Editorials
From ‘Hereditary’ to ‘Halloween’: Where Have All the Audio Commentary Tracks Gone?
One of the best Christmas gifts I received this year was an early Blu-ray copy of David Gordon Green’s Halloween from Universal (available January 15th), which I eagerly slid into my PlayStation 4 as soon as it arrived on my doorstep. What I found on the disc were a handful of short featurettes as well as some deleted/extended scenes; needless to say, not exactly a robust bonus features package befitting one of the biggest horror films in recent years. Worse yet, one big thing was entirely absent from that lackluster package: a commentary track.
The thought of watching Halloween (2018) with commentary and insights from David Gordon Green, Danny McBride, Jamie Lee Curtis, John Carpenter and/or Jason Blum is surely an exciting one to any fan of the film, but you won’t find a single track when the DVD/Blu-ray/4K Ultra HD discs are released later this month. And Halloween sure isn’t the only major horror release of 2018 that has made its way to home video without a commentary track, as it’s the continuation of a trend rather than the start of one. And man is it a serious bummer.
Like Halloween, other high profile 2018 genre films such as The Predator, A Quiet Place, Mandy, Annihilation, Upgrade, Venom, Suspiria and Fallen Kingdom were pressed to disc without commentary tracks, and you won’t find one on the physical release of Hereditary either; that said, the iTunes release of Hereditary does have an exclusive track.
The list goes on, and the obvious conclusion we can draw here is that commentary tracks are largely going extinct. Gone are the days when major releases had multiple commentaries to choose from, which tended to range from just plain fun to incredibly informative. And the real bummer is the insight that we’re losing by not having commentary tracks included with the films we love enough to purchase and add to our collections, as filmmaker/actor commentary tracks were often an absolute treasure trove of knowledge for fans and filmmakers.
Robust special features packages can be entire film courses for aspiring filmmakers in particular, as well as film fans and critics who want to dive deep into the movies they love and learn everything they can about the process that brought those images to the screen. Buying a physical release often wasn’t merely buying a movie, it was buying an education.
“Commentaries were a huge part of my film education,” BD writer Drew Dietsch noted when I tweeted about this very topic the other day. “Getting that kind of (often candid) insight into a film’s production and intentions made me learn what to look for when watching a movie. Not having commentaries for significant releases is a real loss.”
YouTube movie review channel Bloodbath and Beyond also chimed in on that Twitter discussion, “One of the driving reasons I buy physical media is for bonus features.”
Bonus features are indeed one of the main selling points for physical releases, and while labels like Scream Factory and Vinegar Syndrome understand this and go heavy on them, the major labels seem to be shifting away from bonus contents entirely; Upgrade, one of this year’s fan favorites, made its way onto Blu-ray without a single bonus feature in sight!
Mind you, I’m not (yet) suggesting that physical media is likely to go extinct any time soon, but the continued evolution of digital streaming does seem to be draining physical releases of the life that once made discs such must-own commodities. You can own a digital copy of last year’s Halloween, for example, weeks before it’s released onto disc, and there’s not even all that much incentive to wait anymore. Physical copies will always be superior to digital copies in the eyes of many, but it’s not like the Blu-ray offers much that the digital version doesn’t.
Do we really have to wait for Scream Factory to release their own Blu-ray of Halloween (2018), years from now, before we can get the bonus contents we’re craving? Sadly, it seems we do.
Commentary tracks may be dying off, but all hope is not lost for those who are still begging for them. As Fangoria editor-in-chief Phil Nobile Jr. recently noted on Twitter, the new “commentary track”, it would seem, is Twitter, where filmmakers can often be found engaging with fans and offering up the kinds of insights and filmmaking tips that we used to only find within audio commentaries. So long as we don’t drive them off the platform with cruelty and negativity, social media offers the potential to take the commentary track to a whole new level.
My advice? Find the filmmakers/actors you dig and follow them on Twitter. And hey, it can’t hurt to let the big labels know you still want commentary tracks too, so don’t be shy.
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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