Films About Cryogenics and Suspended Animation

Cryogenics (sometimes referred to as cryonics) is the science of freezing the human body in a suspended state and then reviving it at a later period. So far, cryogenics is a science that remains science-fiction. While there exists a number of cryogenic institutes in the real world that offer to freeze the human body, none have yet demonstrated the ability to revive a body at the other end of the process. The process of freezing tissue causes the water content to expand and destroys cellular matter and so it is unlikely in reality that a frozen body could be revived without damage. This has not stopped the popularity of the theme in science-fiction.

The following is a discussion of films about cryogenics and suspended animation and the various ways such themes have been portrayed.


Cryogenics in Space Travel

Few films featuring cryogenic suspension are actually about the process itself. Mostly cryogenics is seen as means for astronauts to endure lengthy space journeys in a story or are about the situation the sleeper faces when awakened.

Astronauts frozen for lengthy space journeys can be seen in films such as Spaceflight 1C-1 (1963), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Alien (1979) and sequels, Galaxina (1980), Earth Star Voyager (1988), Supernova (2000), Avatar (2009), Mr. Nobody (2009), Astronaut: The Last Push (2012), Prometheus Trap (2012), Interstellar (2014), Doom: Annihilation (2019), Breach (2020), Deus (2022), 65 (2023), Crater (2023), and the tv series’ Raised By Wolves (2020- ) and Foundation (2021- ). All of these merely use cryogenic suspension as a method to deal with space travel in a realistic manner rather than use shortcuts like the invention of hyperspace, warp drives and wormholes. The cryogenic process does not form a major plot point in these films.

One minor variant was the Australian children’s series Silversun (2004) set aboard a spaceship carrying a cargo of cryogenic sleepers, which is maintained a group of children (who will grow up through the course of the journey). There was also the tv series Dark Matter (2015-7) where six people wake up aboard a spaceship with complete amnesia about who they are.

There are however a number of stories of what happens when the traveller awakes to find something very different to what they expect or that something has gone wrong. The most memorable of these was Planet of the Apes (1968) where the astronauts wake to find themselves crashlanded on what appears to be an ape-ruled alien planet. Both Alien Cargo (1999) and Pandorum (2009) feature frozen crew-members woken to deal with a mission that has gone awry, while the sleepers in Pitch Black (2000) and A.E: Apocalypse Earth (2013) are woken when the ship crashes.

The crew of the Nostromo awake from cryogenic hypersleep in Alien (1979)
The crew of the Nostromo awake from cryogenic hypersleep in Alien (1979)

The sole variant on the theme where the cryogenic process is an integral part of the story is Passengers (2016), which does clever things with the story of Chris Pratt prematurely woken from hibernation on a ship of sleepers who decides to awaken fellow sleeper Jennifer Lawrence for the sake of companionship. There was also The Time Capsule (2022) where a middle-aged man encounters his unaged teenage girlfriend returned after a relativistic, cryogenically frozen space journey.

The Twilight Zone episode The Long Morrow (1964) features two lovers trying to deal with the fact that he is due to undergo a 40-year space journey in cryogenic suspension and will return to her unaged. There was also the Space: 1999 episode Earthbound (1975) about the scrabble for a sole position in the cryo-chamber aboard an alien ship returning to Earth, which is won by an officious commissioner (Roy Dotrice) before the sting in the tale where he learns that due to a malfunction he will be awake for the entire 75 year journey.

The Doctor Who episode The Ark (1966) has most of humanity preserved aboard a lengthy ship journey to relocate on a new world. Other works like the Doctor Who episode The Ark in Space (1974) and the films Dead Fire (1996) and Air (2015) feature humanity preserved aboard space stations and in bunkers as a means of waiting for a devastated Earth to return to something habitable.

The cryogenic space traveller were played for comedy in Dark Star (1974) where the fatally wounded captain is kept alive on ice and periodically thawed out to provide not entirely coherent advice. The end of Don’t Look Up (2021) plays the idea of a space mission of VIPs departing the destruction of the Earth for another habitable world. for some amusement.

In the other oddities category, Gog (1954) features a murder taking place in a cryogenic research laboratory of a space centre during its opening scenes. The Six Million Dollar Man episode The Pioneers (1974) features Mike Farrell as an astronaut in a cryogenic experiment returned to Earth in a crazed state after an accidental ingestion of too much freezing serum.


When the Sleeper Awakes Stories

The other common theme in cryogenics is the story where a frozen person is woken in the present or the future where they have to face a very unfamiliar world. H.G. Wells set down the trope in his novel The Sleeper Awakes (1899) with a man woken to find a radically different future to the world he left behind.

The very first sleeper awakes in the future film was Just Imagine (1930), which plays as a comedy variation on the Wells story where a man struck by lightning in the present is revived in the absurdist future of 1980. The Dennis Potter mini-series Cold Lazarus (1996) has the head of a present-day man unfrozen in the future where his memories are ransacked by the media. The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The Neutral Zone (1988) concerns a trio of 20th Century people who are awakened after being found in space to find the future they are in bewildering.

The most famous man out of time is Buck Rogers, a man from the present who is revived in the 25th Century where he undergoes a series of space opera adventures. Buck originated in the pulps, gained popularity as a syndicated comic-strip and then appeared on screen in the serial Buck Rogers (1939), the film Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979) and the ensuing tv series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979-1981). In the original stories and comic-book, Buck is preserved by a radioactive gas in a mine; in the serial, it is by a gas after crashing a dirigible in the Arctic; and in the 1979 film, he is a space shuttle pilot who is frozen in the head of a comet.

The Gene Roddenberry tv pilot Genesis II (1973) and sequels Planet Earth (1974) and Strange New World (1975) offer a variant on Buck Rogers featuring a 20th Century man Dylan Hunt who is frozen as part of a NASA experiment and woken in a post-holocaust future where he must work with a scientific enclave to reunite the disparate societies.

The aforementioned Planet of the Apes, the Japanese copycat Time of the Apes (1987) and other works like Gandahar/Light Years (1988), Blue Remains (2000), the tv series Cleopatra 2525 (2000-1), Underworld: Awakening (2012) and Oblivion (2013) feature people waking in changed or devastated futures. The ultimate version of this was the tv series Red Dwarf (1988- ) where Craig Charles is woken aboard a spaceship to find he is the last human being left in the universe. The Star Trek: Voyager episodes The Thaw (1996) and Dragon’s Teeth (1999) feature the Voyager crew encountering alien civilisations that have retreated into cryogenic suspension to avoid disasters that have struck their worlds.

Sylvester Stallone unfrozen in the future in Demolition Man (1993)
Sylvester Stallone unfrozen in the future in Demolition Man (1993)

On screen the Sleeper Awakes story has often been a natural for comedy and satiric future scenarios. There was the Woody Allen film Sleeper (1973) where Allen plays a contemporary nebbish who is woken in the future; the Polish Sex Mission (1984) with two men are unfrozen in a future ruled by women where men no longer exist; Demolition Man (1993) with Sylvester Stallone as a present-day cop woken in a future overrun by Political Correctness; Idiocracy (2006) where an average man from the present wakes to find he is now the most intelligent man in the world; and the tv series Futurama (1999-2013), which spoofs the Buck Rogers-type story with an ordinary everyday schlep awakened to an equally everyday life in the future.

There are only a handful of variants that create more substantial stories are Crypt (1977), an episode of tv’s Logan’s Run featuring a shelter of six cryogenically sleepers left to rebuild the world who are awoken before the discovery that one among their number is a murderer. A similar premise appears in the film Cryo (2022) where a group of people wake up with amnesia not knowing what is happening outside and as things begin to happen inside the shelter.

Two of the best films treatments were Air (2015) where two technicians tending a frozen populace are woken only to find one of their cryogenic chambers is broken and one of them must choose to die when their limited air supply runs out, and Oxygen (2021) where Melanie Laurent wakes up trapped inside a cryogenic capsule with a limited supply of air before undergoing a series of revelations about who she is and why she is there.

Also of note was Frozen Alive (1964) in which a cryogenic scientist awakes after testing the process on himself to be embroiled in a mystery about the murder of his wife. Realive (2016) is a film about the first man to be brought back to life from cryogenic suspension and his adjustment after a hundred years. In the Robert Heinlein adaptation The Door Into Summer (2021), a man goes into hibernation to avoid an unhappy present only to emerge and take advantage of time travel technology to go back and change the past.

Also of interest are two works about cryogenic sleepers that take part of stories where the protagonist cannot be certain what is real. The Spanish Open Your Eyes (1997) and its English-language remake Vanilla Sky (2001) have protagonists suffering baffling reality disjunctions before the revelation they are in faulty Virtual Reality simulations while cryogenically preserved. Final (2001) has Denis Leary as a patient in a hospital where a psychiatrist tries to argue against his persistent belief that he has been cryogenically awoken in the future.


Sleepers Awake in the Present

The majority of Sleeper Awakes stories have people from the past awakened in the present. The very first cryogenic film of all was The Man from Beyond (1922) starring Harry Houdini as a man who awakens after being frozen for a hundred years in the Arctic ice.

The Amazing Captain Nemo (1978), Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery (1997) and Matthew Blackheart (2002) feature heroes of yesteryear awoken in the present to continue their adventures. Sherlock Holmes has been awakened in the present in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1987) and Sherlock Holmes Returns (1993) and in the future in the animated tv series Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century (1999-2001).

The most famous of these unfrozen heroes is Marvel’s Captain America, a physically enhanced superhero from the 1940s revived in the present after being frozen in ice. His origin story is told in Captain America (1990), Ultimate Avengers (2006) and Captain America: The First Avenger (2011).

The tv series Adam Adamant Lives (1966-7) features a Victorian adventurer thawed out for a series of adventures in the present-day. Space Cop (2016) is a comedy featuring a time-traveling officer from the future and one from the 1960s thawed out from cryogenic suspension paired together as present-day partners.

In most of these cases, the cryogenic process is merely an opportunity for the hero to continue on their adventures. The culture clash the awoken sleeper would face is dealt with more substantially in Late for Dinner (1991) and Forever Young (1992), which have characters from respectively the 1960s and 1940s waking up in a changed present. An American Pickle (2020) is a comedy in which Jewish immigrant Seth Rogen is preserved in a vat of pickles in 1919 and awoken in the present-day world. Aurora (2010-1) was a telenovela in which a woman from 1990 is woken up in the present where her love has remarried and daughter is now grown, amid assorted dramatic complications.

A decided oddity was The X Files episode Roland (1994) features the frozen head of a dead scientist kept in suspended animation mentally controlling his autistic twin brother to complete his research and kill. In the two-part The Six Million Dollar Man episode The Return of the Bionic Woman (1975), cryogenics is cited as the means whereby the popular character of Jamie Sommers (Lindsay Wagner) is allowed to be brought back after previously being thought killed.


Criminals on Ice

Some stories posit the idea of keeping criminals on ice as a form of punishment – although this is an idea that it seems hard to believe a society would accept ie. the idea of criminals waking in 25 years still in the height of their youth when their victims are aged. Nevertheless it continues to be seen as a popular method of punishment in films such as Project: Shadowchaser (1992), Demolition Man, Immortal (ad vitam) (2004), Transmorphers (2007), Lockout (2012), the tv series Dark Matter and Snowpiercer (2020-3) and Hypersleep (2022).

A variant on this is one where criminals who have been placed in suspension are unwittingly woken in the future to wreak mayhem again. The classic version of this was the Star Trek episode Space Seed (1966) where the genetic superman Khan Noonian Singh is awoken aboard The Enterprise. The theme has also appeared in the Space: 1999 episodes The Exiles (1976) and The Mark of Archanon (1976), the Blake’s 7 episode Time Squad (1978) and the film Jason X (2001), which awakens slasher icon Jason Voorhees in the future.

Plans are made to revive a frozen Adolf Hitler in The Eagle’s Nest (1976) episode of The New Avengers and the spy film The Order of the Black Eagle (1987). Cryogenically frozen Nazis appear in The Frozen Dead (1966), Nick Fury, Agent of Shield (1998), Yoga Hosers (2016) and the finale of the tv series Psychoville (2009-11), while cryogenically frozen Soviet agents appear in The New Avengers two-part episode K is for Kill (1977) and the film Ice Soldiers (2013). The Doctor Who episode The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967) features the uncovering of a crypt of frozen Cybermen on an alien planet, while the episode The Ice Warriors (1967) has the unthawing of Martian Ice Warriors that have remained frozen in a glacier since the last Ice Age.

In The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Han Solo is placed on ice simply as a handy means to transport him to collect a bounty on his head. In the realm of the completely ridiculous, Hologram Man (1995) features criminals stored in stasis as holograms.

Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) with a carbon frozen Han Solo in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) with a carbon frozen Han Solo in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

The Batman mythos features the novelty of a super-villain Mr Freeze whose motif is freezing things – he has sub-zero temperature and is obsessed with finding a means of returning his frozen wife to life. Portrayals of Mr Freeze can be found in Batman & Robin (1997), Batman and Mr Freeze: SubZero (1997) and in tv’s Batman (1992-4) and Gotham (2014-8).

Baron Frankenstein is engaged in cryogenic experiments in Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) and revives his monster after it is frozen in a glacier in The Evil of Frankenstein (1964). The Cold episode of the H.P. Lovecraft anthology Necronomicon (1993) features a scientist who has discovered a process of slowing aging by freezing his body. In The Man with Nine Lives (1940), Boris Karloff is a mad scientist who has frozen himself alive.

The Twilight Zone episode The Rip Van Winkle Caper (1961) concerns criminals escaped with a stash of gold who place themselves into suspended animation only to wake in a future where their gold is useless.


Suspended Animation in Fantasy

Many stories replace the cryogenic process with the individual simply falling into a glacier, a spell being cast or some equivalent. There are a number of magical processes commonly used such as the story of Rip Van Winkle (which has yet to be filmed) about a man who simply falls asleep for twenty years or Snow White being preserved in a lifelike state after eating the poisoned apple.

The most famous of these is the fairytale Sleeping Beauty where Beauty pricking her finger on a spinning wheel enacts a magic spell that puts an entire kingdom to sleep as in Sleeping Beauty (1959), Sleeping Beauty (1988) and Sleeping Beauty (2014).

Other magical forms of suspended animation occur in The Iceman Cometh (1989) and The Last Airbender (2010). Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023) features the titular kingdom that has been imprisoned frozen in ice for the king’s dealings in black magic.


Prehistoric Revivals

Also popular are films dealing with dinosaurs and cavemen thawed out in the present day after being frozen in ice. The very first caveman was unthawed by Bela Lugosi in the mad scientist cheapie Return of the Ape Man (1943). The theme was popularised by The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) with a dinosaur frozen in Arctic ice being revived by atomic tests and going on to rampage again.

The same idea of dinosaurs and other prehistoric monsters being unfrozen in the present appears in other films of the era such as The Deadly Mantis (1957), Dinosaurus! (1960) and Reptilicus (1961).

The unfrozen caveman appeared in Dinosaurus! and the serious Iceman (1984) and was played for comedy in the inane film Encino Man (1992) and the animated tv series Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels (1977-80) where one such unfrozen caveman joined an all-girl investigatory team.

The Thaw (2009) deals with an unfrozen mammoth that unleashes a deadly horde of prehistoric flesh-eating insects. These are covered in more detail under the theme Prehistoric Revivals.


Recommendations

A full list of titles can be found here Cryogenics and Suspended Animation Archives