“Out of Darkness” is a foundational myth horror tale, a grisly and grim narrative about a time when early humanity could first rightly refer to itself as “humanity.”

In cinematic shorthand, this Scottish production is “Quest for Fire” meets “A Quiet Place” or “The Thing” — any movie where The Deadly Unknown is picking off cast members one by one.

And for a genre piece that hews to and takes a good shot at transcending “formula,” it’s quite good.

A distant blot of yellow light pierces the pitch blackness of 45,000 years ago. As Ben Fordsman’s camera closes in on it, we see it is a campire and we hear a child, in a prehistoric dialect (with subtitles) ask, “Tell me a story.”

This is an extended family band of six. The boy, Heron (Luna Mwezi) has reached his tweens. His mother, Ave (Iola Evans) is heavily pregnant with a sibling. His father, Adem (Chuku Modu) is the alpha male leading them into this wilderness. Geirr (Kit Young) might be Adem’s brother. The storyteller is “a stray” they took in — Beyah (Safia Oakley-Green).

And the elder, the skeptic they don’t listen to, is Odal (Arno Lüning).

“The danger in bringing light to a dark place,” Odal intones, is that “You find out what lives in the darkness.”

That’s prompted by an inhuman screech they hear, which makes all but Adem question why he brought them “across the great sea” to this “cursed” land where the only trees are firs, and damned few of them — a wind-blasted heath with no sign of “prey” game.

Until they find a mammoth, devoured right down to the tusk.

Andrew Cumming’s debut feature immerses us The Great Unknown, before understanding, before anything mysterious that couldn’t be passed down orally could be understood by the primitive people in their furs and superstitions.

A “demon” is out there? When it yanks someone away from that campfire, they will hunt it and they will turn on each other, essentially “inventing” the venal, paranoid side of human nature we know today.

The alpha couple and their son get priority treatment. The “stray” is odd girl-becoming-a-woman out.

Something happened to the migration of the herds where they came from. Perhaps the climate was changing in the midst of the last ice age. Adem chose to take them across the sea instead of “South,” seeking the herds that never came north.

Odal never lets him forget that.

When they are attacked, they respond in the range of ways we expect them to. They won’t be able to avoid the perilous and dark forests any more. Their priority won’t be finding food in this place seemingly berefit of animals of any sort.

The production design is state-of-the-art period-correct and the thesis the film was built on sound — new evidence keeps turning up about how much prehistoric humans migrated, and to where.

And the fear is — in this case — literally primal. Something’s in the dark, something that will kill us.

“We light a fire or we die in the dark.”

The frights may be standard issue, but that novel setting, the ways characters rise to or shrink from their greatest tests, and the grim nature of human life in this most fragile of ages make “Out of Darkness” a winner, right down to the minimalist pun of its title.

Rating: R, graphic violence, gruesome images

Cast: Chuku Modu, Kit Young, Safia Oakley-Green, Iola Evans, Luna Mwezi and Arno Lüning

Credits: Directed by Andrew Cumming, scripted by Ruth Greenberg. A Bleecker Street release.

Running time: 1:27