Editorials
2011 BLACK FRIDAY CHOPPING LIST: BOOKS & COMICS
2011 was a great year for Books & Comics in a Bloody-Disgusting way. From a surprisingly tender look at the inner emotional workings of a zombie to the return of Clive Barker to his native stomping grounds – there’s no shortage of variety when it comes to the horrific printed page. And a bonus, most of these puppies are pretty cheap and make excellent stocking stuffers to compliment that $300 dollar Predator figure you know you’re buying for your creepy uncle. On the not so cheap side of the prose spectrum are those coffee table books – but they’re well worth it since you’ll probably look at them almost every day until the next Chopping List rolls around.
List Price: $24.00
This novel is currently being adapted for the big screen by writer/director Jonathan Levine (50/50, The Wackness) and I picked it up out of curiosity related to that project. It doesn’t skimp on gore and zombie apocalypse stuff, but it has a surprising take on the zombie condition and a good amount of heart. In the coming year you’re going to be hearing this compared a lot to Twilight – but it’s not like that at all. I can’t stand Twilight. Warm Bodies is a genuinely well written zombie romance story that doesn’t sell itself short with empty Seth Graeme Smith hackwork.
List Price: $24.99 (each)
Stephen King’s gunslinger Roland Deschain takes on new life in this critically acclaimed series of graphic novels penciled by Luke Ross. At this point I’ve lost count of exactly how many Dark Tower books (comic or prose) but it’s such a compelling combination of character and world that fans are still eating it up almost 30 years after the publication of King’s first foray into his twisted version of the wild west.
List Price: $19.95
If you’ve got a die-hard fan of the ‘Walking Dead” TV Show in your life (and the ratings suggest that you do) then you couldn’t go wrong starting at the beginning and picking this puppy up for him/her. It details both the creation of the comic and the show with interviews, on set photography and interview with Robert Kirkman and Frank Darabont.
List Price: $100.00
And if you’ve got a “Walking Dead” fan in your life that’s also a die-hard comics reader then this is what you may wanna aim for. This most recent volume compiles 24 issues of Robert Kirkman’s grisly and engaging comic inside some rather handsome packaging.
List Price: $24.99
The fourth installment in Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez’s series of graphic novels hasn’t let their die-hard fans down one bit. Hill’s pedigree is impressive (he’s Stephen King’s son) and he’s followed his famous dad rather successfully into the world of graphic novels. Fans of Hill’s earlier novels (and obviously the earlier installments of “Locke & Key”) will no doubt get a kick out of unwrapping this one.
List Price: $40.00
For my money, John Landis’ American Werewolf In London features the single best movie monster design of the past 30 years. I really don’t feel like people had gotten werewolves right before that film and oddly they don’t seem to have gotten them right after it either. So who better to compile a book of some of Hollywood’s best creatures from the past 100 years? And in what other book can you find John Landis interviewing Sam Raimi and John Carpenter? None. A perfect addition to the horror fan’s coffee table.
List Price: $50.00
I know this book is a a few years old, but it can’t be stressed enough what a great buy this thing is. If John Landis’ book is one of the great horror coffee table books of the year, then Peter Bracke’s “Crystal Lake Memories” is a great horror coffee table book for the ages! This thing features hundreds of interviews, beautiful pictures, concept art and a frank look at the all of the glories and flaws of every F13 movie from the original up through Freddy Vs. Jason. It truly is exhaustive, I’ve had mine for four years and still pull it off the shelf regularly.
List Price: $24.95
If you’re anything like me, The Return Of The Living Dead is one of your favorite zombie movies. I remember pulling away from my parents at the theater when I was a kid and sneaking in to see about 5 seconds of this thing. It just so happened that the onl thing I saw was the zombie munching on some guy’s head saying. “More Brains”! I was fully freaked and ran back out of the theater. Years later I finally saw the film on cable, the first zombie movie I saw in its entirety and I was amazed by the mix of humor and horror. I had never seen anything like it. I never knew it was destined to be the classic it now is though and this companion book has over 300 interviews and covers all of the films in the series. A must have for zombie and horror comedy fans.
List Price: $45.00
At 633 pages the newest edition of Kim Newman’s “Nightmare Movies” offers some of the most thorough analysis of the horror genre that you’re bound to find. If you know a critical thinker who spends a lot of time thinking about the ‘how’, ‘why’ and ‘when’ of horror history, you can do a lot worse than picking this up for them. A complete historical and sociological study of the horror genre.
List Price: $14.95
Not a lot of analytical content at all in this one, rather just a fun stocking stuffer for just about anyone who likes zombies or retro kitsch. Even if your mom hates Dawn Of The Dead she probably has fond memories of the atomic era, so why not zombify them?
List Price: $9.99
Clive Barker returns to his most famous creation. Help a fan wash the taste of those sequels (including the horrible Hellraiser: Revelations) out of their mouths by picking this up for them for the holidays. This is only the 3rd time Barker has visited this world and the (here’s hoping) ongoing graphic novel is in canon and continuity with his original film. A must have for anyone who needs their faith in Pinhead restored.
List Price: $12.99
The adventures of Tony Chu continue in Volume 4 of this great little series about the future’s greatest semi-psychic FDA agent. A great stocking stuffer for someone already into the series, though it’s a fun enough book that if you know someone who isn’t already into it buying them the entire (affordable) series might not be such a bad idea.
List Price: $25.95
An examination of how directors like Wes Craven, John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper and Brian DePalma infiltrated Hollywood from the inside out and redefined horror into what the genre represented in the 1970’s and onward. Author Jason Zinoman even delves into the production of the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the interesting financing ties that made it possible. Another strong analytical read for the brainier types on your holiday list.
List Price: $39.99 (each)
The 4th and 5th installments of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s epic Preacher saga. Perfect for family members who don’t take the holidays so religiously and for fans of harsh language, characters environments, new west flavor and vampires. The 5th one doesn’t come out until November 29th, so there’s very little danger of your intended recipient already owning it.
List Price: $34.95
If you know anyone who’s a fan of horror classics, especially the old Hammer Films, then this is the treat for them this season. Hammer Films historian Marcus Hearn has compiled and amazingly detailed compendium of ephemera from the studio’s heyday. Featuring production designs, correspondence between the studio and its stars, unused posters, pre-production artwork etc… this book truly is a blast from the past.
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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