Horror Challenge entry #1: Frozen (2010, Adam Green)
Maybe this Green kid knows what he’s doing after all. Far removed from the jokey emptiness of Hatchet, Frozen is a taut, ruthless and dead serious bit of survival horror that wants us to care about what happens to its unfortunate characters. Myriad are the horror films where youngsters, privileged youngsters, do stupid stuff to deserve their fate and we in the audience agree. Rarer, and much harder to pull off, is the horror film where the main characters do stupid stuff to deserve their fate yet we hope they avoid it because the film works hard to make us see past their faults to the essential humanity underneath. That’s the strength of Frozen: It’s a combination of bad luck and the-rules-don’t-apply-to-us brazenness that gets three youths accidentally stranded on a powered-down ski lift, yet as the elements take their toll and guards get dropped, sympathy starts to creep in. Once that happens, it’s an easy jump to hoping for the best for these characters, which then means Green can start throwing gut punches. Exposure and rot, the fragility of flesh, place this as uncomfortably close to body-horror as a man-vs.-wild shock show can get, and each bodily failing is played for maximum impact (the blonde’s hand on the metal railing, for instance). A striking step in the right direction for a hopeful young talent; let’s hope this proves to be the rule and not the exception in his career. (Hatchet II seems a regression, though I haven’t seen it.)
