I spent some time today watching a movie about a man whose plane had crashed in the Arctic. He was alone for days, then rescued the co-pilot of a search helicopter who was injured and hardly regained consciousness.
It was, for me, a horror movie.
Instead of a hatchet killer, the horror was the specter of profound human fragility. To emerge from the plane shell, clumsy and frail as a just-hatched bird, the sun never setting, wind never abating. There’s frostbite and bears. Dwindling fuel. Each frozen step (or the alone-ness) asking, “how badly do you want to stay alive?”
Cynthia Hamill 