The Frozen Dead is a 1966 British science fiction horror film written, produced and directed by Herbert J. Leder and starring Dana Andrews, Anna Palk and Philip Gilbert.

Ted, unaware of the Nazi plot, believes that he is to help Norberg keep organs alive for medical use.

Norberg's niece, Jean arrives home unexpectedly from a university in America, bringing along her friend Elsa.

Norberg tells Ted that he plans to experiment on a monkey's head, keeping it alive, with a clear plastic dome over its cranium so that he can observe its brain function, then transfer what he learns to humans.

But then Norberg unexpectedly has the opportunity to use a human head, for Karl had drugged Elsa and taken her to the laboratory, not the train station.

After Ted agrees to tell no one of what he is about to see, Norberg trustingly shows him Elsa's head, alive, its skin a horrid blue colour and its brain covered by a clear plastic dome.

[18] Segments of The Frozen Dead were featured in the U.S. television programme 100 Years of Horror, in a 1996 episode titled 'Mad Doctors'.

The movie's theatrical trailer is included in two American compilation videos of science-fiction and horror movie trailers: Out of This World Super Shock Show, released by Something Weird Video in October 2007, and Grindhouse Universe, released by Ban 1 Productions in January 2008.

carried a notice allowing theatre operators to modify the advertisements for the movies by substituting 'thrill' for 'horror' if they so desired.

[21] BoxOffice's favourable review of the film called it part of the 'more realistic school of science-fiction', with 'low key suspense and life-like effects'.

[22] British critic John Hamilton's look at contemporary reviews notes that the Motion Picture Examiner was of the opinion that the film has 'Some moments of horror and some intrigue but the thin and far-fetched plot is drawn out to a length that makes it unwieldy', and The New York Times wrote of the double bill of The Frozen Dead and It!, 'As horror exercises, they are horrible bores'.

[3] American film critic Bob Herzberg, in The Third Reich on Screen, 1929-2015, quotes additional contemporary reviews which are in the same vein.

He writes that John Mahoney of The Hollywood Reporter called the film 'A murky and dank return to the caverns of the Mad Scientist' with 'sufficient gore' for 'the less discriminating multitudes'.

[23] Among modern-day critics, American academic film historians Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz point out "the recent trend of mashing up zombies with other literary or cinematic genres.

But "There is no immediately self-evident reason why so many texts combine Nazis with zombies, aside from the fact that the Third Reich remains a preferred source of evil in American cinema".

Boluk and Lenz make reference to Canadian critic Glenn Kay, who writes: 'Why so many zombie films return to this subject remains a mystery'.

"All in all," he writes, "The Frozen Dead continues the growing Nazi/sci-fi subgenre, artfully reducing Nazi atrocities, as well as their ambitions for world conquest, into comic-book schlock, with decapitated [sic] heads with special telepathic powers and detached arms which kill, though not necessarily for the Führer, but just for the hell of it".

[23] Hamilton finds that while the film 'starts off promisingly enough' with 'blood-curdling screams and the sight of a thug with a whip leading a party of stumbling wretches chained together', it 'quickly careens downwards and goes from quirky to utterly absurd'.

For example, he wonders 'what the top [Nazi] brass thought they could achieve with 1,500 storm troopers in the days of nuclear proliferation?'

He is, however, complimentary about Kathleen Breck, writing that 'Despite the obvious limitations of playing a head in a box, Breck manages to bring a great deal of sympathy to the role, simply by using her eyes and facial expressions - while [director of photography Willis] Boulton defuses the inherent foolishness of the concept by bathing the scene in an eerie blue glow.

and says, "Leder's pedestrian direction cannot remove the delirium of images such as the rack of arms ready for use and Breck's soulful boxed-in head".