Wind Chill

Emily Blunt and Ashton Holmes play two college students who end up sharing a rust-bucket drive home for the Christmas holidays - one needs a ride and one needs a passenger. With a distinctly chilly atmosphere in the car before the key’s even turned in the ignition, we’re set for an hour and a half of surprisingly good scare-fare.

The journey is set to take a good few hours, but a quick and freaky gas station stop early on gives our girl the jitters, and it can’t help matters when your travelling companion starts getting all twitchy and shifty-eyed in the middle of nowhere. Stranded in a snowdrift on deserted route 606 not long afterwards, the spooks really start to settle in.

The relationship between the two leads is established effectively without feeling tacked on to give some depth - like so many horror films do so badly - and their back-stories are pleasingly brief. The acting is pretty slick from two not-so-big names and their thorny interaction props up a skinny plot with few twists and turns. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, as the good old-fashioned ghouls and ghosts here keep you on the edge of your seat.

Christmas carols in a creepy setting are always good for sinister tension; in fact any slightly jolly, slightly out-of-date tune can give you the willies at the right time and they’re used liberally here. The hold-your-breath nature does occasionally feel like it's waiting to shift into a higher gear that never really happens, but it doesn’t ruin what is still as good a scary film as we’ve seen in a while.

Released on 5th May 2008 by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

Written by Amy Swales.