Cold Prey

Colour, 35 mm
Norway, 2006, 97 min
Section: Midnight Screenings

Synopsis

Five carefree youths set out on a snowboarding trip away from the overcrowded slopes and ski lift queues. Their idea is to conquer a peak in the middle of untouched nature on their own – but instead they find themselves fighting the most frightening serial killer in Norwegian history. When one of the young holidaymakers breaks his leg on the descent they find temporary shelter in an abandoned mountain hotel. They don’t yet know that it is a place people started disappearing from 30 years ago. And they have no idea that the building’s cellar hides a man whose best, or rather only, friend is an axe as sharp as a razor… The cat-and-mouse game the murdering madman plays shows not only who among the frightened visitors has the will to survive, but their true character as well. Cold Prey contains everything that a modern teenage murder-flick should and offers horror fans a skillfully crafted genre spectacle.

About the director

Roar Uthaug (b. 1973, Lørenskog, Norway) made his first killer-with-an-axe film in eighth grade. The fact that his talent for genre films does not lie only in slasher films, however, is attested to by his short western parody A Fistful of Kebab (1998). As a teenager, he tried making music videos for his own compositions. He studied video production in Mediefabrikken in the district of Akershus and in 1999-2002 took a course in direction at the Norwegian Film School in Lillehammer. His graduate film was The Martin Administration (Regjeringen Martin, 2002), which was nominated for a Student Oscar. Since the summer of 2002 he has been making a living as a music video and commercial director. Cold Prey is his feature film debut.