Editorials
Best & Worst of 2009: Ryan Daley Picks His Top 10!
As I’m primarily a DVD critic for Bloody-Disgusting, my year-end Top 10 list traditionally cites only DVD horror releases for a given year, which automatically excludes some of the movies I’ve seen at festivals or through pre-release screeners. Whereas I’m generally jealous of my fellow B-D critics for their all-encompassing year-end lists, I have to admit that 2009 was a fantastic year for horror DVDs, and this list was a pure pleasure to put together. Once again, just so I don’t catch any flak down in the comments, this is a list of the BEST HORROR DVDS OF 2009. Hence, no Zombieland.
David Harley (Best/Worst) | Ryan Daley (Best/Worst)
RYAN DALEY’S TOP 10 OF 2009
Some might say this horror anthology series, buried in the compost heap of NBC’s summer schedule, has been unjustly forgotten. But you can’t forget something if you never knew it existed in the first place. Overproduced and mysteriously under-promoted, Fear Itself is actually a pretty good show. Although none of the episodes can equal the best of Masters of Horror, the first season is solid across the board, each episode a strangely comforting 40 minutes of basic, well-produced horror.
I first saw The Killing Room at the Sundance Film Festival. To my pleasant surprise, Shea Whigham, one of the stars, took the theater seat directly in front of my wife. Remember that scene were Whigham gets his arm crunched in the door slot? The audience jumped out of their seats. And so did Whigham. His friends whispered props for really selling the arm crunch, and Whigham sunk low in his seat, looking both pleased and embarrassed to have pulled of the scare. It’s one of several good moments in a tense, captivating film. With its claustrophobic setting and clever B-movie premise, The Killing Room plays even better on DVD.
Buried for years in the rubble of horror fan apocrypha, Warner Bros. finally dumped its highly-anticipated Halloween anthology onto DVD the first week of October. Like most horror fans, I spent the next 4 weeks trying to spread the word: You feeling a Halloween movie? Well check this one out. Nimbly edited, keenly executed, and oozing loads of Halloween spirit, Trick r’ Treat is an All Hallows’ Eve tradition in the making.
Sam Raimi’s roller-coaster ride of a horror flick serves as proof-positive the director hasn’t lost a step since wrapping Army of Darkness. Steeped in the same youthful exuberance of his pre-millennial horror films, Drag Me To Hell has energy to spare: as far as pacing is concerned, the movie cooks. One of those horror flicks that oozes fun like a summer carnival.
Splinter features the best movie monster I’ve seen this year. It’s bone-snapping, joint-contorting, black-splinter-sprouting parasite is something out of a horrible, horrible nightmare. Stranded at a rural gas station, the characters are stuck in a rut of paranoia and confusion that’s all too palpable. It’s one of those movies that makes your palms sweat.
Vampires and sexual abstinence? Worst combo ever, Twi-hards. Horny adults with a jones for fast-pumpin’ vampire sex, hard-core neck suckin’, and even the occasional blood “snowball”, know where to go to get their vampire fix. True Blood, bitches! It took a few episodes for the series to find the right tone, but once it got a head of steam, it was impossible to stop watching. And Season 2 (available on DVD in 2010) is even better.
One of the more controversial horror releases of 2009, Deadgirl is certainly a polarizing movie. It poses a question frequently bandied about in the B-D forums: if you discovered a chained up female zombie who happened to be pretty hot, would you have sex with it? Okay, perhaps…but what about sloppy seconds? That’s the quandary faced by a couple of high school youths in this highly accomplished indie effort, one of those films that sticks with you for days after you watch it.
Better than Quarantine, that’s for goddamn sure.
Magnolia may have jacked up the subtitles on the DVD release, but don’t let that stop you from seeing one of the most emotionally resonant vampire movies of all time. Thought-provoking, mesmerizing, and overwhelmingly beautiful, this is an excellent movie based on an excellent novel by Swedish author John Lindvist. An unforgettable experience.
One of the smartest horror movies to come along since Silence of the Lambs. Unfortunately, Martyrs‘ overwhelming violence deterred all but the most adventurous of movie-lovers, which is too bad, since French director Pascale Laugier has crafted a philosophical, deep-thinking horror movie that’s practically begging to be discussed in intellectual circles. Yes, it can be hard to watch, but sometimes the reward of personal revelation is worth the hefty price of fleeting pain.
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
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