Seriously, it will.  This sucker is likely to kill you unless you have several years of horror watching experience, like yours truly.  Newbies, know this–this is going to be some of the strongest horror out there, and the interesting part is, it’s not going to depend on blood and torment to get there.

This is horror as it should be, ladies and gentlemen–and when a young couple attends a booze soaked, drug addled New Years Eve party, it’s going to go badly, BADLY, wrong for them.  Actually, it’s not the party that’ll go wrong so much as it is the drive home.  It will be the commute from hell, ladies and gentlemen, and it will do horrible things to your mind and your way of life.

First off, the cover alone will give you nightmares if you live in a state that’s prone to getting snow.  Gigantic snowplow chasing you, snow all around, young girl clearly wearing little more than a light jacket and street clothes, possibly dead cell phone in front of you–this is a Michigan nightmare if ever you’ve seen one.

But this is merely where the horror STARTS, not where it ends.  Because by the end of this movie, you’re going to watch a couple of young people do horrendous things to one another and be utterly convinced they’re merely trying to ensure their own survival.  This is positively unbelievable stuff.

And I might have been content to write this off as another, albeit fairly decent, horror flick until I got to the very end and watched in terrified fascination as Dead of Winter presented to me, in the purest of terms, the single saddest ending I’ve ever seen in a horror flick.  I got misty-eyed.  You have any idea how hard it is to get teary-eyed over the ending of a horror flick?  That takes some doing, and they did it.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands this achievement in horror one of its all too rare ten out of tens for being pure, unalloyed horror with no significant problems that I can spot.  If you want a scary night, just wait for a good snowfall, turn down the heat about five, ten degrees and slam this sucker in your DVD player.  It will be purely unbelievable.