Join today to claim your daily loot

15 Movies Set in Winter That Feel Genuinely Cold

1-15

You can feel the frost.

Nazarii Verbitskiy

TV Shows & Movies - November 5th 2026, 18:30 GMT+1

The Lodge 2019 cropped processed by imagy — 15. The Lodge (2019)
Riley Keough spent weeks researching cult survivor psychology before filming The Lodge, and the flatness in her performance comes straight from that research. Two kids left alone with their father's new girlfriend in a snowbound cabin start to suspect she's hiding something. The film was shot in the Italian Dolomites despite being set in the American Northeast. Directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz also made Goodnight Mommy, and the family resemblance is obvious. | © Neon

Cropped a simple plan 1998 — 14. A Simple Plan (1998)
Nobody in A Simple Plan is a criminal until a bag of cash falls out of a crashed plane in the snow. Sam Raimi directed it in 1998, a sharp turn from the Evil Dead films that made his name. Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton play brothers whose decision to keep the money unravels everyone around them. The Minnesota setting was actually filmed in Alberta and Minnesota both, chosen for snow that stayed put on schedule. | © Paramount Pictures

Frozen — 13. Frozen (2010)
Three skiers get left behind on a chairlift after the resort closes for the night in Frozen, and the mountain stays open for business the next day anyway. Writer-director Adam Green came up with the idea after wondering what actually happens to a lift after hours. The film cost about two million dollars and shot mostly on a soundstage with a green screen. Emma Bell's character makes a jump partway through that still gets brought up whenever people discuss the movie. | © Anchor Bay Entertainment

Cropped The Day After Tomorrow — 12. The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
Roland Emmerich destroys New York with a flash freeze in The Day After Tomorrow, and the wolves that show up near the end were real animals trained for the shoot. The 2004 film cost around 125 million dollars, much of it spent flooding and then freezing a full-scale Manhattan street set. Dennis Quaid plays a climatologist racing to reach his son before temperatures drop low enough to kill in minutes. The science got mocked at the time, but the box office did not care. | © 20th Century Fox

Cropped 30 Days of Night — 11. 30 Days of Night (2007)
A town in Alaska goes dark for a month every winter, and 30 Days of Night treats that fact as an invitation. Josh Hartnett plays the sheriff of Barrow, a real town now officially named Utqiagvik, under siege from vampires who time their arrival to the sunset. The film came from a comic series by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith published in 2002. Sam Raimi produced it years after making his own winter crime film with a very different kind of threat. | © Columbia Pictures

Alive — 10. Alive (1993)
Seventeen of the 45 passengers aboard Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 survived more than two months in the Andes in 1972, and Alive tells their story with Ethan Hawke in the lead. Director Frank Marshall shot on real snowbound locations in the Canadian Rockies to avoid the fakery of a soundstage. The survivors famously ate the flesh of the dead to live, a detail the film does not soften. Hawke reportedly lost weight for the role alongside the rest of the cast. | © Buena Vista Pictures

Cropped Society of the Snow — 9. Society of the Snow (2023)
Spanish director J.A. Bayona returned to the same Andes crash that inspired Alive, this time telling it in Spanish with a mostly unknown cast. Society of the Snow cast actors from Uruguay and Argentina to match the real nationalities of the 1972 crash victims. Bayona and his crew built fuselage replicas and shot in actual snow at high altitude in the Sierra Nevada. The film earned Spain's submission for the 2024 Academy Awards and won Best International Feature. | © Netflix

Cropped Wind River — 8. Wind River (2017)
A frozen body on a Wind River reservation opens this one, and the cold in the title is not decoration. Jeremy Renner plays a wildlife tracker whose own job depends on reading snow for signs of death. Director Taylor Sheridan based the script partly on the real, unresolved crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the US. The film closes with on-screen statistics rather than a tidy resolution, which was the point. | © The Weinstein Company

Cropped Snowpiercer — 7. Snowpiercer (2013)
A train called the Snowpiercer circles a frozen Earth nonstop, carrying the last of humanity in strict class order. Bong Joon-ho adapted the film from a 1982 French graphic novel called Le Transperceneige. Chris Evans plays a reluctant leader pushing from the tail section toward the engine at the front. The whole planet outside the windows is locked at sub-zero temperatures after a failed climate experiment, and the train never stops moving. | © The Weinstein Company

The Grey — 6. The Grey (2011)
Liam Neeson leads a group of oil workers who survive a plane crash only to face wolves in the Alaskan wilderness. Director Joe Carnahan shot The Grey in British Columbia, where temperatures on set reportedly dropped low enough to freeze camera equipment. The wolves were a mix of real trained animals and animatronics, since nothing alive would cooperate with the script. Neeson's character spends the film tying makeshift weapons from broken glass, which says everything about the odds. | © Open Road Films

The Hateful Eight — 5. The Hateful Eight (2015)
Quentin Tarantino shot The Hateful Eight in 70mm using lenses that hadn't been used for a feature since the 1960s. The format was built for sweeping landscapes, and he pointed it at a cramped cabin full of liars instead. Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, and Jennifer Jason Leigh spend most of the runtime circling each other while a blizzard seals the exits. The snow outside is real Colorado weather, shot in brutal cold that shows on every actor's face. | © The Weinstein Company

Fargo — 4. Fargo (1996)
Minnesota's flat white highways in Fargo hide a kidnapping scheme that goes wrong almost immediately. Joel and Ethan Coen opened the film with a title card claiming it was a true story, which was not accurate. Frances McDormand's Marge Gunderson, seven months pregnant, investigates murders with a calm that never cracks. The wood chipper scene was invented for the film and has nothing to do with any real case. | © Gramercy Pictures

The Revenant — 3. The Revenant (2015)
A man gets mauled by a bear roughly twenty minutes into The Revenant, and the attack runs almost four unbroken minutes on screen. Leonardo DiCaprio won his first Oscar playing Hugh Glass, a fur trapper left for dead by his own crew. Director Alejandro González Iñárritu insisted on shooting only in natural light, which pushed the production into freezing locations across Canada and Argentina. Crew members have said the shoot ran past 100 days longer than planned because of weather alone. | © 20th Century Fox

The Shining — 2. The Shining (1980)
Jack Nicholson's typewriter in The Shining changes color at least once between shots, a continuity slip Stanley Kubrick apparently never bothered fixing. The Overlook Hotel sits snowbound for the entire film, cutting Jack Torrance and his family off from any help. Kubrick shot the hedge maze scenes on a set built at Elstree Studios, with fake snow made from salt and Styrofoam. Stephen King, who wrote the novel, has said publicly that he never liked this adaptation. | © Warner Bros.

Cropped The Thing — 1. The Thing (1982)
Antarctica in The Thing is less a setting than a trap, a research station with nowhere to run and no one left to trust. John Carpenter cast Kurt Russell as R.J. MacReady, a helicopter pilot watching his crew turn on each other. Rob Bottin spent over a year building the creature effects, including the infamous chest-cavity bite scene. The film flopped on release in 1982, overshadowed by E.T., and only found its audience years later. | © Universal Pictures

1-15

Some films make you reach for a blanket just by watching, with snow, ice, and biting wind doing as much work as the cast. These movies turn winter into a character. Here are 15 movies set in winter that feel genuinely cold.

Facebook X Reddit WhatsApp Copy URL

Some films make you reach for a blanket just by watching, with snow, ice, and biting wind doing as much work as the cast. These movies turn winter into a character. Here are 15 movies set in winter that feel genuinely cold.