Spring may be just around the corner, but the weather currently remains in winter’s death grip. When the weather outside is frightful, there’s no better excuse to get cozy inside with some great horror. This week’s streaming picks are dedicated to snowy winter horror movies that use harsh weather conditions to isolate their characters, mentally […]
Spring may be just around the corner, but the weather currently remains in winter’s death grip. When the weather outside is frightful, there’s no better excuse to get cozy inside with some great horror.
This week’s streaming picks are dedicated to snowy winter horror movies that use harsh weather conditions to isolate their characters, mentally or physically, trapping them with evil- human and otherwise. As always, here’s where you can watch them this week.
The small Alaskan town of Barrow experiences one whole month of complete darkness every year. It’s the perfect scenario for a coven of savage vampires to partake in a nonstop feeding frenzy, and they arrive just as the sun sets on Barrow for 30 days to begin their month-long all-you-can-eat buffet. Sheriff Eben (Josh Hartnett), his wife (Melissa George), and a dwindling band of survivors must fight to last until dawn eventually breaks. Directed by David Slade (
Hard Candy
) and adapted from the comic book series,
30 Days of Night
eschews any notion of romantic vampires here and instead goes full-throttle on the gore, violence, and monstrous vampires.
Curtains – AMC+, Arrow, Hoopla, Peacock, Prime Video, the Roku Channel, Shudder
Six women from different talent backgrounds spend their weekend at a remote mansion for an elaborate audition to win a coveted movie role. Because remote locations always make for the perfect setting for a masked killer to run amok, the competition becomes fierce in lethal ways. While the audition angle presents a unique setup for this ’80s slasher, the winter backdrop provides endless creativity in terms of the slasher kills. The most memorable kills involve the creepy masked killer using the weather against the victims, including the film’s best death sequence set on a frozen pond. Sickles and ice skating equal bad news.
I Saw the Devil – Hoopla, Kanopy, Peacock, Pluto TV, Prime Video, Roku Channel
Jee-woon Kim’s I Saw the Devil delivers one of the bleakest tales of revenge ever committed to celluloid. When a serial killer viciously murders a secret service agent’s pregnant fiancée, the agent becomes driven by vengeance. That results in a cat-and-mouse game that gets so brutal that the lines between protagonist and antagonist blur. Visceral and shocking, this is a must for those who like their horror extremely dark. The winter setting here doesn’t just provide striking horror imagery with blood on snow, it reinforces the chilling nature and exacting toll of vengeance.
Longlegs – Hulu
Winter plays a key role in writer/director Osgood Perkins’ chilly Satanic horror movie, starting with the opening sequence that introduces Nicolas Cage’s serial killer with a very specific victim preference: young girls with birthdays on the 14th. That’s bad news for FBI recruit Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), who was born on January 14 and finds herself on Longlegs’ radar. The wintry setting only enhances the film’s icy atmosphere. Longlegs injects a true crime story with putrid Satanism and refuses to handhold, serving as a visceral rebuttal to society’s compulsive need to find logic in the most heinous of crimes. It’s the way that evil is a constant, voyeuristic presence that unnerves most; Satan lurks in darkened corners and shadows in many scenes, hiding in plain sight throughout.
Scare Me – AMC+, Hoopla, Shudder
Writer/Director Josh Ruben (Heart Eyes) pulls triple duty, starring as Fred, an aspiring writer suffering from writer’s block, in his feature debut. Fred rents a cabin in the Catskills mid-winter to get the creative juices flowing, only to discover that successful author Fanny (Aya Cash) is staying at a nearby cabin. A power outage inspires a competitive round of scary storytelling between the pair, but the horror from their tales seems to manifest as it grows more intense, building toward a dangerous confrontation. The fire inside is delightful in this cozy little cabin of horror. Scare Me captures the magic of storytelling and the pitfalls of ego with endless wit and creativity.
