Editorials
00’s Retrospect: A Wave Goodbye, A Look at 2009
Y2K, 9/11, war and a a horrid recession, a major escape we had this decade was in the form of film, notorious for thriving during National crisis. Leading up to New Year’s Eve where we’ll ring in 2010, Bloody Disgusting will be looking back at the entire decade year by year through the eyes of various staff writers.. Inside you’ll find David Harley’s personal look back at the year 2009, the last of tis epic retrospect. Please share your memories for each year below, there are so many stories to be told!
’00 | ’01 | ’02 | ’03 | ’04 | ’05 | ’06 | ’07 | ’08 | ’09
More Retrospects:
-Top 20 Films of the Decade: 21-16 | 15-11 | 10-6 | 5-1
-Dead on Arrival: Ten Horror Duds of the Last Decade
2009
Speaking of Platinum Dunes, early in January, we posted a casting call for their remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, with Jackie Earle Hayley as Freddy Kruger. Not even a month later, casting rumors began gestating online with Hayley in the lead role. Two months later and we had our new Kruger cast. Coincidence? Yes. But very cool none the less. Then, in February, Jason hit the big screen and did incredible opening weekend business, proving that some franchises have staying power. Although it had a big drop-off in attendance after its opening, it did enough business to prompt talks of a sequel almost immediately and a date has even been set for it. Whether or not they actual make a Friday the 13th in winter is still up in the air.
In March, we got our first good remake in quite some time with The Last House On The Left. While it could have easily treaded torture-porn territory with its premise, which Craven revisited in the 70s (Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring is still my favorite take on the story), director Dennis Illiadis made a taut and tense filled horror flick. Also in March, we got A Haunting in Connecticut and Knowing, both of which had an interesting premise but failed to deliver. And, if anything, Knowing could’ve been a much better film had Nicolas Cage not been in it and director Alex Proyas not had regurgitated his previous films so much. I took my second annual trek out to Austin, TX for SXSW, where I caught an early screening of Drag Me To Hell and the Australian thriller The Horseman, both of which made my Top 10 list for 2009.
April was a month of big DVD premieres, as Rob Hall’s much anticipated Laid To Rest and Martyrs were released in the last half of the month. Both films feature gore o’ plenty and seem to have divided audiences down the middle. In fact, until Drag Me To Hell was released in late May, all was practically quiet on the horror front. With Drag, critics and fans seem to go apeshit over it, as I predicted they would when I saw it at SXSW, but its summer release seemed to only further confirm everyone’s suspicion that horror just doesn’t bode well in blockbuster season, especially when opening against a Pixar film. The rest of the summer was comprised of forgettable DTV releases – save for [REC], which was finally released stateside – until Orphan was released in July to moderate box office success. The most welcome surprises of the summer were Duncan Jones’ Moon, which isn’t a horror film but was covered on the site because we loved it and it’s destined for Oscar gold, and District 9, which told a really compelling story with a gory sci-fi setting. Here’s hoping Neill Blomkamp and his team eventually get to visit the Halo universe – I can dream, can’t I? Oh, how I can forget Platinum Dunes’ second original horror film The Horsemen, which was snuck out quietly into a handful of theatres in the beginning of the year and was released on DVD during the summer. Although not a God awful film, it certainly doesn’t fit into their filmography and did very little to rise above mediocrity.
Once late August rolled around, we had the double-feature weekend of The Final Destination and Halloween II. The former featured 3-D effects and a formula that started to get stale the last time around, while the latter was so batshit insane and boring at the same time that nobody really knew what to make of it. It ended up being rereleased for Halloween but seemed to disappear for the second time almost as quickly as it did the first time around.
Jennifer’s Body, written by Oscar winner Diablo Cody, debuted in mid-September and started the Juno backlash all over again. While some seemed to enjoy its sense of humor and attractive starlets, in the end it just seemed to further divide everyone on whether or not Cody is a good writer or not. And, on the TV front, Dexter and True Blood continue to rake in big ratings and captivate their audiences.
In late September, Tex and I made our way to Halloween Horror Nights in Orlando and were treated to some great movie themed houses (even one for The Wolfman, which hasn’t even come out yet). I give Universal big props for their unofficial C.H.U.D. house, even though it wasn’t great; I just like the idea of them using non-mainstream films as inspiration. If only Universal would make the houses a tad brighter, the experience would’ve been a lot better but, in the end, it stayed on par with the previous year in terms of scares and ingenuity. We also got to go back later in the month for “Boo Camp”, which meant me and Tex were given the chance to dress up as characters from Planet Terror and roam the streets scaring the bejeezus out of people.
Richard Kelly released his third feature, The Box, which left many people scratching their heads. Based on a Richard Matheson short story, the film delves into familiar Kelly territory in regards to both themes and off-the-wall science fiction. The Fourth Kind is released the same day and tries to trick audiences with “real documentary footage”, which is actually fake. Audiences see through it almost instantly and it disappears soon after. New Moon debuts at the end of November to record breaking numbers and usurps The Dark Knight as having the biggest opening day ever.
Much like 2008, the big winners of the year were those films who were hidden by studios and indie films. Carriers was snuck out in early September and while it didn’t do big business, its greatest fault was that its concept wasn’t very marketable, not that it was a terrible movie. Paranormal Activity, which was sitting on a shelf because it was supposed to be remade, was released with a “Demand It” campaign, which had fans demanding to see the film in their area. Eventually, it went wide and kept Saw VI out of the number one spot on its opening weekend, marking a first for the series. Trick `r Treat finally hit DVD after a lengthy road show that started in the summer. The result: many stores couldn’t keep it in stock, and those who could get a copy on release day couldn’t stop gushing about it. And finally, The Road, a slow-burn Cormac McCarthy adaptation (No Country For Old Men) about a father and son living in a post-apocalyptic world, hit theatres in late November to much acclaim. On the indie front, House of the Devil and Antichrist have extremely limited theatrical releases, backed by a VOD campaign, and get people talking – more so with the latter, which had a very strange reception at Cannes earlier in the year and inspired a lot of really bizarre takes on the film and its meaning.
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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