Editorials
Which On-Screen Death Is Difficult For You to Watch?
A few weeks ago, I asked all of you what your favorite deaths in horror movies were. Now I’m curious to know which death(s) are the most difficult for you to watch. I touched upon Lizzy Caplan’s death in Cloverfield in that post, noting how it was so disturbing to me that it made it difficult for me to watch the movie again. Last weekend I got to catch Marjane Satrapi’s new film The Voices, starring Ryan Reynolds, Gemma Arterton and Anna Kendrick. I loved it, but there is a death in the movie that made me very uncomfortable and disturbed me in a way other deaths in horror films haven’t. If you’ve already seen the film, you probably know what I am talking about. Let’s discuss below!
***WARNING – MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE VOICES WILL BE DISCUSSED***
The Voices tells the story of Jerry Hickfang (Ryan Reynolds), a psychotic man who talks to his cat, Mr. Whiskers and his dog, Bosco, and they talk back. Of course, they aren’t really talking to Jerry. He has stopped taking his anti-psychotic medication and his subconscious thoughts are being reflected through his pets. Mr. Whiskers tells Jerry to kill people and has very funny, foul-mouthed one-liners. Bosco reflects Jerry’s good side. After he accidentally kills Fiona (Gemma Arterton), a girl he has a crush on in his office, things start getting out of control.
***Again, DEATH SPOILERS Below***
Marketed as a horror comedy (which is very difficult to do), The Voices becomes much darker than I was initially expecting about 2/3 of the way into its run time, when Jerry accidentally murders Lisa (Anna Kendrick), another girl in his office whom he went on a date (and had sex) with the night before. The entire scene is very uncomfortable and disturbing to watch. Lisa, still incredibly happy after a successful first date with Jerry, decides to go to his house and surprise him with mini-cakes. Eventually she makes it inside his “apartment” (it’s actually a dilapidated building that Jerry imagines as a beautiful apartment) and sees Fiona’s decaying head sitting on the coffee table. She (understandably) freaks out and hides out in Jerry’s bedroom. After trying to run out, Jerry grabs her and throws her on his bed, causing her to break her neck on his bed frame. The kicker is that she doesn’t die instantly. She lies on the the bed with tears streaming down the side of her face and keeps repeating “Jerry, I just want to go home” as he crawls in the bed and cuddles next to her. Her eyes slowly fill with blood as she stops breathing and dies.
I can handle a lot of carnage in horror films, but it’s not the carnage that makes it difficult for me to watch a character’s death (unless it involves pus). When a character is so sympathetic and so likable, it makes their death incredibly difficult for me to see (which makes the movie more horrifying, so I guess the movie did its job). The fact that Lisa was played by Anna Kendrick, an actress whom I admire a lot, certainly didn’t help matters. I was honestly kind of hoping that Kendrick’s character would turn out to be equally as insane as Reynolds’ so they could run off into the sunset together, but alas, she was doomed to become another head in his refrigerator.
So all of this being said, I just found Kendrick’s death to be incredibly emotional and difficult to watch. What made it so striking is that her death made me sad, which isn’t something I usually feel in horror films. There are a few other on-screen deaths that I find nearly as effective (the aforementioned Lizzy Caplan death in Cloverfield, Heather Matarazzo’s death in Hostel: Part II and Nora Arnezeder’s death in the Maniac remake immediately come to mind) if only because I felt such an intense emotional connection with Kendrick’s character.Do you agree with me? Or are there other deaths that are equally difficult for you to watch? It could be deaths that are too gory for you but I’m really interested in the deaths that connected with you on an emotional level. Let me know in the comments below!
The Voices is currently in limited theatrical release and available on select Video On Demand services.
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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