Editorials
‘Silent Hill’ Creator Would Like To Return To Horror
It’s no secret the horror genre has seen quite a bit of change over the last few years. The end of this console generation has brought with it a potential end of the AAA blockbuster horror game, after series like F.E.A.R., Condemned, Dead Space, Silent Hill and Resident Evil haven’t seen a significant enough return on the millions of dollars required to make games of that quality and scale. F.E.A.R. 3, Dead Space 3, Condemned 2, Resident Evil 6 and Silent Hill: Downpour — more so than its predecessors, which also haven’t been terribly successful — have caused their respective publishers to change the way they approach these series, or, in the case of Condemned, shutter them entirely.
You may not know his name, but Keiichiro Toyama has brought us two of the greatest survival horror franchises of all time. He was the director on both Siren and the original Silent Hill, so he understands the genre. In a recent interview with Famitsu, translated by Polygon, Toyama discusses his desire to return to the genre and the barriers that are keeping AAA horror games from getting made.
“I’ve worked on horror for a long time,” Toyama told Famitsu. “Whenever I work on something different, I can’t help but come up with new horror-oriented ideas. So I’d like to make another horror game someday, but the thing is, unlike in the past, I think it’s become kind of hard to make horror games. To some extent, horror is a good match for the ‘B’ genre, in terms of taking advantage of low budgets for the maximum return and maximum quality. However, we’re now in an environment where B-grade titles are simply being priced out of the retail-software market. I think making a pure horror AAA console title is going to be really difficult going into the future. Instead, if I have a chance to make something like Journey that you can complete in two or three hours, but still offers an intense horror experience, I’d love to try that.”
He has a point. Over the last couple years, more developers have turned to indie development and self-publishing to get shorter, more focused horror games on the market, usually through Steam or Sony and Microsoft’s indie platforms.
Zombie Studios, the makers of the two games based on the Saw films, are working on Daylight, a low budget paranormal adventure with gameplay similar to Slender: The Eight Pages. Then there’s The Atronauts, a new studio made up of ex-People Can Fly (Bulletstorm, Gears of War: Judgment) developers. Their next game, the story-driven The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is much smaller than their previous efforts. There’s also Red Barrels, the makers of Outlast, Frictional Games and their sci-fi horror game, SOMA — the list goes on.
All this isn’t to say the AAA horror game will soon be extinct. There will always be room for them — like The Evil Within, Dying Light and Dead Rising 3 — but I imagine we’ll be seeing less of these sprawling, big budget franchises once the next generation comes along.
I hope Toyama decides to return to horror, because his brand of it is a unique one. Silent Hill and Siren are two of the most original and psychologically terrifying video games ever and with the myriad horror games that are currently copying and pasting the mechanics and style of successful ones — like Slender: The Eight Pages — we need someone to come in and shake things up.
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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