ON THIS DAY IN HORROR - February 23rd
"FROSTBITEN" released in 2006
When a doctor is offered a chance to work with a famous Swedish geneticist, she and her 17-year old daughter move to a small town in northern Sweden. But the geneticists sinister past inadvertently leads to a horde of vampires being unleashed during Sweden's midwinter - where there will not be sunlight for another 30 days - in Anders Banke's debut horror/comedy film, Frostbiten!
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During World War II in Ukraine, 1944, the remnants of 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking are fleeing from The Red Army, seeking shelter in a remote cabin in the woods, but as darkness falls they are attacked by vampires inhabiting a hidden crypt under the cabin. In present-day Sweden, a recently divorced doctor, Annika (Petra Nielsen), and her teenage daughter Saga (Grete Havnesköld) are moving to a town in Lappland, so Annika can work close to the famous Swedish geneticist Gerhard Beckert (Carl-Åke Eriksson). Since Lappland is located above the Arctic Circle, the polar night has begun, where there are only a few hours of sunless twilight each day before complete darkness for the next month. As Annika starts to work at the hospital, she meets the lousy medical student Sebastian (Jonas Karlström), who has been stealing a can of strange pills with which Beckert has been treating a comatose patient. Thinking the pills are drugs, Sebastian tries them rather than getting high, he starts to develop acute hearing and improved vision, and is tormented by extreme thirst! Later, an enigmatic gothgirl Vega (Emma Åberg) - whom has recently befriended Saga - shows up to procure the drugs for a party that night.
Meanwhile, Annika is bitten by Beckert's "comatose" patient - who is in fact a vampire child named Maria (Aurora Roald) - and later discovers that Beckert is the last survivor of the massacred platoon from 1944, and has been "experimenting" on Maria to create a master race of vampires. While Annika frees Maria and attempts to flee the hospital, Saga arrives at John's (Niklas Grönberg) house for the party and finds all hell has broken out when John and Vega have turned into a vampire - the pills being capsules containing the vampiric blood of Maria enhanced by Beckert - and narrowly escapes as the pair rampage through the house killing or infecting several party guests, leaving Saga as the only non-infected person in all of Norrland, with dawn just over a month away!
Meanwhile, Annika is bitten by Beckert's "comatose" patient - who is in fact a vampire child named Maria (Aurora Roald) - and later discovers that Beckert is the last survivor of the massacred platoon from 1944, and has been "experimenting" on Maria to create a master race of vampires. While Annika frees Maria and attempts to flee the hospital, Saga arrives at John's (Niklas Grönberg) house for the party and finds all hell has broken out when John and Vega have turned into a vampire - the pills being capsules containing the vampiric blood of Maria enhanced by Beckert - and narrowly escapes as the pair rampage through the house killing or infecting several party guests, leaving Saga as the only non-infected person in all of Norrland, with dawn just over a month away!
TRIVIA: Frostbiten held the record for most visual effects in a Swedish film for over three years, before it was displaced by the comedy science fiction film Kenny Begins in 2009.
Top and Above: Annika (Petra Nielsen) moves to the small Norrland town with her daughter Saga (Grete Havnesköld) during midwinter - and it's going to be a very long month without the sun!
Swedish filmmakers Ander Banke and Magnus Paulsson had been trying to make a Swedish horror film for years but with little success, until a script by Daniel Ojanlatva was sent to them about vampires showing up in Norrland during midwinter - Ojanlatva had grown up in a small town named Kiruna, in the Norrland region, and thought it because there are no sunny hours during the dark and cold Nordic winter days, it was the perfect environment for vampires. With a first draft completed in 1998, the script originally set to be a Pulp Fiction-style movie with several stories and characters who went in and out of them (the original script also called not only for a vampire dog, but also a vampire flower, but this was cut for budget reasons). Screenwriter Pidde Andersson was brought on board, and the two writers completed another fourteen drafts of the scipt, concentrating on a single main character, Saga - played by Grete Havnesköld, who was best known for playing the titular character Lotta in Lotta på Bråkmakargatan (a film based on the bestselling series of children's books by Astrid Lindgren).
Petra Nielsen and famed Swedish actor Carl-Åke Eriksson were soon cast as Saga's mother, Annika and the evil Professor Gerard Beckert respectively. Emma Åberg, Jonas Karlström, Niklas Grönberg and Aurora Roald were then selected after having taken part in an open audition. Per Löfberg, who had been in the hit romcom Ha ett underbart liv and in the cult film Evil Ed, was cast in a then-secret role of Young Beckert from the opening of the film. Kristian Persson was selected to play the part of the hideous supervampire, The Shape (at one point called the Wraith), because he was tall, thin and had the uncanny ability to open his mouth wide much further than is usually possible. His costume took six weeks to make and took five hours to apply, with Pehrsson having to wear the costume for at least 16 hours each day before taking over an hour to remove the full body latex suit. To even fit into the prosthetics, Pehrsson's ears were glued tightly to his head and every inch of his body was covered in the tight foam latex suit, making it impossible for him to sit down during filming (or even go to the bathroom!).
Petra Nielsen and famed Swedish actor Carl-Åke Eriksson were soon cast as Saga's mother, Annika and the evil Professor Gerard Beckert respectively. Emma Åberg, Jonas Karlström, Niklas Grönberg and Aurora Roald were then selected after having taken part in an open audition. Per Löfberg, who had been in the hit romcom Ha ett underbart liv and in the cult film Evil Ed, was cast in a then-secret role of Young Beckert from the opening of the film. Kristian Persson was selected to play the part of the hideous supervampire, The Shape (at one point called the Wraith), because he was tall, thin and had the uncanny ability to open his mouth wide much further than is usually possible. His costume took six weeks to make and took five hours to apply, with Pehrsson having to wear the costume for at least 16 hours each day before taking over an hour to remove the full body latex suit. To even fit into the prosthetics, Pehrsson's ears were glued tightly to his head and every inch of his body was covered in the tight foam latex suit, making it impossible for him to sit down during filming (or even go to the bathroom!).
TRIVIA: All of the hospital scenes were shot in a real hospital in Kalix, where - much to the horror of the actors - the morgue scenes were filmed in a real morgue.
Top and Above: Famed geneticist Gerhard Beckert (Carl-Åke Eriksson) is discovered experimenting with a vampire serum, that has inadvertently infected the local teenagers, including Saga's new friend Vega (Emma Åberg).
Shooting in Kalix in the winter of 2005, the cast and crew where plagued by the extreme cold, with temperatures falling below 30 Celsius zero. During many scenes, the cameras broke down because of the cold and had to be warmed up. During her final fight scene star Havensköld lost all feeling in her feet. She eventually started to cry and a sound tech had to take her into a van and warm her feet in his armpits. In another scene when Karlström was hanging in a lamppost covered in fake blood, it started to rain, despite being far below zero. The rain then froze on all the equipment and clothes, creating a layer of ice on everything. Banke later referred the feeling like "napalm - but with ice!" (during the final showdown with the cops and the vampires it also started to rain, creating the same problem).
Frostbiten was the most special-effects-heavy film ever made in Sweden at that time - totaling over 300 effects shots - requiring two companies to handle them; Swedish effect company Fido Film and Ulitka Post, the same team who did special effects for Night Watch. Ulitka Post created the opening title, removed wires and created the long, physically impossible take in the cabin scene, while Fido Film and Kaj Steveman did all the creature design, created the different vampires, animated the talking mouths on the dogs and created the knife stabbings. The original design of the vampires resembled the chiropterans in Blood: The Last Vampire and was done with mostly practical effects, requiring 2 to 3 hours to apply. However, the make-up prevented a lot of facial movement and it was decided that CGI was to be used on the teen vampires to make them different from the other vampires and allowed the transformation to be shown in camera.
Frostbiten was the most special-effects-heavy film ever made in Sweden at that time - totaling over 300 effects shots - requiring two companies to handle them; Swedish effect company Fido Film and Ulitka Post, the same team who did special effects for Night Watch. Ulitka Post created the opening title, removed wires and created the long, physically impossible take in the cabin scene, while Fido Film and Kaj Steveman did all the creature design, created the different vampires, animated the talking mouths on the dogs and created the knife stabbings. The original design of the vampires resembled the chiropterans in Blood: The Last Vampire and was done with mostly practical effects, requiring 2 to 3 hours to apply. However, the make-up prevented a lot of facial movement and it was decided that CGI was to be used on the teen vampires to make them different from the other vampires and allowed the transformation to be shown in camera.
Above: The supervampire, known as The Shape (Kristian Persson), corners Annika in the hospital!
Frostbiten opened at Gothenburg Film Festival on February 3, 2006, before it's official release on February 23rd. Unfortunately, the film was commercial failure in Sweden due to not being able to find Swedish distributors; the biggest distributor in Sweden did not want to give it a big release and did not give it much promotion thinking it was too low quality. Ironically, Frostbiten was by far the most popular Swedish movie at the Cannes Film Festival that year, and was sold for distribution to over 40 countries. In fact, US studio Paramount Pictures bought the rights to the Swedish home video market after watching only 20 minutes of the film! Frostbiten was a such a big hit in Russia that it launched Anders Banke's career in the Russian film industry, where he has subsequently made Newsmakers (2009), Chernobyl: Zone of Exclusion (2014), and Warg (2016).
In Sweden, Frostbiten was met with mediocre to negative reviews, with tabloid newspaper Expressen panning the film, calling it "a meaningless splatterfilm". A reviewer for the site Film Threat wrote, "Ever since Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Scream infiltrated the fear-film genre, something's been rotten in Transylvania. Playing horror for winking insider references and juvenile giggles, any real juice has been extracted from the cutting-edge school of cinema that spawned Re-Animator, Dead Alive, and Evil Dead, three brilliant examples of horror that combined ferocious splatter with truly inspired humor. In comparison, Frostbite is too little, too late." The reception was far better internationally, with Bloody Disgusting giving the film 4/5, calling it a masterpiece, saying that the film had a strong cast, great special effects and the film the most enjoyable vampire film since the 80s, filling in: "The way the screenplay is written is fantastic, as you can see above the film has many plants that grow and flourish into one hell of a film".
In Sweden, Frostbiten was met with mediocre to negative reviews, with tabloid newspaper Expressen panning the film, calling it "a meaningless splatterfilm". A reviewer for the site Film Threat wrote, "Ever since Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Scream infiltrated the fear-film genre, something's been rotten in Transylvania. Playing horror for winking insider references and juvenile giggles, any real juice has been extracted from the cutting-edge school of cinema that spawned Re-Animator, Dead Alive, and Evil Dead, three brilliant examples of horror that combined ferocious splatter with truly inspired humor. In comparison, Frostbite is too little, too late." The reception was far better internationally, with Bloody Disgusting giving the film 4/5, calling it a masterpiece, saying that the film had a strong cast, great special effects and the film the most enjoyable vampire film since the 80s, filling in: "The way the screenplay is written is fantastic, as you can see above the film has many plants that grow and flourish into one hell of a film".
ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE: 40%
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