Spoilers are off. You have been warned.
- In Kunio Watanabe's 1958 version of The 47 Ronin, the whole film builds to the epic battle in a snow-covered courtyard.
- Soviet film The Ascent (1977) follows two Russian soldiers that belong to a partisan unit fighting the Germans during World War II. It is deep in the Russian winter and snow is everywhere, which fits the mood of a grim film about death and despair during a pitiless war.
- Blade Runner 2049, the final scene shows K lying down in the falling snow. He is severely injured but doesn't actually die onscreen, leaving viewers to draw their own conclusion.
- In Breakheart Pass, the first murder does not occur until they are above the snowline and there is nowhere for the Ten Little Murder Victims to go even if they could leave the train. All the deaths that follow take place amid scenery of pristine snowbound wilderness.
- In Cannibal Girls, the cold Canadian winter serves as the backdrop of the film's story about a couple who become entangled with a cannibal cult in a small Ontario town. Only one makes it out alive, and the other is indoctrinated into the cult.
- Played with in the 2001 movie Cats & Dogs. Lou, the heroic beagle, is basically at ground zero right as the main storage tank in a Christmas flocking factory goes bang, generating an artificial snowstorm, and is dragged out of the factory by another dog, Butch...lying motionless on a Christmas Wreath. This movie being intended as a comedy, he got better.
- Not a straight example, but the snow globe in Citizen Kane should get an honorable mention.
- In Curtains, Christie notices a small hand protruding out of the snow while ice skating at the edge of a pond, and uncovers a porcelain doll. She is then attacked and decapitated by someone in a grotesque hag mask.
- In the 1989 film of Dangerous Liaisons, Valmont gets stabbed to death in a midwinter duel. This is pretty much entirely so the director can have a cool shot of his blood splattered across the snow.
- Played straight and subverted in The Day After Tomorrow. The first time, some survivors have fallen asleep and froze to death while sleeping. They look peaceful. The second time is the naysaying policeman, whose frozen expression is rather pained. But that's what you get for ignoring the expert.
- Also the helicopter pilots in the beginning of the movie basically flash freeze to death.
- In Dead Poets Society, the boys are seen in a snowy field after learning of Neil's death. The sense of hopelessness that scene brings the rest of the film really is incredible. A less obvious but more literal Snow Means Death moment is when you see through the window that it's snowing just before Neil shoots himself. According to director Peter Weir, this was actually a spontaneous snowstorm that happened while filming, and Weir was inspired to relocate the former scene to fit the snow.
- Dead Snow is made of this trope, even if it's used for horror and comedy instead of explicit beauty.
- One segment of Akira Kurosawa's Dreams features the story of a mountain climber who, trapped in a blizzard and suffering from frostbite, either hallucinates or experiences a visit from a Yuki-onna — a snow demon who takes the form of a beautiful woman. A yuki-onna also figures in one of the stories in Kwaidan, an anthology film adapting several Japanese folk tales.
- Everest (2015): Naturally, when the climbers die, we see frozen bodies covered in snow. Subverted with Beck who spends the night passed out in a blizzard but gets an Unexplained Recovery.
- In Fargo, several people die before a snowy background.
- In The Fountain, the scientist's wife's funeral is on a snowy day.
- Goyokin. The massacre of the fishing village, the climatic night battle, and the Duel to the Death at the end all take place in the snow. In the later example both fighters are shown breathing on their fingers during the duel so they won't go cold, to maintain dexterity in wielding their swords.
- The Hateful Eight takes place during a blizzard. By the end of the film, the entire cast are either dead or dying. Although ironically, none of them die from exposure.
- The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies: It is snowing throughout most of the titular battle, but specific examples:
- Kíli, Fíli, and Bolg all die on a snowcapped mountaintop; and Thorin and Azog kill each other on a frozen river.
- There is a scene of Thranduil walking through the ruins of Dale and seeing his dead kinsmen, while snow gently falls around them.
- It's even referenced in the lyrics of the film's song:
"As the snowflakes cover my fallen brothers..." - The end of House of Flying Daggers goes from brightly sunlit to a blizzard, just in time for the dramatic death scene.
- A positive example in Hussar Ballad: French invaders are fought off, in particular, by severe cold and snow.
- The Ice Storm is the cinematic tribute to this trope.
- An interesting subversion in It's a Wonderful Life. The snow stops after George wishes that he'd never been born and only starts up again after he decides that he wants to live again.
- In The Jacket, Jack and Jackie are visiting a snowed-in graveyard.
- O-Ren in Kill Bill also enjoys picturesque death on the snow. Few consider getting the top of one's head lopped off anywhere near picturesque... but Quentin Tarantino would.
- The 2023 movie La sociedad de la nieve (Society of the Snow) tells the story of survivors of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, and how they eventually resorted to cannibalism after being stranded on the frozen peak of an Andean mountaintop.
- In Letter Never Sent, the last two survivors of an expedition to find diamonds in the Siberian forests are already in desperate straits as they are staggering toward the river that offers hope of safety. Then it starts snowing. Not only is the Siberian winter very bad in and of itself, Tanya notes that the winter might freeze the river. Soon after, Tanya dies of hypothermia.
- Let the Right One In is full of this trope. Well, it takes place in Sweden...
- The ending of anti-Western McCabe & Mrs. Miller in which John McCabe, having been shot three times, manages to kill the assassins who are after him. Without the strength to drag himself indoors, he curls up in the snow and dies.
- Moulin Rouge! ends with the defeated Duke walking through a snowfall, leaving the theater in which the heroine Satine has just died.
- Averted in a Soviet movie The Needle: the protagonist is stabbed with a knife, falls to his knees in the blood-stained snow... but he struggles to his feet and walks away, disappearing in the snowstorm, and we never see him dead. Word of God later stated that the protagonist survived.
- North Face is about an attempt to climb the north face of the Eiger, a mountain famous for incredibly unpredictable and dangerous weather patterns. Things really start going bad when the snowstorm hits - an avalanche and hypothermia are, between them, responsible for killing most of the team.
- In Orphan the entire movie takes place in snowy weather, and most of the film's violent scenes happen outside in the snow.
- In The Patriot (2000), a few battles are set in winter, with corpses covered by snow.
- The Chinese movie Raise the Red Lantern has the plot evolving by following the change of seasons. The climax fittingly takes place in winter, with the servant Yan'er kneeling outdoors in winter until she dies from the cold, while snow flakes fall around her. Then there is the unfaithful third wife accidentally being exposed by the protagonist when drunk and executed by her husband and servants.
- The Revenant shows many deaths human and animal set in vast snowscapes and mountain vistas, ice, snow and blizzards accompany death at all times.
- Inverted after being invoked in Rurouni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno: Shishio's getting betrayed involves him getting repeatedly stabbed in winter and then being left to burn on a funeral pyre. However, a sudden snowfall puts out the fire and saves him.
- Subverted in The Shining. Jack does freeze to death, but his expression is anything but peaceful!
- In Shutter Island: The corpses Teddy sees at Dachau are half-covered in snow.
- Sin City: John shoots himself in a snowy field.
- In A Single Man, George's lover, Jim, dies on a snowy road due to an accident.
- In The Snowman (2017), the killer kills his victims in the first snow of winter.
- In Snowpiercer, a few passengers attempted to escape the train earlier and walked a very short distance before freezing to death where they stood, making their frozen, standing corpses visible from the train years later. While this fate might have been played straight by the survivors of the train after it crashes, we see that a polar bear has survived, indicating that life can survive outside of the train at last.
- The films "Film/Survive" (1976), ''Alive' (1993) and "Society of the Snow" (2023), dramatize the story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, where after the plane crashes atop the rugged Andes mountains, the survivors, which includes a rugby team, resort to cannibalizing the corpses of the other passenges in order to survive the freezing conditions until an expedition leads a rescue party to the crash location.
- Star Wars:
- In Revenge of the Sith, Jedi master Ki Adi Mundi is leading the clonetroopers in a charge on Mygeeto, a snowy planet as Order 66 is issued to the troops, with Mundi trying and failing to fight them off.
- In The Empire Strikes Back, there are several notable deaths in the snow, all of which occur on the ice planet Hoth:
- Luke's tauntaun dies when attacked by a Wampa, a yeti-like predator which hunts under the cover of snow.
- Luke narrowly escapes this fate after escaping the Wampa when Han Solo leaves Echo Base to rescue him. Han Solo's tauntaun, however, succumbs to the cold, allowing Han to use it's dead but insulating carcass to keep the two alive during the night.
- The Battle of Hoth shows us rebel soldiers dying in the snow as they are shot down by blaster fire by imperial forces.
- Subverted in The Force Awakens, when Finn gets struck down by Kylo Ren on Starkiller Base. He gets better with medical assistance.
- The Sweet Hereafter depicts children in a horrific bus accident, caused and contrasted by the peacefulness of the snow around them. Snow and cold are used throughout the movie to symbolize the original serenity in the town.
- Both the deaths of a whole band of Shinsengumi and Hama in The Sword of Doom take place on snowy evenings.
- Used subtly in Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. The movie ends in the snow after the brutal murder of Mr. Baek. White is also used actively to symbolize purity, which is what Geum-ja is trying to move toward. Oldboy (2003) similarly ends in a field of snow after a similarly bloody climax. It may be used as a symbol for leaving the past behind or renewal.
- The Thing (1982):
- When Bennings, who has been assimilated by the Thing, gets immolated after trying to escape.
- When Palmer, assimilated by the Thing, gets immolated and runs outside, attempting to put out the fire, before MacReady blows him apart with a stick of dynamite.
- After MacReady blows up the base, Childs returns, claiming to have gotten lost when chasing after Blair. They share a drink together after realizing that both of them will die whether one of them is a Thing or not.
- In the movie Three Days of the Condor, the protagonist, Joseph Turner (a.k.a. Condor), notices that Kathy Hale photographs and displays only scenes of winter (bare trees, lifeless snow). He comments to her that she is focusing on death, which she confirms.
- Vertical Limit takes this literally. The characters are climbing one of them most dangerous mountains in the world, and quite a few of them die, either in an avalanche or on the mission sent to rescue the first team. One of the points stressed by the movie is just how dangerous a thing climbing like that is.
- War and Peace (1956): The straggling remnant of the French army retreating from Moscow. The retreat, which had already become difficult, becomes harrowing as the cold of winter arrives, and corpses start getting left behind in the snow.
- In Wendigo, all of the horror and death occurs in the beautiful snow shrouded countryside of upstate New York, where the crimson blood is in stark contrast to the pure white snow. George even quotes the poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost when commenting on the beauty of the cold and the snow, shortly before he gets shot while sledding.
- White Fang, in the film, after getting wounded in a skirmish between her pack and a group of humans, White Fang's mother limps to her den before collapsing in the entrance, her pup goes out and she gives him a farewell lick, then it starts snowing.
- Book Ends Wind River. The film opens on a teenage girl running barefoot through the snow at night, only to start coughing up blood onto the snow, then collapse and die. Justified: as explained in the film after her body is found, it was cold enough that night that the water vapor in your lungs would literally freeze and shred your insides if you were breathing too hard. At the end of the film, Cory snowmobiles the last survivor of the men who gang-raped her up to the top of a snowy mountain and makes him run for the nearest road, so that he dies the same way she did.
- The Wizard of Oz subverts the trope during the poppy field scene. The Wicked Witch enchants the poppies to put Dorothy and her companions into an eternal Forced Sleep. Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion are overcome by the poppies and it is indeed peaceful... Until snow comes, sent by Glinda, which kills the poppies, wakes up Dorothy and the Lion, and saves their lives.
- The World of Kanako: In the very end of the film, Akikazu and Kanako's teacher, who claims to have killed Kanako, find themselves on a windy snowfield where Kanako is said to be buried. Akikazu wants to find her corpse but Kanako's teacher can't remember where she lies so Akikazu keeps on searching the snow without success. Then the movie abruptly ends.
- Zack Snyder's Justice League: There's snow during the football match of Victor Stone that his father didn't attend. He has an argument with his mother Elinore when coming back from that match, which causes the car accident that kills Elinore and cripples Victor.
