Editorials
[Butcher Block] The Supermarket Massacre of ‘Intruder’
Butcher Block is a weekly series celebrating horror’s most extreme films and the minds behind them. Dedicated to graphic gore and splatter, each week will explore the dark, the disturbed, and the depraved in horror, and the blood and guts involved. For the films that use special effects of gore as an art form, and the fans that revel in the carnage, this series is for you.
Intruder is what happens when you take the tongue in cheek humor of director/writer Scott Spiegel, fresh off writing Evil Dead II, and the unrestrained special makeup effects of young gurus in the making Robert Kurtzman, Greg Nicotero, and Howard Berger. A gory bloodbath of a slasher set in grocery store during the overnight shift with cheesy puns and humor befitting of The Three Stooges. In other words, it’s a whole hell of a lot of fun. It took a long while for the film to catch on, though, due to it getting caught up in the collapse of Empire Pictures and the MPAA on the warpath of restricting the slasher craze. When Intruder finally was released, it was highly edited to the point where the glorious kills were cut out, making it seem as if the victims simply disappeared. Luckily, those scenes were restored and Intruder finally caught on among fans like it deserved from the start.
The plot is somewhat generic and straightforward, and most of the marketing material gives away the killer. Yet the supermarket setting makes for some surprising and fun kills. Who knew there were so many ways to die in a grocery store? Though Intruder follows a basic slasher formula, it doesn’t bother much with conventional character archetypes so there are some characters that seems like they’d survive a lot farther into the run time than they do. Spiegel’s screenplay also addresses what would play out if the cops showed up right after the final girl won her final battle with the killer in a more reality based setting.
The true star here, though, is the special effects. Kurtzman, Nicotero, and Berger has just launched their own studio, K.N.B. EFX Group, and were looking getting their name out there and transition into a more supervisorial role. When most film productions wanted effects studios with more experience under their belt, it made things difficult for the trio in establishing their newly launched company, perhaps further complicated by being only in their early 20s. So, giving them the reigns for special effects here gave them the needed experience to further establish their studio and gave the production a trio of extremely talented special effects and make-up artists for a steal; Kurtzman, Nicotero, and Berger were each paid $700 each for labor and materials to do Intruder. To be fair, the budget was miniscule and the principal photography lasted only a couple weeks, but considering what the trio delivered it is jaw-dropping. Even more impressive is that they pulled out this caliber of work during nights, as they were working on effects for DeepStar Six during the day.
In their hands, and in Spiegel’s script, Walnut Lake Market became the most hazardous of working conditions. The killer used the grocery store to his fullest advantage, delivering kills by way of skewers through the eye, meat cleavers, meat hooks to skulls, trash compactors, and even the carbonation of a large stock of beer to unleash maximum blood spray.
All are violent and messy, but the crowning glory (even in the eyes of the make-up effects team) is the gnarly death by bandsaw. The camera gets extremely close and personal with the excruciating, slow slicing of the victim’s head. It looks so real that even one of the members of the make-up team fled in tears after watching.
Between Spiegel’s sense of humor, his gleeful joy on display at his first feature directing gig, and the stunning work by Kurtzman, Nictotero, and Berger, Intruder is far more fun than it had any right to be. Cameos by Spiegel’s friends and neighbors Sam Raimi, Ted Raimi, and Bruce Campbell played a role in drawing in fans of the Evil Dead series, but it’s the special effects team that stole the show.
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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