Editorials
[Set Report] WGNA’s “Salem’s” Horror Roots Run Deep!
It’s clear that WGN’s “Salem” is quite horrific. What surprised me more than anything after speaking with creators Brannon Braga (“Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey”) and Adam Simon (“The Haunting in Connecticut”) at the Salem Press Junket was just how embedded horror and especially horror history are in “Salem’s” DNA. There are a lot of phenomenal horror tropes that run through the show but occasionally we’ll see something that pulls from, spoofs, imitates, or pays tribute to classic horror from times past (most recently, in last week’s episode, we got a killer “Evil Dead” moment, which was both so awesome but self aware to the point where it was okay to snicker a bit). The horror references this season also pull from ancient fairytales including a haunted well.
The last episode of season one gave us a full on “Scanners” moment. When I asked Braga his influence in having Anne Hale telepathically explode her mother’s head, he confirmed my suspicions. “Well…the head exploding was ‘Scanners’. We were going to have the whole head explode but we felt it might be a little over the top, so we just had the top of her head explode. But it was inspired by ‘Scanners’.” And “Salem” goes balls to the wall with their special effects. “We built an amazing head and we blew it up!” said Braga.
“There are horror influences that Adam [Simon] and I—being lifelong horror fans—both bring. From “Scanners,” to Ramsey Campbell, who is one of my favorite authors…and this season will have a lot of H.P. Lovecraft references in there.” Said Braga. Note: I almost peed my pants when he told me this, being a lifelong Lovecraftian.
Without going into too much detail, Braga let me in on a little secret. There will be a rat in this season on “Salem”…and that rat may or may not be a prominent character in a wonderful little Lovecraft story. I’ll leave it at that.
Anne Hale might be one of the most classic horror-influenced characters yet. Not only did she get to reenact “Scanners” but also this season she goes full “Carrie.” Braga said, “She’s a cradle-witch. She’s incredibly powerful. But she has absolutely no control over herself and that makes her even more dangerous.”
Braga also cites David Lynch and Roman Polanski as big influences on the tone of the show (the atmosphere of dread and tension, in particular).
Both Simon and Braga grew up on horror so naturally “Salem” had no other path to go down. Simon said, “One of the first things we [he and Braga] said to each other is ‘We’re going to be the first real horror show.’ It really feels like what passes for horror on TV is not horror. In all kinds of ways…because of the limits of what you can show, but also because it tends to be done by people for whom that was not really their genre, their language. We really wanted it to feel physical and real and visceral.”
Simon, like Braga, assured me that the horror we see is totally old school. The only digital is for the realism of the set…set extensions, to make the ocean bigger, things like that. But the horror…as mentioned above with the gruesome head explosion, that’s as real as they can get without actually breaking laws.
Because of Simon and Braga’s lifelong obsession with horror, they had a fun time playing around with hidden references in things like titles and as I said earlier…the rat. “In the second season, and I would say probably only true fans of Bloody Disgusting will even get this reference, we’ve almost tapped into more of the classic foreign horror films. On the one hand there’s almost a kind of j-horror, k-horror thing happening here that you’re going to see, but also all the great Italian and French horror films. I would say this is our [Dario] Argento season!”
So if you doubted the horror elements of dear ol’ “Salem” take a deeper look. And bust out your H.P. Lovecraft. Find that rat.
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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