Ewan McGregor is going to have to start getting some practice riding a Big Wheel through the hallways of a spooky hotel, because he has signed on to play Danny Torrance in Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep, the adaptation of Stephen King’s sequel to The Shining. That comes from Variety, which says King has “given his…
According to Bloody Disgusting, an Italian auction website is going to be selling off a bunch of items once owned by Stanley Kubrick’s longtime assistant Emilio D’Alessandro, including the corduroy jacket worn by Jack Nicholson in The Shining, a bunch of props from Full Metal Jacket, and—perhaps most interestingly—a…
It’s still easy to rag on James Franco for acting like a pretentious grad student a few years ago, but it’s time to acknowledge the dude deserves our respect. Even if you didn’t like his brilliant turn in Spring Breakers, his reverent, nuanced performances in fare like 11.22.63 and The Deuce are proof that he isn’t…
With the release of It and The Dark Tower (and, hell, even Gerald’s Game), more and more casual Stephen King fans are hearing tell of the “dark universe” that connects so many of his books. Pennywise and the Losers’ Club, for example, not only appear in It, but are also either referenced or seen in King books like The…
Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d…
It’s hard to overstate the natural beauty that surrounds the Timberline Lodge. Located above the snow line atop what everyone refers to as simply “the mountain,” every window—except for the ones completely blocked by snow—casually opens onto a stunning vista, as if to say, “Oh, that? That’s just the white-capped peak…
Stephen King is brilliant, but he’s also sometimes wrong. For years, the prolific horror author has asserted that Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of The Shining is not just a bad adaptation but also a bad movie, “a Cadillac with no engine in it” that “you can’t do anything with… except admire it as sculpture.”…
There are many masters of the cinematic freakout. Just last week we interviewed one such master, Laura Dern, on the very literal method to her madness. But over the course of seven decades of cinematic work, Jack Nicholson has distinguished himself as one of the true savants of the form, a roiling ball of barely…
Have you ever thought, “I wish The Shining was weirder, scarier, and more intense—and also had more synthesizers”? We can’t imagine many have, but in case your nightmares aren’t visceral enough, a video from Richard Vezina envisions what The Shining would look like had another auteur, David Lynch, directed it instead…
As a racist, dangerously ignorant steak salesman makes his way toward the Oval Office despite the majority of Americans voting otherwise, that spurned majority is doing some soul-searching. Namely: Would Bernie Sanders have won? There are countless hand-wringing articles exploring how Hillary Clinton’s candidacy…
Some fans assume that Stephen King, by virtue of his being the most successful horror writer of his time, must have had a terribly traumatic childhood that fueled his imagination later in life. But it’s not true, as the author himself reveals in the latest installment of PBS Digital Studios’ Blank On Blank webseries.…
One thing most people agree about film is that—despite its ability to commingle technology, storytelling, music, and visual composition into a medium of unparalleled emotional power—it does not have enough cats. But not anymore. A U.K.-based couple has been slowly reworking iconic cinematic images to feature their…
Yesterday, Mike Pence got the House Republicans together to figure out how one of those darn “selfie sticks” work. The result was a selfie of unmitigated terror: a sea of old, pasty faces, like some sort of chorus of the damned, frozen and oblivious. It immediately drew connections with Paul Ryan’s similarly forced…
In an effort to both serve our readers and help support The A.V. Club, we are going to post daily links to deals and interesting items that we find over on Amazon. If you use these links to click through and buy something—not just the thing you clicked—on Amazon, we will see a portion of that income. You don’t have to…
On The Comics Page, The A.V. Club invites comics artists to illustrate their pop cultural flights of fancy. This week: Luke Meeken posits that misogyny is the monster in horror films. (Previously, he dissected the details of horror video games.)
Viewers of the most recent episode of Saturday Night Live—as well as anyone who’s been on the internet this week—are by now very familiar with David S. Pumpkins. The jack-o’-lantern-suit-wearing, perpetually grinning Pumpkins (played by Tom Hanks), appeared as part of the show’s “Haunted Elevator” sketch, popping up…
When director Stanley Kubrick died in 1999, his proposed adaptation of the 1969 short story “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long” by Brian Aldiss did not die with him. Instead, with the approval of Kubrick’s widow, the project was inherited by a second director, Steven Spielberg, who had originally intended only to…
The Love Boat ran for 10 years, from 1977 to 1987, and yet in all of that time it never once hosted a xenomorph or rotted corpse as a guest star. Well, thanks to YouTube user RIJIR, that has been retroactively remedied with this opening credits sequence that includes some favorites from horror films making an…
Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d…
Toward the end of “Chapter One: The Vanishing Of Will Byers,” Joyce tells Jonathan his missing brother is close: “I know it. I feel it in my heart.” Will is more than close. As he spells out on his mother’s makeshift spirit board, he’s right here. So is Barb. So is an entire world, like their own but eerily desolate.…