The Ghost Ship and a Blood Waterfall: 6 Polar Horror Movies Waiting to Happen

If you've watched "The Thing" you'll know that a polar landscape makes for a great horror setting. What might surprise you is the number of real world curiosities lurking in the snow, just waiting for the silver screen - for example...

• The Blood Falls of Antarctica
• Hybrid Grizzly-Polar Bears
• The Fingers of Death
• Paradoxical Undressing
• Intelligent Orcas
• SS Baychimo, Ghost Ship of the Arctic

The Blood Falls of Antarctica

Did you know that there's a glacier that bleeds?

It's not actually blood, but the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica has a 50ft rusty-red waterfall cascading down its icy flank. The water is tinted by iron-rich water seeping from the ancient lake trapped beneath it!

The subglacial lake is pretty strange in itself. It's trapped 400m beneath the glacier and hasn't been exposed to the surface-world for around five million years. With minerals churned up by the glacier and brine expelled from the ice, the water is so salty and mineral-rich that it remains liquid despite sub-zero temperatures. The lake is also home to a population of weird ancient microbes that live in the oxygen-free darkness.

The iron is thought to have come from the glacier grinding iron out of the bedrock as it moves. When the water bleeds through the glacier and gets exposed to oxygen it immediately begins to rust - hence the blood-colored water.

So to summarize, with trapped ancient microbes living in an alien environment and a glacier that bleeds like a living creature... what about this glacier isn't horror-movie fodder?

Hybrid Grizzly-Polar Bears

Did you know that polar and grizzly bears can interbreed? The resulting animals are sometimes known as pizzly or grolar bears, and they blend aspects of both species. So far they've been pretty rare (though genetic analysis has found that hybrids must have existed in the past) but as the Arctic warms, it's likely that more hybrids will emerge as grizzlies wander north.

Now these hybrids are generally a downgrade in power from a polar bear, but they might be better suited to warm temperatures and gain the long claws of a grizzly. They tend to be a fair bit larger than a grizzly as well - and often blend cream and brown colors in their fur.

So why could this be a horror movie plot? Grizzlies are dangerous enough as it is without a size boost, and polar bears leaving the ice in search of prey in warmer lands sounds like a creature feature to me!

The Fingers of Death

The water temperature near the surface of the Arctic ocean hovers around -2°C, meaning that plenty of animals can survive in relative comfort beneath the ice... unless they encounter a (cue organ music) "finger of death."

It's a dramatic name, to be sure. These fingers form when seawater freezes into ice at the surface, expelling highly-concentrated brine in the process. This super-cold, super-salty fluid descends from the surface, freezing a hollow tube of ice around it as it goes - a phenomenon known as a brinicle.

If the brinicle reaches the bottom, the escaping fluid will freeze a "stream" of ice across the seafloor, killing anything that doesn't get out of the way.

Turning this into a horror plot would be easy - take an underwater research station (or even a disabled submersible) and put it in the path of one of these brinicles!

Paradoxical Undressing

Now for a rather weird fact about hypothermia - sometimes those dying of the condition strip off their clothing, a situation known as paradoxical undressing.

It's thought that the condition occurs due to a false sense of heat. When the human body gets cold, blood vessels in non-vital areas of the body constrict (the technical term is vasoconstriction) which keeps most of your hot blood in the core of the body. Doing this can help you stay warm and functional for a while... but the human body can only keep it up for so long. When the muscles powering vasoconstriction fail, hot blood rushes back into cold flesh and gives a false sensation of heat (or even burning.)

To a disorientated and hypothermic human, the sudden blazing heat can make it seem sensible to strip off... which typically results in a frozen, partially or fully nude body being found in the snow.

Another thing that can occur in hypothermia is "terminal burrowing." Here, the sufferer spends their last moments trying to create or enter a hiding space (which can be a small cupboard, a bush, a pile of household items or even under furniture) that might offer some protection from the killing cold.

Curiously, terminal burrowing and paradoxical undressing can occur alongside each other... which results in a partially-stripped body stuffed in a hiding place. Sounds like a twist filled murder-mystery to me!

Intelligent Orcas

Did you find "Jaws" worrying?

The sighting of a shark may be enough to get human swimmers out of the water, but even great white sharks try to give orcas a wide berth - in fact, a single pair of orcas known as Port and Starboard have been credited with scaring away most of the great whites from the coast of Gansbaai.

Orcas are the biggest members of the dolphin family, with powerful bodies and capable minds. They've also learned cunning ways to hunt - a group in the Antarctic use a technique called wave washing, where a group will charge at an icefloe and create a wave... that washes seals (or whatever's on top) into the water.

So, you have a group of intelligent marine predators that terrify great white sharks and have figured out ways to knock prey into the water. Perhaps "Jaws" needs an update!

SS Baychimo, Ghost Ship of the Arctic

In 1931 the SS Baychimo was caught in a blizzard and became trapped in ice. The crew disembarked and made a shelter (one that would be easier to keep warm than the ship) to wait out the winter, but the Baychimo broke free during a second storm. She drifted unmanned 72km through the icy waters before becoming packed in ice again - when the crew caught up, they declared her no longer seaworthy thanks to her bumpy solo cruise, took her most valuable cargo and abandoned her to sink.

She didn't. In 1932, the Baychimo was seen drifting 480km east from her last known position. Another year passed, and she was sighted near the coast of Alaska.

SS Baychimo would remain afloat for almost forty years. Several different groups attempted to board and salvage the ship, but each time their efforts were foiled by bad weather. The last recorded sighting of the ship was in 1969, with her resting frozen in ice.

The story of this ship seems tailor-made for a horror film. A crewless ship, plying the waves for decades and driving away visitors with storms... all you need is some kind of cursed relic in the cargo and you're done!

Thanks for reading - you might also like...

• 5 Cool (or Cruel) Creatures of Christmas Folklore
• Explore the North: 5 Interesting Facts About the Arctic
• What's a Yeti – and Could They Really Exist?

Sources and Further Info:

• Antarctica’s Blood Red Waterfall
• Pizzlies? Grolars? Why Hybrids Aren’t an Answer for Polar Bears
• The 'Finger of Death' that Freezes Everything it Touches
• Hypothermic Death in the Arctic State
• Whales Making Waves
• Baychimo: The Adventures of the Ghost Ship of the Arctic