Editorials
Pitch Black is Back, Y’all
Pitch Black is back, just as the prophecy foretold.
On July 7, 2011, I published what may very well be the finest 1,256 words I’ve ever written. It was a love letter review of an elusive new flavor of Dew inspired by the woefully underappreciated black grape and infused with the essence of Halloween. That Dew was Mountain Dew Pitch Black.
This is the first soda to earn my fear and my respect. I fear it because of what it did to me one crisp autumn morning back in 2012. It was a Wednesday I’ll never forget. My very own Pitch Black Wednesday.
The day before the horrific incident, an exceptional friend of mine had gifted me two twelve packs of the tasty beverage, earning a place in my heart forever and ever. I plowed through half the cans in no time at all, then, it happened. I had to pee super bad. Like, Jim Carrey in a dog-shaped van bad.
I made it to the bathroom with minimal seepage, like a professional adult, and proceeded to hastily uncoil the beast so I could begin. It didn’t take long for me to realize he was spitting out a sickly green sewage water that lacked the subtle luminescence and warm amber hues I usually see. I came frighteningly close to being traumatized for life that day had I not acted fast and sought answers on Google.
I’m better now, but I am still pretty shaken up about it.
The reason I’m telling you this is so you can better understand what this supremely satisfying soda means to me, as well as what it could mean to you, if you open the still-functioning (for now) arteries of your heart to it.
Mountain Dew Pitch Black is as much a proprietary blend of chemicals and sugar designed by a team of scientists wearing Dew branded lab coats as you and I are people-shaped skin bags filled with meat. It’s so much more than the sum of its parts, just like us. It’s what I imagine Charlie Sheen’s tiger blood tastes like, only better. It’s so delicious, thousands of black grapes willingly volunteer themselves to be drained of their precious juices so they can be reborn as the greatest of mankind’s carbonated inventions.
Prince even dedicated an album to it! Surely you’re sold by now.
You can find out for yourself whether or not Pitch Black is for you by visiting a beverage retailer of your choosing and giving it a try. Go ahead, taste it. Come on, put it in your mouth, you know you want to. Everyone else is, so you should to unless you want to be weird and die alone. What have you got to lose, besides your health or whatever?
Pitch Black is only here for a limited time, unless we enlist Lady Democracy to keep it here until the end of time. As much as I like Baja Blast, it can fuck off back to Taco Bell. There can only be one, and unless that one is Keanu Reeves, it better be Mountain Dew Pitch Black.
Unfortunately, it’s an insanely tight race, with only 1% — one goddamn percent — separating the two. I’m not saying everyone who votes for Baja Blast should die in a fire, but you should vote for Pitch Black.
#VOTEPITCHBLACK
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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