Cinema Challenge #3: The Ten Best Snow Films

Cinema Challenge #3:  The Ten Best Snow Films


It all started with coffee and pie after the fantastically campy Norwegian horror film "Dod Sno"- (Dead Snow)- featuring a group of med students winter vacationing in Norway who find themselves fighting Nazi Zombies looking for their stolen gold. Allow me to repeat...NAZI ZOMBIES and SNOW. Does it get any fucking better? 



Our post-film debate spawned the newest challenge- choose the 10 best American snow films. Thus- here are Alone In the Dark's ten greatest films incorporating the best use of snow. Now before the comments start, I enforced a strict rule that winter/snow must make up the majority of the film. There were plenty of GREAT films with sparse snow scenes (Citizen Kane, Groundhog Day, Empire Strikes Back) and plenty of mediocre films with great use of snow (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger and 30 Days of Night). These are 10 Great Films in which snow might just well be considered not only a backdrop- but a minor character. Pull up your parka and enjoy.

#10.  A Simple Plan (1998)- dir. Sam Raimi

Director Sam Raimi transcends writer Scott B. Smith's chilling novel of the same name into the most unlikely of film genres- Red-State Film Noir. Simple Plan is dark, desperate, and disturbingly real. These are protagonists both ordinary and believable- and achingly easy to empathize with. A true case study of bad choices made worse by the excesses of the human condition. A sort of  "proto-No Country for Old Men", the picture owes much to cinematographer Alar Kivilo- whose dead and silent winter landscapes are powerless to help mask the evil men do.