Something about the cold, the snow and the frost, ice, sparks my imagination. One of my favourite scenes in The Thing is the bit where they discover the spacecraft buried in the ice, possibly for thousands of years.
The sounds of it too - I can hear cars crunching across the snow outside right now. The scene where Warren Oates is stabbing away at the ice block in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia's got that great texture to it. That dry crunch, also just the way the ice looks when it's carved into a block.