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Remember when a Vice blogger stated that Happy Death Day 2U was the first horror film to deal with grief? If you hadn't already guffawed when that click-bait title first dropped, I hope you're rolling your eyes back as you're reading this, because it's a preposterous claim, one that Silent Night, Deadly Night, just a single example in a sea of titles that exemplify Horror's thematic underpinnings as a genre and an aesthetic, promptly axes. What first and foremost functions as a gnarly low-budget sleaze-fest also operates as a traumatic exploration of the memories that haunt and ruin our lives, perpetuating cycles of ideas within parameters of abuse and sexual dysfunction. Sure, this movie has a topless woman impaled by a set of deer-antlers, but it also has lingering, uncomfortable moments of children being exposed to the harsh realities of the world, and the surprising forms in which it inhabits. Shocking, vicious, and sad - a real horror-show.