Mikel. I would have liked more to come out of Gisli’s story – you know, the policeman trying to kill his wives with a massive shotgun after going out shooting sheep for no apparent reason should have more consequences than his son kicking the hell out of him and sitting on the floor of the church praying out loud.
Do I want a season two? I’d watch it if one came along but I feel like we’ve had a pretty self-contained story here in these eight episodes and I think a second season would either be more of the same, except we more or less know the answer to the mystery, or something completely different in which case why not just create an entire new show?
They teased horror and thriller and chiller and ultimately, it’s a character story that delves into the psychology and leaves you feeling a bit grey and washed-out, like the scenery. Recommended but do have something fun to do afterwards.
**** END SPOILERS. IT’S SAFE TO READ ON NOW ****
Keep reading, I’m leaving you a few empty lines to help the spoilers vanish off the top of the screen.
Now, let’s talk Vík and Katla!
This is a little map of the area. In the series, access to the eruption area is restricted at the Markarfljót, the big river that flows down from Þórsmörk. It’s a huge river that generally has less water in it than you might expect. The majority of it is a big grey floodplain with various smaller rivers meandering across it. If you go to Seljalandsfoss, it’s the expanse of grey gravel just before you turn left. You drive straight over it on a bridge.
However, as I said, it’s a floodplain and it’s fed partly by Mýrdalsjökull, the huge glacier sitting on top of Katla. In the event of a Katla eruption, a glacial flood will rush down that riverbed, washing away roads, rivers, bits of mountain and anything in its path. The flood is the ice from the glacier. I’m sure you can imagine how something hot like a volcanic eruption might melt a lot of the ice on top of it. So the ferry probably would be the only way to cross that river in the event of an eruption, although I’d want to be nice and sure that there wasn’t another flood coming before I boarded it.
First left after the bridge is Seljalandsfoss, a tall thin lacy waterfall tumbling off Eyjafjallajökull’s lower slopes and this one is particularly exciting because it’s carved a cave behind it and you can walk behind the waterfall and look out at the views across the south coast with the water falling down in front of you. Take waterproofs; this is a very wet and slippery little adventure.
A little further on is Skógafoss, a very powerful square waterfall that also marks the southern end of the trail that starts at Þórsmörk and goes over the new craters from the 2010 Fimmvörðuháls eruption. Those two waterfalls are always, always worth stopping at, especially as it’s a very long drive along the south coast to Vík from Reykjavik.
A little further on is the turning to Sólheimajökull, which is a tongue of Mýrdalsjökull and from here you can take tours onto Katla. Your best bet is probably Arctic Adventures. Poke around their website and see what takes your fancy. You can go trips with them that include a minibus transfer from Reykjavik, which takes a good two or three hours, or you pickup from Vík or you can meet them at the Sólheimajökull car park. I’ve done a glacier hike and ice climbing on Sólheimajökull, and I’ve done snowmobiling a little further up. You can also go inside the glacier, like Darri does, on their aptly-named Under the Volcano Katla Ice Cave tour. Whatever you do, don’t venture onto the glacier without a guide, ok? These things move, they have crevasses hundreds of metres deep and they are not to be messed with. Go with a guide and guarantee that you’ll come back from your adventure alive please.
A little further on again is the car park for the hike to the plane wreck, which I find an inexplicably popular tourist attraction. Ten years ago, you’d have had to know exactly where to park. Now there’s a car park that’s always packed. It’s an hour or so across the grey sand to the plane itself but if you want to tick off a popular tourist spot and a Katla location, it’s right there.
Next stop is Dyrholaey, which is a headland with views across to the famous Black Sand Beach, aka Reynisfjara. I love the views here on good days and it’s a little quieter than certain other points along this road. I believe Dyrholaey, especially the cliff with the hole in it to the right of this photo, is a popular climbing spot but again, don’t do this without an expert.
Back up on the Ring Road, take the next right and you’ll find yourself at Reynisfjara. It’s a black sand beach made up of pulverised lava rock and it has a huge wall of hexagonal basalt columns and a cave. It’s also one of the most dangerous spots in Iceland. If you’ve watched Katla, you’ve seen some of the things that occur on this bit of coastline. In real life, the bottom drops away very steeply and big waves can come out of nowhere and drag you out to sea in seconds. There are signs everywhere warning of these sneaker waves: pay attention to them and stay well away from the water. From here you can see the rock formations just off the headland, which you should recognise from the background of Katla. I suppose they might be accessible by boat but I don’t recommend it.
The bit of beach you’ve seen in Katla is actually round the other side of the headland. Don’t attempt to walk it. Get in the car and go up and round and down into Vík. I recommend parking by the N1 roadhouse and the wool outlet centre. The roadhouse is where you’ll get fuel and you can also get a famous Icelandic lamb hotdog “with everything”. It’s a very popular snack stop. Venture into the wool outlet for good prices on jumpers, hats and assorted other souvenirs. Then make your way through the dunes and down to the beach. This is the Katla beach and there’s the headland and stacks exactly as you’ve seen them in the show. This bit of beach is usually much quieter than the famous one on the other side and you’re more likely to have it to yourself.
I wish I could be very informative on the subject of the town itself but I haven’t seen much of it and there isn’t much of it left in the show. The church that Gisli uses as the police HQ is real and present and you’ll spot it up there on the hill, overlooking the town. It’s a bit of a steep climb and much easier to do by car. Go inside, have a little peek inside and also take in the view of the town and the coastline from up there.
I have no idea where Katla’s Hotel Vík is. The real-life Hotel Vík is the long modern building below the church. It used to be part of the Icelandair Hotels group but it appears to be independent these days. It has a strip of small private apartments, if you’d rather have self-catering and a little more peace and it has some cottages under the mountain.
While you’re in Vík, you might as well pop over to the swimming pool. Most towns in Iceland, no matter how small, have an outdoor geothermal pool and I will always recommend a visit. It’s warm, it’s open-air and although there’s usually a fence around it, the fence is never quite big enough to block out the views.
To be honest, I think that’s it for exciting things to see and do in Vík. It’s a really small town. Maybe next summer I’ll get out there and find some more Katla locations but I don’t think anyone will really care by then. Anyway, once you’ve had your fill of Katla in this small town, you can either return to Reykjavik or press on eastwards. Another two hours across a really big and scary volcanic floodplain from the biggest glacier in Europe and you’ll come to Skaftafell, which is a great place for camping, walking and appreciating the scenery and another forty minutes from there will take you to Jökulsárlón, the glacial lagoon. I hope you enjoyed the Netflix Katla series and if it inspired you to go to Iceland, I hope you enjoy that too!