Have you ever been hooked by a TV series so hard that you rushed to IMDB to watch literally anything else starring the show’s cast of actors in hopes that it was half as good??? Because that’s how I found myself watching The Walking Dead’s Emma Bell get stuck on a ski lift above a snowy mountain in the 2010 film Frozen. And before you ask, no, there was not a single zombie in sight.
Not to be confused with Disney’s cutesy musical tale packed with snowmen and showtunes — though I don’t doubt Bell could pull off “Let It Go” if she put her mind to it — psychological horror Frozen from director-writer Adam Green dares to ask: what if the simple ride up a ski slope became a claustrophobic nightmare? As Amy Harrison on The Walking Dead, Bell doesn’t get a chance to shine as much as Norman Reedus or Andrew Lincoln, but her heart-shattering performance as Andrea’s zombified sister stuck with me all the same. In Frozen, she only has a few inches to move around for most of the film, and still took my breath away.
Frozen follows Bell as Parker O’Neal, Kevin Zegers as Parker’s boyfriend Dan Walker, and Shawn Ashmore aka Iceman from the 2000s X-Men movies as Dan’s grumpy best friend, Joe Lynch (a nod to Green’s horror moviemaker buddy of the same name). After taking an impromptu ski trip (filmed at Snowbasin Ski Resort near Ogden, Utah), the trio’s already rocky relationships (Joe isn’t the biggest fan of his best friend’s girlfriend, Parker) are tested when, due to the negligence of the ski resort’s staff, the three are left halfway up a frozen slope with no way to get down. Worse still, the ski resort is shut until the following weekend — meaning five whole days before they can escape. At the height of winter. And no phones either because they packed them away in a locker. Drat, who knew responsible thinking would be these young adults undoing?
I have a fondness for films that do a lot with a little, like The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Saw (2001). With the film set in one location and so much of it focusing on the dangling ski lift, Frozen fits that criteria. The mundanity of the setting makes it all the more terrifying — who would ever think this situation would happen to them? My friend group has a detailed list on how we would fight off boogeymen like Ghostface and Michael Myers, but ask them how they would handle the events of being stuck 25 to 50 feet above a snowy mountain slope and they’d probably just say “cry.”
With the horror of the situation spurring most of the scares in Frozen — Bell and Ashmore leaning against the ski lift’s flimsy rails was enough to flip my stomach each time it happened — the narrative beats of the film rely largely on the characters’ relationships with one another. As established, Joe isn’t too fond of Parker due to how much time she’s taking away from him and Dan. Parker, on the other hand, desperately wants to be “one of the guys.” Dan is in the middle of all this, attempting to mediate both of his relationships, and mostly succeeding — right up until it becomes obvious that they have to do something to escape the lift, otherwise all three of them will die of hypothermia.
A shallower movie would settle for cliché characters who you’d love to see bite the dust (er, snow). But the debate and bickering between Bell, Ashmore, and Zegers feels real enough to elevate Frozen’s horror; we care about them and their connections to one another. Dan holding Parker’s teary face and softly promising her he’ll make sure she stays alive was just as gut-wrenching as Joe feebly promising himself he’ll get married to the girl who gave him her number at the ski resort. Even as the crew butts heads, I found myself rooting for their survival instead of waiting for a gnarly death sequence. The chamber drama comes to a head with Dan’s decision to put himself in danger to ensure both Joe and Parker are able to escape. I teared up, I won’t lie. It also raised the tension. Can Joe and Parker put aside their differences to work together? Despite the icy surroundings, Green’s Frozen is brimming with a warm heart that makes the horror sting so much more.
While Green’s character work is easily the strongest aspect of Frozen, don’t expect warm fuzzies throughout. Poorly received by some critics (Variety slammed the acting as bad and the dialogue “worse” — boo!), Green clearly got under the skin of other viewers by exploiting anxieties they didn’t even know existed. I’m not the only one who watched this film with my hands over my eyes: when it premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, some audience members reportedly couldn’t handle the tension and fainted.
Admittedly, Frozen and The Walking Dead are two very different IPs, and it was my obsession with one that led me to the other. Still, I can happily say that there’s only been two horror films that have instilled an irrational fear of something into me: Final Destination 5 (I’m happy wearing glasses forever, thanks) and Frozen. I’m someone who will merely blink at gory dismemberment and fountains of blood spurting on screen, but after watching this film? Never, will I ever, get on a ski lift.
Frozen is available to stream on Tubi and to purchase on YouTube, Prime Video, and Apple TV
