Editorials
‘Boys in the Trees’: Celebrating Halloween with Bittersweet Magic
‘Tis the Night…
The Night of the graves’ delight…
Nicholas Verso’s 2016 Boys in the Trees (available on Netflix) is a beautiful film and a really unique addition to your Halloween viewing. It captures the essence of the season and uses it in an entirely new way to tell its story. Rather than a full-on frightfest or creature feature, it harnesses that energy and uses it to tell a bittersweet coming of age tale about how friendships can bend, break, and be reforged in the throes of adolescence.
Set in an Australian suburb in the late 1990s, the film opens on the afternoon of Halloween. In Australia, this means that school is just getting out for the summer, and after exams have passed, our protagonist, Corey (Toby Wallace), will be entering into adulthood with no real idea of what he wants to do with himself. He has dreams of going to New York to study photography. His father wants him to stay close and study something more practical, and his gang of trouble-making, miscreant friends want him to join them in simply continue living as if their teen years will last forever.
As Corey and his friends hang out at the local skate park, their leader, Jango (Justin Holborow) spies classmate, Jonah (Gulliver McGrath) among the small crowd. Jonah is a solitary boy. Small and quiet, he makes an easy target for Jango and his pack, and they do not hesitate to pounce. Jango approaches Jonah and orders him out of the park, pushing him down onto the concrete. Corey snaps a photo of Jonah in that moment, as the bullied boy looks up with shame and defeat in his eyes. Corey has little interest in Jango’s cruel torments, but he wants more than anything to run with the crowd. So he says nothing, offers no aid to Jonah, and follows the group out of the park and on to their evening of Halloween pranks.
As Corey tires of his friends’ antics, he wanders back to the skate park where he once again encounters Jonah. The smaller boy has fallen off of his board and cracked his head on the concrete. Corey rushes to his side, and though Jonah appears okay, he convinces Corey to walk him home.
“You owe me, old pal.” he says, as the two walk off together. You see, Jonah and Corey are not vaguely familiar faces that pass each other in the hallway. The two have a history. A childhood friendship that spanned all of reality and into the world of make-believe. As the two walk, they begin to once again embrace that world. The remember songs they once sang, stories they held dear, and a game of imagination that they would inhabit as children, but has long since been forgotten as adulthood has crept ever closer.
Over the course of Halloween night, as the pair wanders around town, reminiscing, reconnecting and trying to overcome the gap that has come between them over the years, Verso uses his story to illustrate the ways in which the simple act of growing up can pull us apart. We all have people who were our best friends in childhood, but whose names we can barely remember now. Life takes us in different directions, but what this film points out, is that it happens earlier than we ever expect it will. Childhood fantasies and bonds become nothing more than distant memories in the blink of an eye, and the worlds that we create together become simply fairytales.
Halloween is a magical night. It is an evening that carries its own sense of mystery and wonder and a magic that cannot be found on any other day of the year. This film harnesses that magic and uses it to tap into childhood fantasies. So even though the film isn’t scary, it does have that air about it. That mysterious nature that the walls between the world of reality and everything beyond have been thinned for just a few hours. On that night, our dreams, fantasies and memories are all more readily accessible, along with our fears. Boys in the Trees is a film that reminds us of that magic and uses it to tell a bittersweet tale of friendship and growing up.
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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