How Long 'Til Skynet?

My buddy Phil was mucking about with an AI art generator and he sent me this.

It's Bjork as Danny from The Shining. He then proceeded to ask me for ideas, for which I shot out “Scarlett Johansson as Ash from The Evil Dead.” of the cuff. A few minutes later I get this...

I for one welcome our robot overlords...

Overlook Slugger

The Doctor Is In!

Danny (Tony) says go see Doctor Sleep this weekend. It rules.

...makes Jim a dull boy.

Newest on the list of scary good deepfake videos is this one cribbing Kubrick's masterpiece The Shining.

I wonder. What is it about The Shining that makes it such fertile ground for fan videos? 

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Hello all. I hope you are all having a good weekend. Here's what I've got for you this week.

Invading the Popular Consciousness.

YouTuber Jarvis City sent me a cool video recently compiling eighteen minutes worth of references to The Shining from pop culture. You're welcome!

Having done a few of these myself, I know how time intensive they can be. I also give him props for not including The Chickening because that shit hurts my eyes -- and my soul.

On The Vanguard.

Last week, during the Blood in the Snow Film Festival's awards ceremony last weekend, my friend and prolific Canadian actor Ry Barrett was presented with the Vanguard Award in recognition of work in Canadian genre cinema. The award was preceded by a compilation reel of his work compiled by director and compatriot Gabriel Carrer.

I was honoured to have his work in my short films Lively and The Good Samaritan included in there. Ry deserved every bit of this recognition.

Going to the Dogs.

So, what if Reservoir Dogs had had an actual dog? Like a killer dog that showed up at the warehouse mid-film! Well, your prayers have been answered!

Though I haven't seen Dark Summer, I was a fan of Paul Solet's 2009 debut Grace and his weird BMX-western segment in Tales of Halloween, so I'm eager to see what he can do with a larger budget. It appears to be fairly action heavy, which is good, but I guess it comes down to how digital will the antagonist be. Bullet Head releases in theatres and VOD on Dec 8th.

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Hello all. It looks like the sickness that has been felling everyone around here has finally caught up with me. I'll attempt to give you this week's goodies in between nose honks.

Oculus Overlook.

I discovered a really cool application for the Oculus Rift this week. British game developer Franbo (who I believe may just be one person) has created a virtual tour of The Overlook Hotel from Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's classic novel, The Shining. Here's a teaser, followed by a walkthrough care of JamusYO below.

There's some obvious copyright dodging with the use of names such as The Overview and The Silver Room, but it looks like a pretty authentic experience that I hope gets elaborated on in the future. If you have a Rift, you can download it here for free. Happy hunting!

The Mark of Kane.

The upcoming Friday the 13th game from Gun Media took another stride toward legitimacy when it was announced that Kane Hodder, the best Jason there ever was, had come on board to do motion capturing for the game. Now we know that we're gonna be getting the real deal, as these images clearly illustrate.

And best of all, since this is a video game we don't have to worry about most of his handiwork being left on the cutting room floor. Hell, if Jason wants to smash somebody in a sleeping bag against a tree twenty times, then dammit that's what we're gonna see!

There is no release date yet, but you can pre-order the game by going here.

A Video Possessed.

Here's a cool video I came across this week. YouTube user Kris made a montage of clips from Andrzej Zulawski's 1981 film Possession and set it to the aptly titled Trevor Something track, The Possession. For anyone who hasn't seen the film, I urge to go and watch it first because it is super intense, unpredictable and frankly, exceptional. For everyone else, enjoy!

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Greetings all. I hope all your holiday festivities went well and you've recovered from your turkey comas. Here's some more horror morsels to ring in the New Year.

Gingerbread Hotel.

Here's something truly remarkable. This year, the Keeling family painstakingly recreated the Overlook Hotel from The Shining in gingerbread! It even came complete with the hedge maze and accompanying scenes from the film.

For the rest of the pictures, click here.

It Was A Dark & Wintery Night.

Here is a short film I wanted to share from Canadian filmmaker Santiago Menghini. This short tore up the short film circuit last year, but has just recently been put online. An amalgamation of two short comics by Al Columbia & Uno Moralez respectively, I love the tone of this piece.

Menghini was able to create a world that was both ominous and gorgeous at the same time. Tremendous work!

The Forest Is Real.

A movie I am looking forward to in 2016 is Jason Zada's The Forest. Initially, my interest for this project lay only with its star Natalie Dormer, but the story behind the Aokigahara Forest is a fascinating one. The marketing recently has also gone beyond what is usually provided for January's shovel-fare. Check out this cool interactive adventure Enter The Suicide Forest.

It's fairly simple, but the atmosphere is there and you can even visit the real place via Google Street Maps afterwards. As for the movie, I'll try to remain optimistic. If someone spent more than an afternoon on the script, it might surprise. I guess we'll see when it releases January 7th.

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Hello all! It's been a few weeks since I've been in town to do one of these things, so let's get right to it. I just realized that this week's DKTM is going to be heavy video-game centric and, since I've been absent for a while, quite large. Here we go!

First, there's this cool video for Night, one of the pieces on John Carpenter's new album, Sacred Bones.

Pretty cool. Knowing what a big nut JC is for video games, I wonder what he thinks of the Oculus Rift.

I've been seeing some really great video games on all formats in the last few weeks, so figured I'd give them all some love. A few weeks ago, I came across this 8-bit representation of The Shining.

I love the little flourishes, like the sound of Danny's big wheel going from carpet to hardwood and the act of mimicking the exhaustive typing of Jack's one iconic phrase, “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. Click the image above to try it out. But dress warmly.

Another neat little thing I came across was Ian Tuason's interactive short 3am. The short itself is pretty simple fare, but the hook is that you can control the camera for a full 360 degree view of the action. Best viewed in Chrome and using headphones, here it is below.

Perhaps the most distressing news of the past week or so, is that the new Silent Hill game that everyone was excited for is no longer happening. I suppose it shouldn't be surprising as the two gentlemen involved aren't the most reliable on following through on projects they fleetingly announce, but this one had an incredibly intense and robust teaser attached to it. It was pretty much all gamers were talking about the week P.T. (now Silent Hills) was released.

Norman Reedus in Silent Hills.

The point is that they shouldn't be able to back out at this point and the gaming community has already reacted. Since the teaser was taken off the PSN, PS4's including the game on their hard drives are going for a mint on Ebay, and a petition to developer Konami has already reached 60,000 signatures in mere days.

So, Konami, whatever the issue is, sort it out! To sign the petition, click here.

Lastly, the most exciting new thing I saw this week was the Indiegogo campaign for Night Terrors.

Currently we are on the precipice of a new age of gaming. It is no longer an issue of degrees, as the Oculus Rift and Sony's Morpheus are about a year away from hitting the consumer market and possibly revolutionizing the industry. However, some are going a different route and offering an experience utilizing a device that everyone already owns - a Smart phone.

How fucking cool is this? You can have ghosts in your very own home. The functionality of this is very provacative indeed. The project has already raised $20,000 in four days and considering a mere five bones buys you the app, that's very affordable indeed. To contribute, and get more info, click here.

Trailer Tuesdays: The Shining

I hate, nay, I LOATHE winter. I always start to feel like Jack by this time every year.

Fun times. And in the interest of accuracy, here's the actual trailer.

Viddy Well!

A few weeks ago, the Stanley Kubrick exhibit launched at the Lightbox. I'd been waiting to check this out, since its inaugural run in Los Angeles, and boy did this thing not disappoint!

It's a really comprehensive exhibit of the man's staggering achievements, and even the in-house bar has gotten in on the festivities.

The exhibit spans his entire career, starting with his early photography for Look magazine all the way through to 1999's Eyes Wide Shut, for which he passed away right before it was released. The exhibit was broken into rooms, with each one representing a title in his filmography.

I didn't want to be one of those people that snaps pics of everything instead of enjoying the moment (I really only pulled out my camera for my two faves, which you'll see below), but rest assured, there were lots of things to keep your eyes busy, like a 12-foot obelisk from 2001: A Space Odessey and a miniature War Room from Doctor Strangelove.

The A Clockwork Orange room was pretty spectacular, which, in addition to costumes and international posters, had these iconic pieces from the Korova Milk Bar (flanking the penis sculpture that Alex uses to bludgeon the Catlady)

The Shining, you might imagine, had the most props, including these goodies.

I also couldn't resist snagging a pic of this display of these masks, as well.

The exhibit continued on the fourth floor inside the TIFF reference library, where all of Kubrick's old camera lenses were on display, the most impressive of which was the one used to shoot Barry Lyndon. For those who don't know the story, Kubrick insisted on shooting all the interior night scenes by candlelight, which required special lenses - one NASA used to capture the dark side of the moon - to work in low light conditions. As you can imagine, this camera was a huge beast and your eyes went to it as soon as you walked into the room.

The other main draw of this area were the materials from the three unproduced films that Kubrick worked on during his career. There was a wall of beautiful storyboards for his vision of A.I. (which Steven Spielberg took over after Kubrick's death) as well as exhaustive research into a Holocaust project called The Aryan Papers, which was scrapped when Spielberg went into production on Schindler's List. 

The third project was Napoleon, which was abandoned after 1970's Waterloo performed poorly. I'd always heard about the exhaustive research Kubrick put into that project and, much to my delight, his research card-catalogue cabinet was part of this exhibit. Kubrick not only recorded every day of the French conqueror's life, but also colour-coded his interactions with every other significant historical figure.

If you live in the GTA and have any interest in film at all, this is a must see. TIFF is playing all of Kubrick's films during its run, so you can catch one of those, plus the exhibit for just twenty bones. That's a super value, any way you cut it.

Fan Expo 2014 Part 2

As I mentioned yesterday, there was an extraordinary amount of panels this year. Fortunately, there wasn't a huge amount of overlap - as is the case most years - so I got to sit in on most of them.

The genre examination documentary Why Horror? conducted a panel to go along with the recent unveiling of their snazzy new poster.

The film, as seen through the eyes of life-long horror fan Tal Zimerman, is an exploration as to why so many feel drawn to the darkest corners of cinema. Directed by Nicolas Kleiman & Rob Lindsay, the project is now finished and will soon screen in Mexico, Spain and here in Toronto. The panel consisted of Zimerman, Kleiman, as well as two of the doc's interviewees, Andrea Subissati and Dave Alexander.

They touched on various talking points of the film, including the history of horror storytelling through the ages, how various cultures have different things that scare them and how and why some people find watching horror films a cathartic experience.

Co -director Nicolas Kleiman (left) and Tal Zimerman, Andrea Subissati & Dave Alexander.

Zimerman & company showed sections of the film - which spans the globe, including stops in Mexico, London and Tokyo - my favourite of which is when Tal volunteers his mother to undergo an experiment with him. They visit U of T and get hooked up to heart monitors to see how they both react - his mother swore off horror after being terrified by Dario Argento's 1971 film Four Flies of Grey Velvet - to horror stimuli. It's pretty hilarious, but the results were surprising. I guess you'll have to see the doc to find out what they discovered.

I also found it interesting to learn that, in the interest of symmetry, when they sought to interview an anti-horror advocate, they couldn't find one. They, in fact, had to go back to the nineties to find said sound bites. I guess that means that the people with the torches & pitchforks really have moved onto pinning the world's problems on violent video games. Yay?

Speaking of horror, Toronto After Dark announced the first ten titles of this year's festival line-up.

There are some really exciting titles on the schedule, including The Babadook, Open Windows and Dead Snow 2. The festival runs October 16-24th and you can check out more details, by clicking here.

Lisa & Louise Burns, the ladies who played the unforgettable Grady Twins in The Shining, were there. They were absolutely lovely, and still almost as tiny!

They talked about the fans' reaction to seeing them in person;

“They are either really frightened of us, or so happy to see us. People say really nice things to us though. It is almost overwhelming. There's people making these things on that site Etsy and all these lovely people who dress up as us and send us photos.” 

Naturally, someone asked about what it was like to work with the great Stanley Kubrick;

“We found him to be very friendly and cuddly, almost like an uncle. A genuine man. He knew exactly where he wanted to go, but he would encourage rather than tell. He wasn't a telling person. He would work with his own actors, or at least that is how he was with us... He did do loads and loads of takes. You know how you've always got one friend who has to take five photos when everyone else just takes one. They always have their finger on the button, don't they? I think if Stanley was still around with all the modern gadgets we've got now, he'd be one of those people.”

They were pretty great. The day wrapped up with A Nightmare on Elm Street reunion of sorts with Robert Englund & Heather Langenkamp appearing together on stage. I'd seen them both separately in previous years, but it was awesome to see them together.

Robert Englund & Heather Langenkamp

There was obviously stuff that I'd heard before, like how they both won their roles and such, but some new stuff, as well. They talked at length about working with eventual A-listers Johnny Depp, Patricia Arquette and Laurence Fishburne, and they spoke of how important Nancy as a character was instrumental in the birth of the “fan girl” movement. I can see that, as the Nancy & Tina did interact with each other in a very realistic way, even moreso than the ladies in Halloween six years earlier. It definitely helps when you have characters within a film that you can identify with.

Someone was quick to ask about what they thought of the remake. Langenkamp declined to say anything for fear of going on a rant, so Robert tried to be tactful;

“The remake of Nightmare was just too premature. I understand remakes. Every movie our grandparents saw was a remake of a silent film. There are only so many stories to tell around the campfire. I understand the drive to remake it for a younger audience, but with the advent of digitally remastered Blu-ray box sets, these original fans are older and have kids, and they can pass these movies down to them, looking better than they ever have before. Hollywood knows that movies have a larger shelf life now, so why they are rushing to remake everything is beyond me.”

The last question of the day was about Englund ever coming back to the role;

“If I was to come back, it would be Freddy vs. Viagara!”

But the question did bring up an interesting story about a prequel;

“There was some talk after Freddy Vs. Jason of a prequel script floating around and John McNaughton was going to direct it in a documentary style. At one point I think it was called Krueger: The First Kills. But was so creepy about it, were the lawyers that get him out of jail. And they became symbols of the corruption of American society and our children. They were phenomenal roles from what I hear. I never read it, I heard a lot about it from a guy that used to work at New Line. And that was close to happening, and then Michael Bay bought the rights to everything. But that would've been the last thing I did. I loved the idea that it was the lawyers that were the stars and Krueger just comes in at the end.”

We're not done here. Come back tomorrow to hear about a further quartet of events I attended.

The Overlook in Toronto!

Last Friday night, I took a trip to Toronto's Gladstone Hotel, which for Halloween had been transformed into a recreation of The Shining's Overlook Hotel.

The Gladstone is Toronto's oldest hotel, situated in the trendy West Queen West area of town. It now functions as an “art hotel”, hosting many eclectic events throughout the year. This Shining party thing had several rooms dressed up and from their website pics below, it's certainly not a stretch to imagine the possibilities.

Pics from The Gladstone Hotel.

The main areas were the Melody Bar, which was set up like The Gold Room, the Art Bar, which housed a recreation of the famous hedge maze and the Ballroom, which is where the Daft Punk tribute happened.

I'm right behind ya!

I, however, spent most of my time upstairs because it was less crowded up there. This floor featured several door lined hallways (they were numbered in the 200's, but sadly no 217 or 237), a bunch of stills from the film hanging on the walls, as well as some fitting graffiti. I ran into a couple of ladies dressed as the Grady twins, but they sadly seemed oblivious as to who I was supposed to be, so fan fail on their part I guess. 

One out of three ain't bad ;)

The most interesting part was that there was a re-enactment of the film going on over the course of the evening. It started with this;

All work...

And then I saw a brunette sheepishly walking the halls clutching a baseball bat. There is a staircase in The Gladstone that wraps around an old school elevator, so I thought I'd just hang around that area and see what happened. Sure enough, Gladstone Jack & Wendy played out the famous scene on the staircase while everyone else partied around them. I appreciated the extra effort put forth by the organizers to do this.

This was a pretty cool experience and I'm glad I was able to witness such a unique event. Props to The Gladstone for putting it on.

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Hey everyone! Here are some juicy bits of horror to help you nurse your Halloween hangovers.

Into The Darkness.

Director Vincenzo Natali has teamed up with producer Steve Hoban for a new anthology series called Darknet. You can check out the pilot here.

I dug this. I like that it is set in Toronto (Oakville shoutout from David Hewlett!) and feels very modern while fully capitalizing on all the best elements of the anthology format. The full season of six episodes will premiere here in Canada on Super Channel in January. Consider me hooked.

Back To The Overlook.

Courtesy of The Shining's premiere fan site The Overlook Hotel, here are some behind-the-scenes photos from the set of Stanley Kubrick's classic 1980 masterpiece. Below, are a few of my favourites.

To see the whole batch, click here.

TAD Awards.

The awards for the 8th annual Toronto After Dark were handed out a few days ago. The audience award was tallied from over 4,000 votes this year. Here below are the winners.

GOLD

SILVER

BRONZE

For the short film accolades, the awards were split up into two categories, Canadian and International.

Representing the Great White North, Jean-Francois Asselin's wonderfully absurd tale Remember Me took GOLD, and Trevor Juras' The Lamp and Ben & Seb McKinnon's Kin took SILVER & BRONZE, respectively.

Internationally, Derek Van Gorder's futuristic sci-fi piece C: 299,729KM per Second took the top prize, followed by Eric Jacobus' Rope-A-Dope and Carlos Torrens' Sequence.

As has become custom, there were several individual awards handed out this year, which were voted on by All-Access Pass holders. The big winner here was the Tollywood crowd-pleasing actioner Eega, which took home nine awards, including Best Action Film, Most Original Film, Best Villain & Best Editing. Other multiple award winners were two of my faves, Jim Mickle's We Are What We Are and The Battery. I was also glad to see Scott Schirmer's film Found pick up two well deserved awards for Best Gore & Best Title Sequence.

Click here to see the full list of awards.