Editorials
“Orange is the New Black” Goes Full Slasher
Orange is the New Black, the hit Netflix prison dramedy, just launched its fifth season last week. All thirteen episodes take place over the span of three days in the midst of a riot at the Litchfield Penitentiary. It’s a ballsy choice to allow a full season to play out over such a condensed timeline, but in this writer’s opinion, the gamble mostly pays off. The show has always traversed the peaks and valleys of quality from season to season, and sometimes the struggle can be felt within a single episode. That inconsistency is the price of the show’s fluid tone. One moment may have you on the brink of tears while the next will have you literally crying from laughter.
Spoilers for Season 5 Below.
Creator, Jenji Kohan, and co. have built a narrative as diverse as the characters that inhabit it. One particular hour of this newest season is what we’re here to discuss today. Episode 9, entitled “The Tightening”, goes full blown Halloween as a deranged corrections officer infiltrates the facility during the prisoner led takeover to seek revenge on a certain Russian cook with a mama-bear complex, Red (Kate Mulgrew). The officer in question is the “big bad” from season 4, Piscatella (Brad William Henke) who has been lured back into the prison by Red and her partner in crime this season, Blanca (Laura Gomez). While coming to the end of an accidental amphetamine binge (they thought they were taking energy vitamins), the two have been posing as another guard held hostage inside by sending texts from his phone to Piscatella.
The episode wastes no time in setting the stage for the horrors to come. We open to various lurking POV shots of the women as they walk through the dimly lit corridors of the penitentiary. Someone is watching and waiting. The music hits the kind of ominous bass notes you only find in a stalk-n-slash. As Natasha Lyonne’s Nichols walks down the hall hearing someone calling to her from a darkened broom closet, we know this won’t end well for her. She’s abruptly snatched by someone unseen and dragged in behind the slamming door. Other inmates pass by without noticing a thing.
So it has begun, Piscatella sets about snatching each and every one of the people closest to Red in scenes that put a delightful spin on many of the tropes we’ve come to expect from the horror genre. A couple sharing an intimate moment in a shower are quickly snatched up. Another couple is interrupted as one is dragged away, leaving the other confused and afraid. She calls out, “Hello? This isn’t funny!” It’s never funny, is it?
Other homages cover the likes of When A Stranger Calls, as Black Cindy (Adrienne C. Moore) answers an unnerving prank call from the resident meth-heads, Leanne and Angie (Emma Myles and Julie Lake). They ask Cindy, “Have you checked the children?” only for her to respond, “Nope. Pause. I know how that shit goes. The children are already dead, and I’m next. Cause’ that how it goes for black folk in the movies.” Only moments later she turns a corner to find the ghostly image of two girls standing still, side by side, at the end of the hall a’la The Shining. Of course, after she turns tail the opposite direction with a resounding, “Oh, hell no!” we learn it was only the duo known as Flaritza (Jackie Cruz and Diane Guerrero) practicing singing by the flaccid light of their cell phone.
Beyond the obvious nods throughout “The Tightening”, one genre convention the writers nail perfectly is the cliche of the “hysterical woman”. So often in horror films, the female lead is reduced to a blubbering mess as she becomes convinced of the peril surrounding herself and those she loves. Naturally, no one she trusts seems to believe her. They chalk it up to lack of sleep, depression, general hysteria. More often than not, the damsel is one hundred percent correct in her assertion of the danger approaching, and those who doubted her realize it only when it’s become too late. Red is our woman in peril here. She intrinsically knows that Piscatella is after her and her friends, but no one will listen to her. It’s all explained away by her crashing withdrawals from the speed binge. It’s perfect cannon fodder for a show like Orange is the New Black, a strikingly feminist series, to poke fun at one of our genre’s most tired tropes.
At the end, the fun and games of the episode come to a head once we learn Piscatella’s endgame. Of course, he hasn’t been murdering the ensemble One by one. He’s gathered the women up, bound them, and plans to force them to watch as he demeans, humiliates, and tortures Red. The worst is saved for episode 10, and it’s a difficult scene to watch that stands at odds with the lighter tone of “The Tightening”. There’s that famous OITNB tonal ping pong again. Thankfully, before we dive headlong into the real nightmare of Piscatella the Boogeyman, we’re gifted one more horror-centric zinger. Red discovers the hideout where her friends are being held hostage, rips the duct tape from Nichols’s mouth and asks “Where is he?!” Nichols replies:
“He’s off playing Jason from Friday the 13th or Jason’s mom…technically. Spoiler alert!”
Have you guys been watching the show? Were there any genre nods that I missed?
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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