Editorials
What Three Albums Changed Your Life?
Currently trending on Twitter is the hashtag #3AlbumsThatChangedMyLife. Designed to have people tweet the covers of three albums that changed their lives in some way, it’s not meant to seek their favorites, which I love. It’s much easier to think of landmark events than favorite moments as those can shift on a minute-by-minute basis. But something that left an indelible effect on one’s life? Those are far easier to pinpoint.
That hashtag got me thinking of three albums that shaped my musical life. To be 100% honest, I only needed about 10 seconds before three immediately came to mind. Therefore, I figured I’d share my own and hope that you would all let me know yours!
Tangerine Dream – Legend OST
This was one of my favorite films as a child and Tangerine Dream‘s score was a big part of my love for this movie. It was also the soundtrack that got me hooked into film scores, the one that made me pay attention to the music of a movie as much as I paid attention to the visuals and story. I remember laying on my bedroom floor with a cheap keyboard in front of me, plunking away and trying to figure out to play the main theme. This soundtrack is what inspired my love of music and will forever be the most important album of my life.
Metallica – The Black Album
My sister had a party once and several of her friends brought CDs over so they could have music in the background whilst doing whatever it was that they did (I wasn’t invited). One of her friends left a copy of Metallica‘s The Black Album but no one laid claim to it. It’s as though someone left it deliberately, never wanting to have it in their possession again. So, I did what any rebellious young teenager would do: I took it and played it, wanting to see if I was going to be interested in “metal”. At this point, the only real albums I owned were Green Day’s Dookie, No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom, and, shame upon shame, ICP’s The Great Milenko.
The Black Album completely changed me. Suddenly, it felt like I found a genre that was meant for me, that spoke to who I was as a person. Prior to having this album, I never really took to metal, even though I liked the occasional “harder” song. But now it all made sense and I went down that path and have never looked back.
Porcupine Tree – In Absentia
In the summer of 2002, I was hanging out with a core group of friends and our big thing was going to concerts and blasting music at earth-shattering volumes, all while hooking up our computers and playing Diablo II via LAN. One of those guys was a huge prog rock fan and kept talking about a band by the name of Porcupine Tree. One day I was at a music store and I saw In Absentia for $9.99. That was back when CDs were anywhere from $13.99 to $17.99, so I saw it as a great deal and said to myself, “Fuck it. If I don’t like it, it was a cheap test.”
I got into my car and popped the album into my Discman, which was connected to the stereo system via a cassette adapter. I dug the first track, “Blackest Eyes”, but it was “Trains”, the second track on the album, that hooked me. The vocal harmonies in the bridge starting at 2:55 in the below video absolutely blew my mind. I rewound and replayed that section over and over and over. Then I replayed that song over and over and over. I think I listened to it maybe 20 times before I allowed the album to progress to the third track. What followed is an album that I still return to with enormous fondness and joy, now mixed with wisps of nostalgia because it’s been a part of my life for so long.
While The Black Album introduced me to my love of metal, In Absentia allowed me to stray into new and exciting territories. It was because of this album that I felt comfortable testing the waters of anything that came across my path. After all, if I took a risk on this album and it ended up changing my life, who knew when that might happen again?
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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