Dead Snow is a hilarious, gory and thrilling horror set in the Norwegian mountains with a group of students spending their Easter break fighting Nazi zombies.

Director Tommy Wirkola took the time to give us his top five favourite horror movies here and also took the time to answer some of our questions at the UK premiere at Channel 4’s Frightfest.

Hecklerspray: Dead Snow features Nazi-zombies, recently we’ve also had lesbian vampires and mutant sheep – where can horror go next?

Tommy Wirkola: That’s a good question! I don’t know what animal would be cool to do… I don’t know! (Laughs) Let’s go back to that one!

**Update** – Tommy emailed us with the answer after the interview:

TW: I would like to see Frankula..a mix between Dracula and Frankenstein…would be interesting!

HS: What was the biggest challenge for an independent filmmaker to bring this film to the big screen?

TW: The money was the biggest challenge. In Norway, 95% of the movies are funded by the government which means that they pay for about 50% of the budget and you come up with the rest of it. We applied but we didn’t get it, I’m don’t know why, Nazi-zombie movies should always get money! We had to fund it privately and went to a lot of independent producers and contractors in my home town to invest money. It was hard to convince people that even though we were not government funded, we would get all their money back.

HS: Dead Snow has many references littered throughout, one of them being the Evil Dead films – were you tempted to replace any appendages with weaponry?

TW: Yeah but we’re saving that for the sequel (laughs)! We talked about doing different stuff but budget restrictions meant we had to stop somewhere. We have a cool idea for that in the sequel.

HS: Can we expected Martin to replace his crotch with maybe some sort of gun?

TW: Well, we talked about the opening of Dead Snow 2 and… I can’t tell, sorry, I don’t want to spoil number 1.

HS: Sam Raimi went from The Evil Dead to Spiderman, Peter Jackson from Bad Taste and Braindead to the Lord of the Rings – are there any franchises you have your eyes set on?

TW: Star Wars 7, 8 and 9! Hopefully we’ll be doing Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (His next film, with Will Ferrell and Adam McKay producing), which will be a big step up budget-wise and production wise… but yeah Star Wars… or Indiana Jones!

HS: Well both of their last films were disappointing so you might have a good chance… What was your fondest memory of the production?

TW: We had a lot of weird stuff going on. You know they set fire to the cabin in the movie and we never see it burning. The producers kept saying to me to shoot it, they felt it added production value, so okay we burnt it, we shot it and came back and the shots were ruined! The camera had malfunctioned so we couldn’t use the shots! So that was a weird memory, burning down a £40,000 cabin and not being able to use it. Also the day we shot the crotch bite was a bit weird.

Also, being on set with the actors and figuring out funny things. A lot of the humour was improvised on set, the actors came up with good stuff all the time, so that was the best part.

HS: The film features plenty of gory, blood-splattering action and deaths throughout – but do you have a particular favourite?

TW: The first character that dies is a favourite of mine, where the head gets ripped open! It takes it from a normal horror movie to the crazy horror movie we were making, that is the turning point in the movie which I like a lot. Or the sequence where they are hanging by the zombie entrails and fighting the zombie off the cliff. It was a hard thing to shoot but was maybe my favourite scene.

HS: Well it can’t go without saying that you seem to have a particular fascination with intestines!

TW: Well, you know intestines are always funny; Peter Jackson had a lot of fun with them in Braindead! I actually read a comment online, by a doctor, it said it was very unlikely that entrails could hold two people hanging like that. I think we kind of knew that but zombie entrails would be stronger than normal humans’!

HS: Well, they are mutated.

TW: Yeah, but its fun. The entrails have a sense of humour to them that we felt we needed in.

HS: You told us recently that The Exorcist is your favourite horror movie; would you like to go into more serious horror yourself?

TW: Maybe, so far the two movies I’ve made have had a lot of humour in them but eventually I would like to try and make a movie that is 100% serious. What I don’t see myself doing in the next five or 10 years is a drama, I don’t have that in me yet.

HS: What can we expect from your next film Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters?

TW: You can expect a lot of, like Dead Snow, blood and guts and cartoonish violence. I’ve written a couple of big set pieces, big action sequences, it’s going to be R-rated and we have a couple of really memorable characters. We have two big trolls with tattoos! I think it is going to be a really fun movie to watch, despite all of the violence and action, it is going to be a fun movie to see. Hopefully we get to shoot it next year.

HS: You’ve mentioned before that Dead Snow 2 is a possibility, where are you going to go with the sequel? Like Evil Dead 2 is it crazier, funnier and gorier?

TW: In Dead Snow the first part of the movie is serious and the second part is the crazy stuff. In the sequel we can go crazy from the first second and we have a lot of ideas of what we want to do. It’ll be the Evil Dead 2 to the original.

HS: Will you remake the first film in the opening then?

TW: We’ll cut Dead Snow into half a minute. I don’t think we are going to reshoot it with a bigger actress!

Dead Snow is out on DVD and Blu-ray now. The review is online here and Tommy Wirkola’s Top 5 Horror Films is here.

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An idyllic wood cabin, surrounded by snow in the Norwegian mountains – sounds like the perfect postcard.

Add to that a group of ravaging, recently resurrected Nazi zombies, tearing students’ limbs off, painting the vast landscape a gloriously unsettling red and you’ve got Dead Snow.

This ambitious Norwegian film from newcomer Tommy Wirkola takes a group of medical students and gives them their Easter vacation from hell. Secluded, cold and surrounded by bloodthirsty Nazi zombies, it’s fight or bite! Not shying away from anything, it instead throws everything at the screen (jokes, references, horror, heads etc) and makes for one of the most surprisingly enjoyable horror movies for quite some time.

Director Wirkola is a child of the 70s and 80s, set on making a horror film cut from the same cloth as Evil Dead and Braindead and even openly referencing these classics within Dead Snow. What Wirkola (and writer/actor Stig Frode Henriksen) does that makes this stand out is the inclusion of Nazi Zombies.

Not an original concept, computer games recently have made use of the double bastard glory of the premise and even schlock cinema of the 70s and 80s featured them. This film manages to thrust them into a film that actually revels in the pure lunacy that should surround such a great villain – and celebrate that lunacy they do. The amount of inventive violence, gore and laughs generated from this breed of fast-moving moaners is enough to have any horror fan feel welcome.

When the characters finally have the climatic showdown with the undead patrol, it becomes grinning, unadulterated, gory glory and couldn’t be more enjoyable.

While the film does prove plenty of humour and action it is at the detriment of character development. Obviously we need a fair amount of disposable bodies but the film has a few too many, making for some very one-dimensional characterisation. While Raimi knew to put Ash centre stage in Evil Dead from the oft, it’s never clear who we should be following in this until the third act when Martin (Vegar Hoer) steps up.

While the insanity of hacking the zombies to pieces is pure joy, the film at times drops the tone and takes time to reflect on some character demises. It makes for uncomfortable viewing, as if someone sat you down after a particular demonic rampage on Grand Theft Auto and explained the real life implications of your actions.

These are minor niggles; Wirkola has set out to create a horror movie which is fun, something being slayed from the genre for a while. He succeeds for the most part, sometimes even injecting the movie with flair and originality making him a director to watch. Dead Snow is a nod to some of the most inventive horror movies and a film that can proudly say that for all its faults is an entertaining and indulgent film school in how horror movies should be made.

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Tommy Wirkola is a new name for the horror genre but his audacious, hilarious and blood-splattered Norwegian Nazi zombie movie Dead Snow, shows that this is one director who has done his homework.

If the film isn’t making you laugh, cutting something in half or having intestine pulled out of one of the characters, then its winking at the audience with some reference to some of the best-loved horror masterpieces.

Tommy Wirkola has exclusively talked to us about his top five horror movies of all time, and as a list of definitive titles to watch, it’s hard to argue with. Enjoy…

Tommy:

I have been watching horror movies from when I was at a very young age. I blame that on my oldest brother who is 10 years older than me, who brought home the most horrific horror movies for me to watch, when the stuff I should have been watching was things like Sesame Street and Disney movies.

To ask me to only pick five horror movies, is like asking Hannibal Lecter to pick his favourite part on the human body… anyway, here it goes:

TOP 5 HORROR MOVIES BY TOMMY WIRKOLA

5. Drag me to Hell

I LOVED Sam Raimi’s comeback to the horror genre. It was suspenseful, scary as hell, funny and gross. What more can you ask for?

4. Braindead

It’s incredible that a movie can contain THAT MUCH blood, and still be as funny as it is.

3. The Descent

I love this film. It’s scary and never have I felt that out of breath in a movie theatre. Claustrophobic and suspenseful! And it was refreshing to see a movie with an all-female cast.

2. The Evil Dead 2

What can one say? All the things that I love about moviemaking combined in ONE FILM.

1. The Exorcist

I still remember the first time I saw this film. I was alone at home… it was in the middle of winter, which in north of Norway means total darkness, and it was in the middle of the night. I couldn’t sleep for days. I still find it scary, shocking and incredibly well acted. A favourite!

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So, yes, everyone’s very sad about Michael Jackson and everything. But we’ve got the perfect antidote.

Well, maybe not the perfect antidote. Maybe not an antidote at all, in fact – it’s a trailer for Dead Snow, a film about Nazi ice zombies. Oh, now you’re interested.

God knows what actually happens in Dead Snow, but we’re determined to see it thanks to the rule which states that any film featuring an undead Hitler monster staggering around and bellowing into the sky must be one of the best films ever made. Look, the Dead Snow trailer is after the jump. It’s plainly mental…