Winter isn’t just about cozy fires and snowball fights, it’s also the perfect breeding ground for chills of a different kind. With weakened immune systems, crowded shelters, and eerie isolation, characters in these frosty tales face more than just frostbite. From outbreaks and body horror to claustrophobic contagion, these stories dig deep into the frigid terrors of disease and survival. And for a full-blown blizzard of dread, we’ve paired them with spine-tingling books and TV shows to keep the horror alive long after the credits roll!
In 30 Days of Night (2007), a remote Alaskan town plunges into terror when a month of darkness invites a horde of bloodthirsty vampires to hunt its isolated residents.
What to read after 30 Days of Night: Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist – It is autumn 1981 when the inconceivable comes to Blackeberg, a suburb in Sweden. The body of a teenage boy is found, emptied of blood, the murder rumored to be part of a ritual killing. Twelve-year-old Oskar is personally hoping that revenge has come at long last—revenge for the bullying he endures at school, day after day.
But the murder is not the most important thing on his mind. A new girl has moved in next door—a girl who has never seen a Rubik’s Cube before, but who can solve it at once. There is something wrong with her, though, something odd. And she only comes out at night….
What to watch after 30 Days of Night: From (2022-) – Unravel the mystery of a city in middle U.S.A. that imprisons everyone who enters. As the residents struggle to maintain a sense of normality and seek a way out, they must also survive the threats of the surrounding forest.
The post-apocalyptic thriller The Divide (2011) traps nuclear attack survivors in a basement, where paranoia and brutality escalate into a nightmare.
What to read after The Divide: The Road by Cormac McCarthy – A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece.
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.
The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.
What to watch after The Divide: Y: The Last Man (2021) – Set in a post-apocalyptic world, Y is the last surviving male human on the planet. Based on the comic series “Y: The Last Man.”
In Blood Glacier (2013), a team of scientists discovers a mysterious glacier leak in the Alps, unleashing mutated creatures that turn the frozen wilderness into a battlefield.
What to read after Blood Glacier: Icebound by Dean Koontz (Published as Prison of Ice under the pseudonym David Axton) – A group of international scientists working on the project of towing an iceberg to be used as relief for droughts, is headed up by the husband and wife team of Rita and Harold (Harry) Carpenter. Rita secretly suffers from the fear of cold, ice and snow. Due to an unexpected storm, the scientists become stranded on the iceberg with bombs ticking under them. If they do not find a way out, they will perish. A Russian submarine is trying to rescue them, but the rescue is complicated by the ice. Meanwhile, another problem arises. One of the crew members is secretly an assassin with an agenda of his own.
What to watch after Blood Glacier: The Mist (2017) – After an eerie mist rolls into a small town, the residents must battle the mysterious mist and its threats, fighting to maintain their morality and sanity.
The haunting Quebecois film Ravenous (2017) follows a ragtag group of survivors battling a mysterious zombie outbreak in their snow-covered rural community.
What to read after Ravenous: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks -The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.
Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.
What to watch after Ravenous: Kingdom (2019-2020) – While strange rumors about their ill King grip a kingdom, the crown prince becomes their only hope against a mysterious plague overtaking the land.
Virus 32 (2022) sees a mother and daughter trapped in an abandoned winter complex, fighting to outwit relentless infected attackers as a deadly virus spreads.
What to read after Virus 32: The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey – Melanie is a very special girl. Dr. Caldwell calls her “our little genius.”
Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant Parks keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don’t like her. She jokes that she won’t bite, but they don’t laugh.
Melanie loves school. She loves learning about spelling and sums and the world outside the classroom and the children’s cells. She tells her favorite teacher all the things she’ll do when she grows up. Melanie doesn’t know why this makes Miss Justineau look sad.
What to watch after Virus 32: Black Summer (2019-2021) – In the dark, early days of a zombie apocalypse, complete strangers band together to find the strength they need to survive and get back to loved ones.
The chilling Antarctic Journal (2005) chronicles a South Korean expedition battling illness, paranoia, and supernatural forces deep in the icy expanse of Antarctica.
What to read after Antarctic Journal: Dark Matter by Michelle Paver – January 1937. Clouds of war are gathering over a fogbound London. Twenty-eight year old Jack is poor, lonely, and desperate to change his life, so when he’s offered the chance to join an Arctic expedition, he jumps at it. Spirits are high as the ship leaves Norway: five men and eight huskies, crossing the Barents Sea by the light of the midnight sun. At last they reach the remote, uninhabited bay where they will camp for the next year, Gruhuken, but the Arctic summer is brief. As night returns to claim the land, Jack feels a creeping unease. One by one, his companions are forced to leave. He faces a stark choice: stay or go. Soon he will see the last of the sun, as the polar night engulfs the camp in months of darkness. Soon he will reach the point of no return–when the sea will freeze, making escape impossible. Gruhuken is not uninhabited. Jack is not alone. Something walks there in the dark…
What to watch after Antarctic Journal: The X Files Ep 8, Season 1 “Ice” (1993) – A mass murder–suicide occurs at a remote Alaskan geophysics outpost, leading FBI agents Mulder and Scully to investigate. They discover a dog infected with bubonic plague-like symptoms, and a deadly parasite inside a dead scientist. As one of their team becomes infected, tensions rise, and the group is forced to confront the worm-like creatures. Mulder believes they’re extraterrestrial, while Scully wants them destroyed. Paranoia ensues as they uncover more infected members and fight to survive in the isolated, storm-ridden outpost.
In The Night Eats the World (2018), a man wakes to find Paris abandoned and overrun with zombies, forcing him to survive both the undead and his crushing solitude.
What to read after The Night Eats the World: I Am Legend by Richard Matheson – Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth… but he is not alone. Every other man, woman and child on the planet has become a vampire, and they are hungry for Neville’s blood.
By day he is the hunter, stalking the undead through the ruins of civilisation. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for the dawn.
How long can one man survive like this?
What to watch after The Night Eats the World: Survivors (2008-2010) – An unknown virus pandemic kills more than 90% of the world’s population. Those immune must strive to survive and overcome the difficulties of this new world order, hoping that the virus will not mutate.
That’ll do it for us for 6 Weeks of Winter Horror, hopefully we’ve given you enough snowy horror media to last you until Spring!
NightTide Magazine 
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