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"By the power invested in me by the mighty and awful snow demons, I command you to come to life! LIVE! LIVE! LIVVVE!" — Calvin, Calvin And Hobbes. (It doesn't end well...)
"He's chillin'...and killin'."
— Tagline for the 1996 film Jack Frost. (It ends even worse...)
Snowlems (a portmanteau of Snow Golems) are living snowmen, often complete with stovepipe hats, lumps of coal for eyes, and carrots for noses. Genre writers with a sense of humor may cast them as Ice Elementals. There are three varieties of Snowlems:
Version I. The Friendly Snowlem: Also known as the " Frosty The Snowman" variety, they often are simply snowmen constructed by cute kids and animated by Christmas magic. Very often the subject of Narm.
Version II. The Human Snowlem: This is where a human is transformed into a snowman, sometimes after an accident or due to some Applied Phlebotinum. Depending on who the person is, it may overlap with Versions I or III.
Version III: The Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons Snowlem: The snowman is something to be feared. Perhaps it's some supernatural monstrosity shaped into a snowman or perhaps a serial killer back to life or maybe it was simply evil snow, it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is... oh my god, he just killed that guy with a carrot!
Examples
Anime and Manga
- One episode of Cardcaptor Sakura from the third season had crazy snowmen.
- Chilly from the Kirby anime falls under this trope. Gamewise, it's debatable.
- These are created in Berserk when evil spirits attack the Weirdness Magnet hero during a snowstorm.
- This happens during the Millennium Falcon arc of the manga (which has nothing to do with Star Wars), and as a result, the Playstation 2 Berserk game has Guts taking his BFS to them during the first part of the game, eventually having to face a boss Snowlem.
- Digimon has had several different Snowlems.
- Urd created a Snowlem to assist her in a Snowball Fight with Skuld in the OAV.
Comic Books
- The Snowman (see Western Animation) was originally a wordless graphic novel by Raymond Briggs.
- The image at the top of the page comes from an issue of Strange Adventures called "Invaders from the Ice World
 ◊", which is a brain-breaking example of What Do You Mean It Wasnt Made On Drugs?
- Also, this issue◊ of Action Comics has Snow Superman fighting what appears to be a Gentleman Snowman.
- Supes also battles a literal snow golem (Hebrew words on the forehead and everything) in a recent DC comics holiday special.
- The Blue Snowman (an old Wonder Woman foe) looks like this, but is actually a human woman in a bulky costume.
- Adult comic Viz used to run a seasonal parody of The Snowman, with a violent, foul-mouthed snowman taking the human boy on a drinking and gambling spree
Film
- The 1996 film Jack Frost had a serial killer become transformed into a snowman due to ribonucleic acid. In the film, he rapes a woman in the shower with a carrot ().
- A bit lighter is the 1998 film Jack Frost, where Michael Keaton has a car accident and wakes up as a snowman. Also notable for including three of Frank Zappa's four children. Woe to anyone who intended to rent this film and rented the first one instead!!
- Der Schneemann or The Snowman was a short animated film made during Nazi Germany.
- There was a 2005 made-for-video movie called The Legend of Frosty the Snowman, a very, very loose sequel to the original Rankin Bass Productions Frosty.
Literature
- Mr. Snow in the Mr. Men books was created by Santa Claus as an assistant.
- In Discworld, the Ice Giants often mentioned to be at war with the gods have eyes of coal and snowmen are stated to be idols built by human racial memory.
- And then there's the wintersmith.
- One Goosebumps novel centred around an evil snowman who was really a monster trapped in that form by a witch.
Live Action TV
- Fozzie builds a snowman who comes to life in A Muppet Family Christmas. They're briefly a double act, but the snowman retreats outside due to heat and heckling.
- It's A Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie featured Joe Snow, who was a parody of Sam the Snowman from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. He claimed to be the narrator, but the camera crew said otherwise.
Music
- "Frosty the Snowman" actually started out as a song written by Walter "Jack" Rollins and Steve Nelson, and recorded by Gene Autry in 1950.
Newspaper Comics
Tabletop Games
- The high-level Simulacrum spell in Dungeons And Dragons creates a low-power duplicate of a living being out of snow or ice. That's right, they're deranged mutant killer monster snowlems... and they walk among you!
- Eve worse is the Ice Assassin spell, a Version III upgrade to the above. While a simulacrum could theoretically be put to benign use, an ice assassin's entire purpose is to kill whoever it's based on.
- The Ravenloft setting perpetuates the proud Dungeons And Dragons tradition of "make golems of whatever you can think of" with... Snow Golems.
- The Ice Giants of Narandu in Talislanta are at very least strongly implied to be Snowlems (of the third variety).
Video Games
- Bible Buffet featured killer snowmen as one of the villains. Because that was totally predicted in the Bible.
- Noah's Ark, a Konami game, features a killer snowman at the end of the Antarctica stages.
- Kingdom Of Loathing has ninja snowman enemies.
- The multiplayer "clan dungeon" Hobopolis has a snowman hobo named Frosty as a mini-boss.
- Regice is a Pokemon made entirely of Antarctic ice, and it's one of the Legendary Golems.
- Snow Bros., a 1990 arcade game, had two snowball-throwing snowmen as the heroes.
- Clayfighter had Bad Mr. Frosty, a badass Anti Hero snowman.
- Super Mario 64 had some enemy snowmen in one level.
- They're also in other games, including New Super Mario Bros Wii, and go under the name 'Mr Blizzard'.
- Games created with Power Game Factory can include living snowmen as enemies.
- The Adventure game Simon The Sorcerer had one of these as an obstacle. You get past him by eating some mints.
- Banjo-Kazooie featured a rather annoying variant in which the only way to defeat them was to knock off their stove-top hats with a difficult aerial maneuver.
- A Wintersday quest in Guild Wars features characters chasing down familiar-sounding ingredients (button, two pieces of coal, corncob pipe, magic hat) to make Freezie, the Greatest Snowman Ever Made. Freezie and other snowmen (which look like Ice Elementals wigh a snowman head stuck on the front]]) also show up in other Wintersday quests, and populate the Secret Lair of the Snowmen dungeon in Eye of the North. For the children!
- One of the unlockable skins in some of the Ratchet And Clank games is that of a snowman. A Snowlem with a BFG. You may quake in fear now.
- Various 'Winter Events' in City Of Heroes have involved menacing Type III Snowlems of varrying sizes - including towering 'Giant Monster' versions that requires several entire TEAMS of Superheroes to defeat.
- Earthworm Jim had a fire-breathing snowman as the Mini Boss of the
Hell Heck level.
- Jack Frost is Atlus' mascot for a reason; he appears in just about every Shin Megami Tensei game, and he's going to beat the living hee-ho out of you.
- Donkey Kong Country 3 had a snowball-chucking (and snow-cannonball-shooting - thanks to a cannon hidden in his top hat) snowman as the boss of the K3 zone. He had to be defeated by chucking snowballs back at him in the style of the Swanky's Sideshow minigames.
- Arguably, Lokholar the Ice Lord in World Of Warcraft. He's an ice elemental though, and not a snowman.
- In Animal Crossing you can make incredibly angsty snowmen who lament their creation and resent you for creating them.
Web Comics
Web Original
- The Whateley Universe story "There's an Angel in Father John's Basement" plays with this: The third-rate mystic villain trio after the power of the titular 'Angel' find a magical tome which will let them unleash an evil so powerful that all the major superheroes in New York will have to fight it. To do this, they build themselves an army of evil Santas and mobile, energy-absorbing snowmen. The prophecy comes true when the individual snowmen eventually combine into Ymir in the middle of New York...
Western Animation
- The original Frosty the Snowman animated television special was aired on December 7, 1969. What followed were several increasingly bad sequels: Frosty's Winter Wonderland in 1976, Rudolph and Frosty's Christmas in July in 1979, and Frosty Returns in 1992.
- They were all follow-ups to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which was narrated by Sam the Snowman, a Version I snowlem patterened after Burl Ives.
- Bouli was a French animated television series that aired from 1989 to 1991, where the moon magically animated the snowman Bouli and his friends and they set up a snowman village in the woods.
- The Kim Possible half-episode "Day of the Snowmen" involved a weather machine and toxic water from Lake Wannaweep creating mutant zombie snowmen.
- Ron: "...They don't seem like jolly, happy souls."
- Xiaolin Showdown, "The Deep Freeze." It helps to have the mystical Heart of Jong that can animate inanimate objects.
- The first South Park short was called "Jesus vs. Frosty" and involved four kids animating a snowman - who turns out to be an insane killer who sprouts tentacles.
- There was a short cartoon called "Earth Versus Everything," which featured giant mutant killer snowmen brought to life by radiation from nuclear tests. It was a very silly cartoon.
- The famous British short film The Snowman ("we're walking in the air") features a living snowman who can even fly to Lapland for a snowman party. Shown every Christmas on Channel Four.
- There's a 1930-era cartoon The Snowman that starts off pleasantly enough as an Eskimo boy and his animal pals build a snowman, but it turns into a version III that goes on a psycho rampage (even eating one of the critters!) - the kid runs to a control room and starts up machinery that cranks up the sun, and the Snowlem melts in ghastly death-throes. Literal Nightmare Fuel for this troper as a kid.
- Used by Dao Lon Wong in the Christmas Episode of Jackie Chan Adventures.
- Robot Chicken had a small bit where two police snowmen were at a puddle:
Officer A: That's all that's left of him, poor bastard.
Officer B: *Turns on radio* Suspect died of... natura-natural causes. *sniff*
- They also have an scene with "Composite Santa" who is half evil-Santa and half evil-Frosty.
- The Simpsons Did It, of course, in the episode where Homer and Burns were trapped in a cabin buried in an avalanche. Burns created armies of snowmen, which came alive and fought against Homer's army of former political figures he summoned by "political powers". It was all just a hallucination, but still...
- A freezing villain makes version III snowlems in an episode of Johnny Test.
- The Monster Of The Week in an episode of Courage The Cowardly Dog. As the last of the snowmen, his nefarious scheme is to extract the anti-melting gene from humans and implant it into himself, allowing him to outlive the inevitable warming of the earth. Also he speaks with a Scottish accent. Take from that what you will.
- The snow soldiers from the three part Christmas Special of Bump In The Night
Other
- Cirque du Soleil's Wintuk show has a bunch of ten-foot ice golem-esque things come to life and attack the heroes. The golems are puppets, of course.
- In 2007, Spawn creator Todd McFarlane released a Version III Snowlem in Series 5 of his company's "Monsters" toyline.
- Lipton's corporation ran a series of ads for its iced tea products, in which an animate snowman skeleton wanders into a convenience store in the dead of summer, downs a bottle of iced tea, and recrystalizes into a decidely sinister-looking snowman. Who then steals a carrot and stalks-off.
Real Life
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