Filming for Katla began in early 2020 but was suspended after the Covid-19 virus reached Scandinavia. Filming resumed in May of 2020 at a large studio in Reykjavik for interior scenes and eventually on location in the real village of Vik, which is normally a heavily-visited tourist locale but was empty during pandemic travel restrictions for much of 2020. Pre-pandemic Vik also had a revolving resident population of geologists and volcanologists numbering in the hundreds, absent during filming. Series co-creator and director Baltasar Kormakur commented that returning to a deserted Vik to shoot exteriors "was like 28 Days Later".