Editorials
Top 15 Back To School Horror Films!!!
By Zena S. Dixon.
It’s time to go back to school! Get your pencils ready, dust your books off and lets bring out the horror! Maybe you’re starting school, maybe your kid is starting school…or maybe you don’t need school because you’re one of those rare, lucky individuals who excel without it. Depending on the position you’re in, this list will make you dread going back to school or happy to know you’re pretty safe…for now. Either way, let us all indulge!
Although there were many candidates for this list, I decided to go with these 15 films! As a bonus, these horrors contain survival tips for the school year. So let’s get ready for Back to School: TOP 15 School Horrors!
Post will contain spoilers, so BEWARE! Rawr!
This glorious cheese fest of a slasher takes place just a few weeks before graduation day at Midville High School. Unfortunately for students, getting people to sign their yearbook is the LAST of their troubles. Lurking around campus is a mysterious psychopath who slashes people’s guts out. And what makes it worse is that he or she insists on using a timer.
Tip? Graduate early to avoid a splatter fest.
A prank by Theta Pi leaves one of their best friends dead. A couple of months later a mysterious killer roams their sorority house, crashing their party and sending random texts.
Planning on joining a sorority? Well don’t!
What would High School be without popularity? Ask Tamara. Tamara is an unpopular and unattractive girl who is picked on by her peers. Not only is Tamara a witch, but she accidentally gets murdered. Don’t cry though. She comes back as a seductress, sex kitten on the road for revenge against those responsible.
We learned this one in kindergarden people! Be nice to everyone because you never know what people know about you or if they are witches who can come back from the dead to kill you. They may even make you eat a glass or perhaps your own fingers.
Sisters Ginger and Brigitte have an obsession with death and gore. Alienation in school becomes the least of their troubles once Ginger is attacked by a werewolf. Geez. Going through puberty is tough enough, but imagine growing hair all over your body and having a thirst for blood.
Tip: When turning into a werewolf, keep your thirst for blood minimal by avoiding large crowds… unless it’s with people you don’t like, then go for it! Good luck!
Who needs class when you have metal? Eddie is an outcast because of his preference of music…. Clearly it sucked to be him back in ’86! If he was around today and was a huge fan of metal, I doubt that porky jocks with stiff hair would attack him in empty wood shop classes.
If you idolize a rock star, lets hope he doesn’t send you a demonic record when he dies or makes you a mix tape that melts your ears off as soon as it plays.
I’m sure we’ve all had a secret admirer! Well, this movie has one of those in it. Back in 1982 at Crippen High School, there was a blood bath of horrors; however, the killer was never identified. Five years later, a movie production company comes to the abandoned campus to make a movie based on the previous deadly events.
Tip for this one: If you have a secret admirer, run.
A string of gory suicides forces a detective to try to unmask the reason behind it all.
From this horror, you should take away the simple lesson: Don’t follow the crowd. If 54 people simultaneously jump onto the path of an ongoing train…it doesn’t mean you have to!
Ah, a classic. A horror filled with alien parasites that enter through the human mouth and turn their host into a violent zombie.
This movie is a lot like teen pregnancy. Bottom line, don’t end up a zombie, or worse, a cast member on Teen Mom. But if it happens, just remember that I warned you about those sneaky people.
Sarah is the new girl at the Catholic prep school and feels connected with three other girls who practice witchcraft. The girls abuse their powers and eventually turn on Sarah.
Remember when I said be nice to everyone? Well, be nice includes not doing spells and putting curses on other people!
Sydney is being stalked by a mysterious killer known as Ghostface. Meanwhile, everyone around her is getting murdered.
Important note: Just because you’re in school doesn’t mean you’re safe from wackos. If something bad goes down remember: EVERYONE is a suspect. So if you keep this simple rule of horror, you should be very proud and very safe! Thanks, Randy.
Students begin to become suspicious of their school’s faculty after strange events begin occurring.
You better hope that Elijah Woods attends whatever school you or your loved ones attend if you want to feel safe from aliens.
Destined to kill vampires, cheerleader Buffy takes up arms to defend us all.
Geez. Wouldn’t career day be so much easier if you already knew you had to be a Vampire Slayer?
Poor Carrie. She’s super shy and her mom is crazy terrifying. She already doesn’t fit in, it doesn’t help that she discovers her telekinesis ability. Unfortunately, when she’s pushed to the limit on Prom, people will pay.
My advice? If there is a girl named Carrie, just skip the prom or any similar events. It’s all overrated at that point!
A masked killer stalks four teens responsible for an accident that happened years ago.
Why not just wait to get your revenge at the 10 year reunion? And maybe it can be emotional revenge, why does it always have to physical?
In every school there is a Queen B, in this one there’s a terrifying Black Queen. Suzy arrives from America to the prestigious dance academy in Germany, only to suspect that there is something evil going on behind closed doors. Eventually, Suzy will unveil the dark history of her new school.
If you can’t beat the Queen B, either join her or go against her, either way it can be haunting.
Wishing all the students a wonderful, horrific school year. If this was your Back to School: TOP 15 School Horrors, what would be on your list?
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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