The Arctic and Antarctic are perfect places to set a scary story. To start with, the freezing environments at the top and bottom of the world are terrifyingly inhospitable to human life. Then you’ve got the pervasive darkness, which blankets both poles for months at a time. Finally, there’s the extreme isolation, which means that if something goes wrong, you’re on your own!
I thought that in writing a list about Arctic and Antarctic horror stories—I’ve got three for each polar region—I’d be smugly looking forward to the warmer days that are just around the corner (the nights currently still feel like winter here in Scotland, but spring is creeping into the days). And then the central heating in my house broke. But while I may be shivering along with the characters in these stories, at least I don’t have to deal with the various ghosts and monsters they have to fend off!
Dark Matter (2010) by Michelle Paver
Starting off the Arctic section of this list is Dark Matter, which is set on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. It’s 1937 and main character, Jack Miller, signs on to be the radio operator for a year-long expedition to the Arctic. The small group of men will be stationed at Gruhuken—the site of an abandoned (I wonder why…) mining operation on the coast—to report scientific weather data from their lonely little cabin.
The story is told via Jack’s journal entries and it’s definitely a slow burn, but I found the beautiful descriptions of the Arctic landscape to be captivating before the scares of the ghost story kicked in. We essentially follow along as Jack is slowly consumed by fear. The haunting starts out as merely unsettling, but it gets progressively more insidious as the long months of total darkness stretch out and the pages flip by.
One of Jack’s only sources of solace throughout the haunted polar night is a husky called Isaak. Despite being a self-proclaimed dog-hater at the start of the trip, Isaak proves to Jack that there’s actually nothing better than a canine companion—particularly when a ghostly presence is lurking just outside the door.
A Haunting in the Arctic (2023) by C.J. Cooke
A Haunting in the Arctic largely flips back and forth between two timelines. In 1901, Nicky is kidnapped and finds herself trapped aboard the Ormen—a whaling ship that’s set sail for the Arctic. In 2023, Dominique is exploring the wreck of the Ormen off the coast of Iceland.
The two timelines brilliantly complement each other—we get to read a chapter or two about the dilapidated and very creepy wrecked ship, before flashing back to it in its glory days of sailing the high seas. And while Nicky’s storyline is absolutely heart-wrenching, we get much needed breaks by jumping forward in time and putting on our explorer hats with Dominique. Although the ending didn’t quite work for me, it didn’t take away from how much I was swept up in the chilling journey—both in terms of weather and emotion!
[I just want to mention a content warning, but it is also a mild spoiler: one of the storylines involves rape.]
30 Days of Night (2002) by Steve Niles, illustrated by Ben Templesmith
The vampires in the three-issue comic book 30 Days of Night have the perfect plan to overcome their weakness to sunlight: simply infest an Alaskan town in the Arctic circle where the sun doesn’t rise for 30 days! Unfortunately for the residents of Barrow (now known as Utqiagvik), their town has been chosen as the vampire buffet.
The idea of setting a vampire story in a place where darkness reigns just feels so right, and while the plot and characters are admittedly rather thin, Ben Templesmith’s creepy art adds some meat to the bones of the story. The desaturated use of color not only perfectly fits the freezing environment, but it also makes the bright red splashes of blood really pop off the page.
There’s also a whole series of sequel comics to explore if the first installment leaves you wanting more. I haven’t yet read any of follow-ups, but researching this list has led me to discover that there was an X-Files crossover, which I’ll be getting my hands on ASAP!
Symbiote (2025) by Michael Nayak
Now we’re embarking on the Antarctic section of this list, starting with Symbiote. The story is set against the backdrop of WWIII, with the American scientists at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station feeling thankfully removed from the conflict. But their bubble of safety is burst when a small group of Chinese scientists—with a ravaged dead body in tow—arrive looking for shelter after fleeing their own station hundreds of miles away.
As polar night descends, it quickly becomes evident that people are being infected with an aggressive and heretofore unknown parasite. The station quickly descends into chaos as the infected violently lash out and the uninfected scramble to stop the spread and find a cure. The isolated research station sitting in the vastness of the Antarctic tundra may seem as if it’s channeling The Thing, but the existential horror goes in its own creative direction (and isn’t nearly as gross as John Carpenter’s film!). Symbiote is fast-paced, frenetic, and a little bit frightening.
“The Crevasse” (2009) by Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud
“The Crevasse” is a lyrically crafted snapshot of Lovecraftian Antarctic terror. Four men—one of whom is unwell—are traveling by dog sled across the barren swath of Antarctica when a massive crevasse suddenly splits the icy plain. After taking emergency action, the team make camp nearby for the night, but not all is well in the snowy landscape.
This short story is incredibly atmospheric, with the bitter cold seeming to seep into every line. The otherworldly horror elements are only shown in little glimpses, but those morsels manage to be as fascinating as they are terrifying. Each monstrous image seemed crafted by the authors to crawl its way into my brain and fester in my imagination.
[Quick content warning: animal injury and death is a part of this story.]
“In Amundsen’s Tent” (1928) by John Martin Leahy
It was the expedition led by Roald Amundsen that was the first to reach the South Pole back in 1911, and it’s his real-life tent which is given a fictional horror twist in “In Amundsen’s Tent.” A small group of men come across the tent of the explorer and inside they find a severed human head and a journal—both of which belong to Robert Drumgold, and the latter of which makes up the bulk of the epistolary short story. The dialogue within the account may seem clunky to modern readers, but I find it kind of charming.
The horror itself is relatively subtle. Something supernatural is certainly at play, but we largely only get to see it through the ramblings of men who have been driven to madness by whatever it is that they’ve seen. And while it may be tempting to describe the bizarre presence in the story as Lovecraftian, “In Amundsen’s Tent” actually predates At the Mountains of Madness by three years.
Are you also a fan of chilling Arctic and Antarctic horror, or isolated winter settings in general? I’d love to know which stories you recommend, so let me know in the comments below!
