As the polar vortex prepares to sweep across the United States, plunging temperatures and bringing “exceptionally cold” weather, it’s the perfect time to lean into the wintry chill by exploring some of the most chilling films ever made.
As the vortex blankets much of the nation in frost, stay warm and watch these films.
This Hulu original is about a woman, Darby (Havana Rose Liu), who breaks herself out of rehab and steals a car in order to visit her dying mother on her death bed. A massive winter storm interrupts her plans and she ends up taking shelter at a roadside visitors center with four strangers. The creepy setting turns into real danger when Darby discovers a little girl bound and gagged in the back of one of the stranger’s van.
Oz Perkin’s directorial debut was this psychological horror movie about a boarding school student who is left behind over a holiday break. Meanwhile another student tries to make her way back to the school by hitching a ride with a stranger and his wife. The two storylines eventually collide in a gruesome series of events.
A soon-to-be stepmother named Grace joins her fiancé and his two children for a Christmas vacation at the family’s remote lodge. The family’s strained relations are made worse when the dad returns to the city for work. Isolated together, Grace and the kids begin to experience unexplained events.
From Academy Award-winning director Bong Joon-ho comes this post-apocalyptic thriller set at some point in the future after a climate-change experiment designed to halt global warming actually led to an Ice Age. Snowpiercer is the name of a high-speed train that travels the globe, holding the few living remaining humans who survived the big freeze. But even in the train, there is a class system: Toward the front, the rich passengers eat real food and enjoy luxuries that are inconceivable to those back in coach, who are fed protein bars made from dead insects and are forced to do whatever they’re told—and a class war seems inevitable.
A Norwegian comedy horror movie about seven medical students who take a ski vacation over Easter break. The group learns that locals were tortured by Nazi soldiers during World War II. The group then begins to be hunted by a squad of zombie Nazis.
Oskar is a lonely and bullied boy who lives in the frosty climate of Blackeberg, a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden. He meets another lonely child named Eli, and they quickly become friends. Oskar slowly realizes that Eli is a vampire, but his loneliness trumps any qualms he has about Eli’s condition.
Barrow, Alaska, is situated on the northernmost tip of Alaska, and every year around winter solstice, its residents must endure thirty full days without sunlight. This is why nearly three-quarters of the town’s 500 residents vacate Barrow and head south during that month. This time around, a group of vampires preys upon the remaining residents, forcing locals to hide in horror and desperately await the next dawn.
The infamous wood-chipper scene in Fargo. And no, that’s not wood… This crime thriller is loosely based on a real-life story of a kidnapping/ransom plot gone horribly awry. In Fargo, the endless cold is merely a metaphor for the heartless and sadistic brutality that unfolds as the foiled plot claims one victim after the next. Frances MacDormand won an Oscar for Best Actress for her brilliantly subtle portrayal of a kindly but tough pregnant female cop.
Paul Sheldon finishes his latest novel, drinks a bottle of champagne, and takes off down a mountain in a snowstorm. Kathy Bates won a Best Actress Oscar for her chilling performance as Annie Wilkes, an obsessed fan who rescues, then holds hostage her favorite writer, Paul Sheldon—played by James Caan. To his horror, Paul gradually realizes that Annie’s original intent may have been to nurse him to health, but she becomes determined to not let him leave. The inhospitable winter weather surrounding Annie’s house is every bit as villainous as Annie is.
John Carpenter’s The Thing takes place in Antarctica’s wintry landscape. This is director John Carpenter’s favorite film he has directed. It is also widely considered one of the best and scariest horror movies of all time. The Thing follows the crew at a research station in Antartica as they discover a malevolent shapeshifting alien in their midst. As the creature can turn into any one of them, no one can be sure who to trust. Every year since 1982, crew members at all British research stations in Antarctica have made a habit of watching The Thing on June 21—which is the longest night of the year on the South Pole.
In Stanley Kubrick’s Meisterwerk of psychological horror, themes of geographic isolation and bone-chilling temperatures intermesh with the story of a dysfunctional family whose patriarch slowly goes mad as they house-sit a haunted hotel which has been shuttered for the winter. Roger Ebert wrote: “The movie is not about ghosts but about madness and the energies it sets loose in an isolated situation primed to magnify them.” Three decades later Stephen King wrote a sequel to The Shining which was adapted into a film by Mike Flanagan, Doctor Sleep (2019).
