Snow always divides opinion. In places like the UK where snow is rare and unusual, the freak weather initially feels like a treat, an opportunity to revel in a beautiful new landscape where mundane neighbourhood streets are transformed into dazzling white playgrounds. But while the snow remains unmelted and the days wear on, as basic infrastructures fail and travel becomes impossible, offices close and we sit in our homes encased in bright white walls of silence, snow becomes less of a laugh. It becomes decidedly inconvenient, a claustrophobic problem that prevents us living our lives normally, destroying our routines and eventually reducing itself to freezing cold banks of grey slush that ruin our shoes and make us miserable.

In other countries where snowfall is a regular occurrence, it is an expected inconvenience that can be dealt with, unless of course the snowfall in question is ‘Snowzilla’ or ‘Snowmageddon’, the blizzard of epic proportions currently coming to the end of its merciless battering of the US, having killed people and gridlocked people on highways.

Filmmakers have always recognised the ambiguous power of snow, how its all encompassing beauty provides a contextual and visual backdrop for films and can bring about the making and undoing of its characters. In this time of deep dark winter, where snow-filled films such as The Revenant and The Hateful Eight are in the cinemas and America starts to repair the damage caused by its record-breaking blizzard, the time is right to look at some of the most memorable snowbound films:

THE SHINING

When the Torrance family first move to the empty Overlook Hotel high in the Colorado Rockies, winter is yet to begin. But as the days turn to months and the first flakes of snow become vast drifts, trapping the family within the vast confines of this mausoleum of evil spirits, Jack Torrance’s sanity begins to wane. Cabin fever takes hold and the confinement of the snow causes Jack to lose his mind – and then his life – as he is outwitted by his son Danny in the hotel maze and freezes to death still clutching his axe.

FARGO

In Fargo’s opening credits, the Coen Brothers playfully claimed it to be a true story, leading one eager and foolish Japanese treasure hunter to go searching for a suitcase filled with $1 million. Takako Konishi eventually died in the snowy North Dakota wastelands after her painstaking search unsurprisingly uncovered exactly nothing. If Konishi had looked at the film’s closing credits as carefully as she had for the suitcase she would have read the ‘all persons fictitious’ disclaimer.

THE THING

John Carpenter uses the constricting and entrapping qualities of snow perfectly to indicate the creeping paranoia, claustrophobia and foreboding which begins to engulf a group of Antarctic scientists after an extra-terrestrial organism invades their research station. Shooting locations were split between the vast tundras of British Columbia in Canada and artificially frozen sound stages in L.A. The film is perhaps best remembered for the special makeup and animatronics effects work by Rob Bottin and Stan Winston to create the creature in its various guises. Particularly memorable is the oozingly gross monstrosity of flailing tentacles, gore-covered appendages and blood-curdling howls that is the ‘weird and pissed off’ dog incarnation.

MCCABE AND MRS MILLER

To the lilting sounds of Leonard Cohen’s score, much of Robert Altman’s genre-defining revisionist western takes place in the mud, rain and snow of a village called Presbyterian Church. This counterpoints the typical western conventions of sun baked prairies, dusty towns and gun battles at high noon. The film’s climactic scene sees McCabe (Warren Beatty) the film’s central hero, mortally wounded in the snow. McCabe’s death at the hands of the main bad guy is not accompanied by sweeping orchestral music or swathes of crying townsfolk. It is quiet and bleak and perfectly represents the lack of sentimentality and pessimism that characterised the ‘New Hollywood’ or ‘American New Wave’ of the 1970’s where some of American cinema’s finest directors made their films against a backdrop of political lies, corruption and war.

GROUNDHOG DAY

Were it not for the blizzard, which prevents him from leaving the Pennsylvanian Town of Punxsutawney, Phil Connors would just have returned to Pittsburgh to be as smug and cold-hearted as ever. However, the snow keeps him trapped in town and he lives February 2nd, Groundhog Day, over and over again. The snow is both Phil’s jailer and redeemer as at first he hates it after it keeps him stuck in a ‘hick’ town full of people ‘freezing their butts off waiting to worship a rat’. But after recognising that only by becoming a better person will he ever escape the seemingly eternal time loop, Phil grows to love the snow and ice, becoming an expert ice sculptor and even deciding he wants to live in Punxsutawney.

MISERY

Misery remains Stephen King’s most autobiographical work. Misery’s Paul Sheldon is a novelist who after being rescued from a snowy car wreck is imprisoned by his psychotic ‘number one fan’, Annie Wilkes. Paul then develops an addiction to ‘Novril’, the fictional painkillers Annie gives him and is forced to write her a novel entitled Misery’s Return. The story deliberately mirrors King’s own cocaine and booze addictions and the resentment he felt towards those fans who wanted him to write only horror stories. Both Sheldon and King felt pigeonholed and confined by their addictions, the unreasonable expectations of their readers and in Misery’s case, the Colorado snow.