Europe Endless - Horror: Dead Snow (Dir Tommy Wirkola, 1h31m, 2009)

Horror is a universal language in cinema: like romance, it crosses language, cultural, and continental barriers - we love to be scared as much as we love...love. If there is a cinematic lingua franca, it may well be in the fears, and hopes, that these two genres represent - it's easy to understand why Nosferatu, Les Diaboliques, and Suspiria, scared German, French and Italian audiences, as much as they scare me, and, I must presume, my readers who've joined me in watching these films. 

However, it's easy to get somewhat snobbish about horror; A24's recent spate of high concept, mid budget work, including films I've covered here, have made it easy to consider horror an auteur's genre rather than one they share with endless sequels, cheap thrill merchants, and people making gory, silly, shlock - the latter I mean as a compliment. In our five months across Europe we have in essence, perused the gallery, the best these respective nations can offer, rather than - in most cases - what the masses are watching - horror is, innately, a good remedy for this. 

We end this second shorter European adventure with zombie Nazis, a logical endpoint to the question "what is the antithesis of the European arthouse?" This seig-heiling shambling horde can be found in Tommy Wirkola's breakout movie - and we are very much on the "movie" end of cinema here - the aptly named Dead Snow (Død snø). Wirkola is no stranger to this column: his most recent international feature being Die Hard-with-Santa action flick Violent Night (2023), in which David Harbour has money-hungry terrorists on the naughty list. Like Død snø, it's genre-savvy, workmanlike, yet oddly cathartic to see this vaguely Norseified St Nick beat John Leguizamo's squad of thieves to a pulp with, among other things, decorations, a snow-mobile, and a hammer. 

Like many Northern European directors, most notably Finland's Jalmari Helander, himself last appearing in this column with the equally 'pleasingly brutal to Nazis', Sisu (2022), Wirkola has found himself bouncing between films made in his native Norway, like action horror comedy The Trip (2022) and joyfully undemanding fare for the American market like Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (2011) and "what if there were sharks in a hurricane" survival thriller, Thresh (2026). Dead Snow sits quite happily between these two pole of his career, and immediately gets down to business with one of its eight hapless young adults, Sara, offed in its credits by said zombie Nazis to Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King." Certainly one way of signalling we're in Norway...

Thus we're introduced, as they travel to a remote cabin, to the rest of our cast from trainee doctor with a fear of blood, Martin (Vegar Hoel) to sporty snowmobiler and unexpected action star once the zombies emerge, Vegard (Lasse Valdal), to movie nerd, Erlend, and their respective girlfriends. If Dead Snow, and Wirkola as a director in general has one Achilles heel, it is his unabashed homages to other films, and Dead Snow's central setup is not so much a reference to as a transatlantic uprooting of Sam Raimi's gleefully nasty Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2, to the point that Wirkola and his co-writer, Stig Frode Henriksen, who also stars in the film, have Erland allude to the similarities, whilst the title itself references 1985 Norwegian TV series, Rød snø, set in 1942. With the arrival of the portentous figure of a hiker (Norwegian character actor par excellence, Bjørn Sundquist), who fills our selection of dumb horny teenagers in on the history of the area and the disappearance of a battalion of Nazis, led by the figure of Herzog (Ørjan Gamst) at the hands of the local under-trodden population.

His warnings promptly forgotten by the time he leaves, the group soon uncover a cache of 1940s jewellery and coins, as they begin to be picked off by the vanguard of the undead. With the stakes clear, the stage is set for all manner of bloody carnage, much of it wreaked on zombified Germans, brought to unpleasantly gory un-life via makeup artist Janne Røhmen - with aplomb, as our heroes attempt to escape from their rampage back to civilisation. What carnage - there are too many gleefully brutal moments, ranging from the Evil Dead homaging chainsaw that's found in the nearby tool-shed, a location that also gives us the bleakly comic moment of a Nazi being hit with a (claw)hammer and a sickle, to a scene where Vegard abseils up a cliff using the un-spooled guts of a dispatched soldier, to all manner of viscera, blood and the like via special effects team Per Steinar Hoftun, Shino Kotani and Steinar Kaarstein. 

Despite its comparatively small budget of $2 million, there are scenes, particularly once Herzog joins the fight, that push this budget, and the amount of blood and (Nazi) guts on screen, to the limit, and give a sense of why the film made Wirkola's name and took him to Hollywood. There is maybe because Sundquist claims to have been in every recent Norwegian film made, an enjoyable weightiness to his scene retelling the occupation of the area, whilst the impassive, seemingly unstoppable commandant is given a relentless energy, despite full-face prosthetics, by Gamst. For all its tongue-in-cheek tone - the thing is basically waggling freely through zombied skin - there is something quite earnest about Dead Snow, in its gleefully gory, Nazi-slaying romp through the frozen Norwegian countryside

Rating: Highly Recommended

Dead Snow can be watched on AppleTV and is available on BluRay from Arrow Releasing

Next week and indeed next month, we saddle up and join Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach in the first of our Anti-Heroes season in Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.