Editorials
The Devil’s in the Dance: ‘Climax’ and the Extreme Horror of Gaspar Noé
Some filmmakers want to tell a visual story. Some simply want to elicit an emotional response through the medium. French auteur Gaspar Noé, however, wants to confront his audience through unrelenting graphic violence, controversy, and nihilism. It’s not just the subject matter of his films, though that alone would be enough to set him apart, but in the way he toys with cinematic convention to put the viewer in an intimate, voyeuristic position that challenges us to face the ugliest aspects of society. From the flashy, atypical title credits that immediately set the precedent that this isn’t your average film to the jarring, swirling camera movements and long takes as it follows unsavory lead characters, Noé is seeking a visceral response meant to test the audience. It all culminates in his best work yet, the profoundly disturbing horror film Climax.
His earlier films made him a pioneer in the world extreme cinema that emerged in France dubbed New French Extremity and put him on the radar of die-hard horror fans, but the irony is that most of his filmography isn’t technically horror at all. Yet, the extreme and shocking acts depicted within them pushes them straight in genre adjacent territory that’s generally shunned by mainstream audiences.
Take his first film, the short Carne in 1991, and its full feature length sequel I Stand Alone, in 1998. Both center around The Butcher (Philippe Nahon), an antihero that begins his journey by mistaking his autistic daughter’s first menstruation as signs of surviving a sexual assault, which then prompts him to take revenge on an innocent man. Carne opens with a graphic scene of a horse’s slaughter for meat processing, a brutal introduction to The Butcher’s desensitization to violence. With I Stand Alone, it picks up after The Butcher has left prison and moved to rural France, his daughter institutionalized. Discontent, the film sees The Butcher heading back home to attempt to reclaim his old life and finding it a struggle. Eventually, Noé flashes a warning card across the screen, giving the viewer 30 seconds to leave (or turn the film off) before a heinous, shocking act commences (spoilers ahead)– The Butcher, who takes his daughter out of the institution to see her one last time, decides to give in to his incestuous feelings for her before killing her. The major taboo-breaking act rendered all the more shocking in the way Noé made light of it with dark humor.
I Stand Alone plays a major part in Irreversible, the first film to launch Noé into the international spotlight. It opens with The Butcher confessing to his crimes of incest before setting up the film’s themes of time. From there, events of one traumatic night unfolds in reverse order, through a series of 12 long takes for its central characters Alex (Monica Belluci), Marcus (Vincent Cassel), and Pierre (Albert Dupontel). It means that the most vicious scenes come near the beginning, first with Pierre smashing in an innocent man’s skull with a fire extinguisher, and then with the most excruciating, traumatic long-take of Alex’s harrowing sexual assault and beating at the hands of a pimp. Noé forces the audience to be uncomfortable, unwilling participants in the way he films the scene; when the rest of the film contains his trademark dizzying camera work, this scene remains stagnant and fixated upon Alex, her assaulter, and the filthy underpass in which the monstrous act takes place. By playing the night’s events in reverse order, these scenes of nihilistic, graphic violence become tragic, when the film ends by depicting these characters happy, normal, and in love. As The Butcher lamented in the opening, “Time destroys everything.”
Enter the Void took a hallucinogenic journey into the afterlife with more dizzying overhead camerawork and permeating neon colors. It followed drug dealer Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) as he’s shot to death in a drug deal, his soul then hovers overhead as he follows the repercussions of his death while in search of resurrection. It’s a long journey, with a 142-minute runtime, and also Noé’s most ambitious in terms of visual storytelling. Much more explicit in its depictions of sex, with some violence, Enter the Void is less horrific than previous films and exists more overtly in the realm of fantasy. For many, it’s considered the auteur’s best work.
But arguably, his best is Climax, set to release stateside on March 1. It’s also firmly planted in horror. What begins as a night of dancing and celebration for a dance troupe gathered at a remote school building mid-winter turns into a hallucinatory nightmare of hellish proportions when they discover their sangria has been spiked with LSD. Noé’s trademarks are all on display, the vivid colors, atypical film credits, and the swirling camera work as it follows the beleaguered dancers in their journeys of torment, by way of continuous long takes.
At the beginning of the film, we see a television framed by books and VHS tapes, all which shaped and inspired Noé throughout his life. Two noticeable VHS tapes are Possession and Suspiria, both which play a major influence in Climax. But the horror in Noe’s film is psychological rather than supernatural. It doesn’t make the events that unfold any less harrowing or horrifying. Climax earned a spot on 2018’s most disturbing moments in horror, but truthfully the entire film could’ve dominated the list. Noé has never been afraid to break major taboos, but he throws caution to the wind and tackles just about every single taboo in his latest. Surprisingly, Climax also is the director’s most accessible film to date.
Noé’s films aren’t for everyone, and the unflinching way in which he challenges the viewer often means that even if you do appreciate his films, it’s not often an experience you’re willing to sit through twice. His cinematic style and shorthand are distinctly his, and his use of graphic violence and sex make bold statements on society and the morally ambiguous nature of humanity. They also ushered in a wave of extreme cinema in France. The definition of dance is the movement of the body in a rhythmic way, usually to music, for the purpose of expressing emotion or an idea, or releasing energy. It’s also a perfect summation of Noe’s style, in that he uses movement and score to force his audience to face the ugly head on. Climax is the culmination of everything the came before, in one heady, hellscape of dance.
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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