Editorials
[Butcher Block] ‘Laid to Rest’ is a Gore-Hound’s Slasher
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.
Almost exactly 10 years ago, gore lovers found themselves a new horror icon in ChromeSkull. The masked killer made his debut in Laid to Rest, a brutal slasher that put major emphasis on putting creative kills back in the subgenre. Not bothering with traditional introductions, Laid to Rest picks up with one of ChromeSkull’s victims waking up in a casket with a traumatic head injury inducing both amnesia and major disorientation. She escapes, and spends the night fleeing for her life as ChromeSkull pursues to finish what he started. The body count racks up along the way and, being that this slasher is the brainchild of special effects artist Robert Hall, it gets pretty gnarly.
Hall has an extensive body of work in special makeup effects, from genre films like Dead Birds, Vacancy, Prom Night (2008), Quarantine, to beloved genre shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. It was the latter where he met actors Lena Headey and Thomas Dekker, who both found themselves terrorized by ChromeSkull in Laid to Rest. The silent yet menacing ChromeSkull was played by Nick Principe (Hatchet II). With Bobbi Sue Luther in the lead role as ChromeSkull’s intended victim, The Girl/Princess, the rest of the cast is filled out with genre notables Richard Lynch (2007’s Halloween, The Lords of Salem), Johnathon Schaech (Quarantine, Prom Night), Kevin Gage (Strangeland, Heat, The ‘Burbs), and Sean Whalen (The People Under the Stairs, Hatchet III). Most of which fall victim in very gruesome fashion. While Laid to Rest is intentionally simple in premise and isn’t interested in breaking the slasher mold, it is refreshing that The Girl consistently finds herself aligned and supported by characters who are genuinely nice people.
But, of course, who cares about the characters or story? We’re here for the gore. While Hall wrote and directed Laid to Rest, he handed the special makeup effects off to his crew from Almost Human Inc., with Erik Porn (Dead Night, No One Lives, The Crazies) serving as special makeup effects supervisor. Because Hall comes from an extensive background in special makeup effects, he had a strong grasp of how the effects should look, so Porn had extra pressure when coordinating the lifelike kills and gore for the film. Between the team’s impressive work and Hall’s vision for how the special effects should work and look, Laid to Rest has been praised for its stunning practical effects. That’s because Hall understands how to use CG to enhance the practical effects; it’s so seamlessly done that it’s often been assumed this slasher is entirely practical.
Lena Headey’s character is one of the film’s earliest deaths; ChromeSkull skewers her head to the wall while she’s dangling upside-down out of a window. It’s made even more brutal by ChromeSkull’s twisting and wrestling the large blade out of her skull, the skin stretching and tearing as blood gushes from just about every orifice in her head. Headey’s face was digitally composited over the puppet and practical effects. Hall had designed this kill sequence to be equal parts practical and digital from the get-go. Yet it looks entirely real and wholly practical. The visual effects crew from Asylum VFX and Almost Human Digital deserve just as much praise as the practical team- all involved delivered visceral gore that looked incredibly realistic.
It’s easy to see why this series has developed a vocal following, and have long been clamoring for the third entry. It’s an unrelenting slasher full of glorious kills that will make gore-hounds happy. Exploding heads, severed heads, a disembowelment, and literal face melting, but all through the laser precision of someone well versed in delivering stunning special makeup effects.
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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