This month, I’ve been taking part in the Letterboxd Hooptober challenge. The goal is to watch 31 horror films in October, including films that meet specific criteria such as “directed by Wes Craven” or starring a black woman.
I’m posting my thoughts on each of the movies here, as and when I get time.
Frozen
No one knows you’re up there.
When three skiers find themselves stranded on a chair lift at a New England ski resort that has closed for the next week, they are forced to make life or death choices that prove to be more perilous than staying put and freezing to death.
Frozen (the horror film one) has been on my to-watch list for fifteen years. That also happens to be the number of years my wife and I have been married. The two numbers are connected because of our honeymoon. Or more specifically, the horror film festival we unexpectedly attended on our honeymoon.
There’s an annual horror film festival in London, FrightFest, and in 2009 it happened to coincide with the dates we were in London celebrating our wedding. We hadn’t heard of the festival until we got to Leicester Square and saw the signs outside the Empire Cinema. We’re both horror fans (my wife’s desire to rewatch Hellraiser is one of the defining moments of our relationship), so, we had to attend.
We’d missed a lot of the festival, but we did get to see a couple of films including Nazi-zombie flick Dead Snow and something else that I’ve completely forgotten. We also saw a trailer for an interesting looking film – Frozen.
Fast forward fifteen years, and we finally had the opportunity to watch it, thanks to Amazon Prime.
And, like Maggie, I was pleasantly surprised. Let’s face it, low-budget horror movies can be bad. Really bad. But Frozen is a really solid movie. The cast were strong, there was a decent amount of time spent establishing the characters, and the action moved along quickly enough that the admittedly-thin premise didn’t wear out.
The characters themselves aren’t especially likeable, so if that’s something you need to enjoy a film, try something else from my Hooptober watch list.
But if the premise sounds interesting, Frozen is definitely worth checking out. And for a similar, but even more effective film, try Open Water. It’s based on a true story.
Frozen actually does nothing to help us hit our Hooptober goals, other than being one more film towards the 31 film total.
[Hooptober 11 – Frozen by Philip Harris first appeared on Solitary Mindset on 23rd October 2024]