For his first two feature films, Robert Eggers has been fascinated with America’s native horror lineage. His directorial debut, The Witch brought us the story of a pilgrim family isolated in the forests of New England where Satan toys with their religious and psychological dynamics. His next feature, The Lighthouse, was a turn-of-the-century piece about two sailors trapped on an island with nothing but each other, their secrets and the constant blaring of a foghorn - which may or may not be the sound of darker forces at play.

Known for rooting his stories in some historical reality (down even to the cadence and dialect with which his characters speak), Eggers has chosen for his next film to go overseas for more ancient narrative foundations. The Northman is the story of Amleth, a Viking prince whose father is betrayed by his own brother and who in turn seeks violent retribution. It’s certainly not a story we haven’t heard before, but brings to it his own spin.

The name Amleth itself may sound very similar to the name of a certain Shakespearean Dane who asked whether to be or not to be. Though based on the play Ur-Hamlet written some time in the 16th Century, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is drawn as much from the Viking tale of Amleth, a story which has gone on to be told again and again in countless takes from Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well to Disney’s The Lion King. Eggers’s story aims to both bring to the story to life for a modern audience whilst rooting it firmly in its early Scandinavian origins, partly achieved in his casting of famous performers from the region, including Alexander Skarsgard, Dracula’s Claes Bang and everyone’s favourite Icelandic popstar Bjork.

But beyond familial battles is the Viking setting itself. There have been plenty of swords-and-sandals films set in Ancient Rome or jidaigeki samurai features set in feudal Japan but Vikings are a somewhat less-explored historical setting in film. However, the Viking Age is a period that has allowed for a variety of tonal and genre exercises. In Hollywood, Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis starred in 1958’s swashbuckling epic The Vikings whilst Robert Zemeckis brought his lens nearly 50 years later in the blood-soaked motion-capture Beowulf. In Scandinavia, the most notable Viking film of recent years would perhaps be Nicolas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising, in which a one-eyed Mads Mikkelsen plays another warrior in search of vengeance and murders a great many Christian crusaders in the process. All of these films play fast and loose with historical accuracy, much like how the Western genre has mythologised the cowboy as a classic American archetype so too has the handful of Viking films worked to transform the Viking into an elemental force of violent retribution.

Eggers however has confessed in interviews that he was not particularly fascinated with Vikings with prior to The Northman, and that his cinematic influences were drawn from elsewhere. Two films in particular that he has referred to are Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev and John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian.

A running theme through the films discussed has been violence, one that The Northman seeks to continue. Eggers has spoken of his preference for shooting in long unbroken takes which make action sequences all the more immersive. Tarkovsky’s not necessarily known for being an action-packed filmmaker but has been lauded as one of the masters of using long takes to tell his stories (or “sculpting in time” as he famously called it). Andrei Rublev is the loose biopic of the great 15th Century Russian painter whose life is backdropped against the highs and lows of medieval Russia. As you can imagine, medieval Russia is not the most hospitable place in the world, presented here as a country where princes and tribes regularly do battle and wreak havoc. Rublev seeks to use his artistic voice to capture the time and place as he sees it, and is in many respects no different than Tarkovsky or Eggers depicting historical periods through a highly stylised lens. While The Northman isn’t monochrome like Andrei Rublev, Jarin Blaschke’s muted colour palette similarly grounds this otherwise folkloric story in a real sense of time and place and connects the audience more viscerally.

As far as Conan the Barbarian is concerned, anyone who has seen The Northman trailer will have picked out overt visual nods; not least in the brief glimpses at Claes Bang’s Fjolnir whose framing and costume bare an uncanny resemblance to Thulsa Doom, James Earl Jones’s cult leader villain in the 1982 film. Alexander Skarsgard’s striking, scantily-clad physical presence is one to rival Arnold Schwarzenegger’s but the similarities go beyond the superficial. Those who haven’t seen Conan may assume it is a light-hearted fantasy romp where Arnold throws out one-liners as he slices through enemies. This would be a fitting description for the lesser sequel Conan the Destroyer but Milius’s original film is yet another brooding and atmospheric tale of a lone warrior searching for the man who killed his family set against a vast landscape of nature. Backed by Basil Poledouris’s operatic score and portentous screenplay co-written by Oliver Stone, John Milius’s film is one with the heightened thrills of a swords-and-sandals adventure along with a sincere reverence for its pulp fiction roots that is sadly lacking in modern blockbusters. Eggers’s film seeks to return blockbuster filmmaking to a time when the hero didn’t have to wink to the camera at all opportunities and a hero’s journey is less about saving the world than getting your own back at the expense of everything (or everyone) else.

The Northman is showing at Showroom Cinema from April 15.