Editorials
‘My Super Psycho Sweet 16’ – MTV’s Attempt at a Slasher Franchise
It’s easy to forget just how revolutionary MTV was back when it first went on the air, with the channel quickly becoming a staple of youth culture during the 80s and 90s. Of course, interests change over time, and the music-focused giant was eventually forced to make a few concessions in order to compete with rival channels. This led to MTV investing heavily in reality programming during the 2000s, which many claim to be the beginning of the end when it comes to their original brand.
One of these reality shows happened to be 2005’s My Super Sweet 16, which dove into the drama-filled world of extravagant teenage birthday parties. While I was only tangentially aware of the show back in the day, it was actually a massive hit and even garnered its own feature film spin-off in 2007. However, this peculiar little program would also become the basis for MTV’s My Super Psycho Sweet 16, a bizarre slasher franchise satirizing the original show’s petty conflicts and themes.
It’s now been a decade since the premiere of the third and final entry in the series, and while these made-for-TV flicks didn’t exactly have a lasting impact (especially since they’ve become rather hard to acquire), I’d like to take this opportunity to look back on MTV’s first attempt at their very own horror franchise.
Strangely enough, it was the network itself that originally approached director Jacob Gentry with their idea for a horror-centric adaptation of their popular show. The director had already been featured on MTV in the past, with the channel airing his Terminator 3 fan film when he was just fifteen years old, but he also had experience in the horror genre after co-directing 2007’s underrated The Signal. The only problem was that Gentry was clearly not a fan of reality TV, openly admitting that he considered it one of the lowest forms of entertainment.
What’s scarier than teen drama?
In a bizarre turn of events, this actually worked out for the best, as the director ended up realizing that the absurd situations and characters depicted in the show were already the perfect setup for a traditional slasher flick. Partnering with writers Scott Thomas and Jed Elinoff, Gentry soon had a weirdly entertaining mish-mash of teen drama and horror tropes on his hands, which could appeal to both fans of the original property and horror junkies alike.
Airing during the Halloween season of 2009 after a promotional theatrical release, My Super Psycho Sweet 16 stars Lauren McKnight as Skye Rotter, a teenage outcast whose father was responsible for a horrific mass murder at the local roller-skating rink. Unfortunately, the spoiled high-schooler Madison Penrose (Julianna Guill) insists on having her sixteenth birthday party at that very same Roller Dome, eventually leading to the unexpected return of Skye’s murderous dad during an unforgettable Sweet 16.
An uncomplicated teen horror flick, My Super Psycho Sweet 16 doesn’t reinvent the slasher wheel, but it doesn’t really have to. The birthday setting and appropriately dramatic teenage characters are interesting enough, with McKnight standing out as a memorable final girl and Guill turning in a respectable performance as a spoiled brat. The “Lord of the Rink” killer is also pretty cool, sporting a medieval motif as he takes down partygoers with swords and axes. I’d argue that the only real flaw here is the overall lack of brutality, as even the unrated version feels a bit tame.
Either way, the movie was a big hit for MTV, receiving mostly positive reviews and impressive ratings. That’s why it’s no surprise that a sequel was greenlit almost immediately, with Gentry and his team coming back for more the following year. Featuring a larger budget and more ambitious kills, the follow-up was bigger and meaner than the original without losing any of the teen soap-opera charm.
Family is forever. Wait, wrong slasher movie…
Once again starring McKnight as Skye Rotter, the sequel sees our traumatized protagonist move in with her estranged mother after fleeing the scene at the end of the first film. While it initially appears that Skye has earned a fresh start, her inevitable 16th birthday party ends up attracting unwanted attention, with old friends and psychotic enemies returning for yet another Sweet 16 murder spree.
Airing in October of 2010, My Super Psycho Sweet 16: Part 2 is a surprisingly solid follow-up to an already entertaining movie. It still feels like 90210 meets I Know What You Did Last Summer, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Skye remains a memorably edgy protagonist and her teenage worries are compelling enough to make you not root for the killer, who remains appropriately threatening (though a little less over-the-top with his medieval antics).
This one was another hit for MTV, but judging by what happened to the third film, it’s likely that it wasn’t quite as popular as the original. The network still ended up commissioning another sequel, but the film suffered a few delays and it appears that budgets got slashed somewhere along the way. This resulted in a final entry that doesn’t quite live up to the standard of its predecessors.
In 2012’s My Super Psycho Sweet 16: Part 3, Skye is invited to her estranged half-sister’s 16th birthday party before heading off to college. Things obviously don’t go according to plan, as it appears that the birthday curse lives on. With bodies beginning to pile, Skye once again has to face off against old enemies during yet another blood-soaked celebration.
‘Lord of the Rink’ is one of the all-time best Slasher villain names.
Part 3 is still somewhat entertaining in its own right, but it lacks some of the charm present in previous entries. This is mostly due to the less-intimidating killer and the isolated country house setting, which is arguably the least interesting of the bunch. It also doesn’t help that the titular Sweet 16 is attended by a mere handful of characters, limiting the thrills in both quantity and quality. It may bring a satisfying conclusion to Skye’s story, but I often skip this one when re-watching the franchise.
These made-for-TV movies obviously aren’t for everyone, as the schlocky writing and teenage sensibilities may get on some viewers’ nerves, but I see this trilogy as a fun prototype for future teen-oriented horror shows like Scream and American Horror Story. While I think you’d probably get more out of the experience if you were a teenager yourself when you first watched the trilogy, there’s still a lot to love about these cheesy birthday massacres.
The peculiar mix of soap-opera styled drama and classic horror tropes makes My Super Psycho Sweet 16 surprisingly memorable, and I particularly enjoy how McKnight’s protagonist becomes more complex as the films go on. The MTV-approved soundtracks also serve as a musical time capsule of the late-2000s to early-2010s that’s sure to entertain the more nostalgic horror hounds out there.
Before the horror renaissance of the mid-2010s, TV horrors were few and far in between. That’s why I believe the My Super Psycho Sweet 16 trilogy stands out as a fun introduction to the horror genre for an audience that might never have seen a Slasher flick before. These movies may have suffered from watered-down kills and budgetary constraints due to their made-for-TV origins, but I think they’re still worth revisiting for their soap opera thrills and festive kills. At the very least, I’d say that they’re a hell of a lot more fun than the original My Super Sweet 16 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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