13 Nights of Hallowe'en 2010: Night #12 The Shining (1980)

The night before Hallowe'en, Devil's Night. Can you feel the excitement? Are you ready? Well if not then you should be aftertonight's movie. In a list of movies with infamously haunted places there is one name that towers over the others. It is called The Overlook Hotel, and it is not real, but most people will know the name nonetheless, even if they don't recall from where. The Overlook is based for the most part on a real hotel called The Stanley Hotel and is the creation of Stephen King in his novel The Shining. This is the first movie adaptation of that novel. The mastermind behind it is none other than Stanley Kubrick. Mind you some people aren't so sure on the mastermind part. This movie deviates from the novel on several levels. To me this makes for the more interesting of the two kind of novel to movie adaptations.

Kubrick had his own vision for the story. It is both familiar and divergent. Starting off we have the cast. The movie stars Jack Nicholson,Shelley Duvall, and young Danny Lloyd as a family maintaining The Overlook Hotel during the long and harsh winter. This is the same as King's story. It's not a spoiler, but the only thing I'll say here about the differences is that in Kubrick's movie the hotel has a hedge maze, and the novel--and remake mini-series--has hedge animals that come to life. As one might expect from a Kubrick movie there is a great attention to detail from sets to locations to the acting, and of course the direction. As for the haunting, the Shining has it in spades. Also, if you don't know, the shining is actually psychic ability, exemplified by Danny Lloyd's character and the cook played by Scatman Crothers.

Mood: stoked.

Music: Halloween by Helloween. MP3s

13 Nights of Hallowe'en 2009: Night #12 The Crow

The night before Hallowe'en is infamously known as Devil's Night and is a time of trouble ranging from the annoying to the destructive to the violent. In some places, like Detroit, Devil's Night was known for its record number of arson cases. The Crow is one of the few movies about the night, which is somewhat understandable with Hallowe'en being a much juicier target. The Crow isn't necessarily a horror movie even though it is in the vein. It's more of a dark action movie. It is also one of those rare movies where the star met with an untimely death on the set with the accident that took Brandon Lee's life. The filmmakers turned the movie into something of an homage to this young talent. They also did an excellent job of completing the film in his absence.

When I first saw The Crow at the theatre I was left with two impressions. The first was that this was a very special movie. The second, during the viewing, was that it pulled in a lot of ideas from different places and had that feeling of reusing bits of others films. What is odd about this second impression is that it very quickly faded. Whatever movies I felt The Crow borrowed from were quickly subsumed by the movie and I quickly could not recall any of them, those elements, themes, and scenes now belong to The Crow. Put together with the rest of the movie they no longer belong to the original sources in any kind of important way, as odd as that sounds. As for The Crow's original graphic novels I only know what I've heard in the DVD extras plus a little from additional bits in the TV series.

Mood: mellow.

Music: Dead Souls by Nine Inch Nails off of The Crow: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack