Jack Frost is best appreciated by guilty parents who also live in a cold-weather climate and like Stevie Ray Vaughan — check, check, and check! I’m 41 now, so that means I’ve been stuck in snow for about 17 years of my life. The Hateful Eight is about cabin fever, and seasonal paranoia, and the claustrophobia that occurs when you know you can’t travel or even leave the safety of shelter. I can’t say I actually like snow — I don’t ski or ice-skate or play hockey or haul my ass on a toboggan. I’m breaking my own rules by ranking this one so high — only about half of this 1972 classic starring Robert Redford actually takes place in the snow. For as long as I can remember, there’s been snow. Just like video game developers love to include at least one snow level, film directors often resort to the chilliest form of precipitation in their creations. If the Rebels had spent another half-hour on Hoth, or Llewyn Davis hung out longer in Chicago, or [SPOILER ALERT] John McCabe’s corpse had rested in that snowbank for the entire film, it would be a different story. For now, I’ll just say this: Tarantino understands that you don’t actually have to see the snow for a snowy movie to work. Harsh Winter and Snow Movies. All The Best New Rap Music To Have On Your Radar, All The Best New Hip-Hop Albums Coming Out This Week, All The Best New Indie Music From This Week, All The Best New Pop Music From This Week, All The Best New Music From This Week That You Need To Hear. 4. In fact, Sly (and everyone else in this movie) never ever wears a hat or gloves. How can you appreciate living without snow and all that it entails — the blankness, the overwhelming physical and psychic stasis, the wet socks — if you’ve never actually lived with it? Die Hard is a Christmas movie because it’s about a disillusioned man who comes to appreciate how good his life is (i.e. 2. Two of the greatest snowy movies ever use the pretense of science fiction to make the psychological effects of living snowbound for several months more tangible for the non-snowbound population. I admit it: I really wanted to do a movie list in which Jack Frost is ranked higher than McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Did you see that Liam Neesons movie with them wolves, though? Most snowy movies are content to merely show people shivering inside of heavy coats, or rubbing their hands desperately over a warm fire. 25 best snow movies ever. However, the drama in Cliffhanger has more to do with great heights than crushing cold. 7. This obscure spaghetti western from 1968 starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Klaus Kinski was restored and re-released earlier this year, though it’s clear that Tarantino saw it years ago and had it in mind when he conceived The Hateful Eight. Runaway Train The dead woman who sets the story in motion is actually killed in part by the weather — according to Wind River, running for six miles in your bare feet when it’s 20 below causes your lungs to burst. in May or so. 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The famous scene in which Steve Buscemi buries the ransom money in the frozen ground next to a fence post along a country road, which might as well be any country road, nails the existentialism of living with snow — how it makes everything around you seem vacant and unknowable, sending you back inside of yourself, the only place where it’s warm. The film isn’t overly graphic in its depiction of cannibalism — we see living people like Ethan Hawke and Josh Hamilton cut pieces of dead people from the corpses’ backsides, which are then turned into food that sometimes looks like beef jerky, and other times like steak. ... Jack London's classic adventure story about the friendship developed between a Yukon gold hunter and the mixed dog-wolf he rescues from the hands of a man who mistreats him. 18. So, sometimes this is a snowy movie, and other times it’s more of a straight-ahead western. Unlike the boundless openness that’s endemic to most westerns, the omnipresence of snow gives The Great Silence a feeling of oppressive suffocation that mirrors the dearth of morality in the film’s motley crew of murderous bounty hunters. Jeremiah Johnson It could be a pure adventure ride or an existencial film. Please leave your thoughts or any other recomendations to watch below and I hope to add more titles to this list. The Empire Strikes Back That resumé sums up the aesthetic — half philosophical, half-red meat action – of Runaway Train. Best movies that deal with survival in wilderness or fighting against nature. As a lifelong resident of the Upper Midwest, I’ve shoveled it, packed it, driven in it, trudged through it, slipped on it (on purpose and by accident), snow-angeled with it, made forts out of it, feared it, dreaded it, cursed it, and above all lived with it for about five months out of every year. The Coen Brothers approach it all with sardonic humor, wary dread, and, yes, genuine affection. 13. Jon Voight and Eric Roberts play fugitives who break out of a high-security Alaskan prison and hop a train that is spent careening nonstop after the engineer unexpectedly dies. Jeremiah Johnson follows the titular mountain man character through several different season cycles, as he grows more acclimated to the wild. If you live in Los Angeles, where the sun shines almost every day, what is the yang to your meteorological yin? Fargo, however, is practically a documentary about life in the midwest during wintertime. Die Hard 2, then, is a quintessential snowy movie, because it shows that same disillusioned man experiencing the true awfulness of the world (by forcing him to spend time at the airport during Christmas) and yet wanting to live anyway (by murdering terrorists).