On Halloween, Belgian filmmakers Chloë Delanghe and Mattijs Driesen will present Hexham Heads, their co-directed film, at Art Cinema OFFoff. Their film is based on a ghost story deriving from the English town of Hexham, where a family was terrorized by a series of paranormal occurrences after bringing home some small stone heads. It is a re-account of this story and a re-imagination of the horror film genre, in which spaces, objects and the photographic process engender suspense. On this festive horror-evening, creators of the soundtrack Sam Comerford and Branwen Kavanagh will give a concert. After that, Delanghe and Driesen have chosen a surprise Halloween film to share with you.
In anticipation of this event, I asked these seasoned horror fans which other films they’d recommend. Their first choice is The Shining by Stanley Kubrick, stating: “The trope of the gloomy haunted house evoking a domestic trauma-psychology is transformed and expanded here into a gigantic, brightly lit hotel evoking a historic injury. This haunted space is defined by its labyrinthian corridors, in which time and place are confused, and wherein the violence of both psychology and history is continually repeated.”
Their second film of choice is Smile 2 by Parker Finn, who has declared The Shining his favourite film of all time and has cast Ray Nicholson, son of Jack Nicholson, in his latest instalment of the Smile franchise. “We haven’t seen this one yet, but we’re looking forward to it,” say Delanghe and Driesen. “The first one was far from great, but it had a truly weird ending. And even bad horror films always have interesting stakes.”
A family heads to an isolated hotel for the winter, where a sinister presence influences the father into violence. At the same time, his psychic son sees horrifying forebodings from both the past and the future.
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Redrum.
Redrum.
REDRUM!
“The Shining seems to be about the quest for immortality – the immortality of evil. Men are psychic murderers: they want to be free and creative, and can only take out their frustrations on their terrified wives and children. The movie appears to be a substitution story: The waiter denies that he was the caretaker, but there has always been a caretaker. And if the waiter is telling the truth, it’s Jack who has always been the caretaker. Or maybe Jack is so mad that he has hatched this waiter, in which case Jack probably has always been the caretaker. Apparently, he lives forever, only to attack his family endlessly. It’s what Kubrick said in 2001. Mankind began with the weapon and just went on from there. Redrum (‘murder’ backward). Kubrick is the man who thought it necessary to introduce a godlike force (the black slab) to account for evolution. It was the slab that told the apelike man to pick up the bone and use it as a weapon. This was a new version of original sin: man the killer acts on God’s command. Somehow, Kubrick ducked out on the implications of his own foolishness when he gave 2001 its utopian, technological ending – man, reborn out of science, as angelic, interplanetary fetus. Now he seems to have gone back to his view at the beginning of 2001, man is a murderer, throughout eternity. The bone that was high in the air has turned into Jack’s axe, held aloft, and Jack, crouched over, making wild, inarticulate sounds as he staggers in the maze, has become the ape.”
“In The Shining, as in Barry Lyndon, Kubrick shows us a society in which surface elegance hides a dissipated and ultimately destructive existence. In A Clockwork Orange, he gave us one totally violent society; in The Shining, he gives us still another. This time, however, the violence is born of trying to live up to oppressive expectations and not out of some perverted lust for life. But what is most intriguing in The Shining is that Kubrick’s themes of violence and dissipation are developed in a decidedly American, not European, context. In 2001, Kubrick suggested we could transcend our dissipation with a new frontier–outer space. With The Shining, thirteen years later, he is observing that life in America might well destroy us first. If there are any frontiers left for Kubrick, they do not involve the expansion of boundaries but the construction of new social relationships within our existing borders. In her review of The Shining, Pauline Kael implies that Kubrick, too long absent from America, cannot really understand us. But it is evident from the film that he understands us very well and is trying to tell us something important about ourselves. Kubrick, in fact, is coming home.”
“Kubrick’s 1980 film has certainly inspired reams of particularly labyrinthine scholarly and critical analysis, YouTube fan videos, and blogs, mirroring the hedge maze in the movie. It has spawned a mainstream (or cult?) documentary devoted to unlocking its purported secrets, Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 (2012). Named after the eponymous room in The Overlook Hotel, the deadpan documentary deconstructs the horror movie from a variety of perspectives. ‘Room 237 conceives of the film as resembling the Da Vinci Code, the viewer as Alan Turing confronted with an Enigma machine, and Kubrick as like Walter Sickert supposedly confessing in one of his East End paintings that he was Jack the Ripper.’ Kubrick and The Shining have stimulated the production of non-academic books as well. Derek Taylor Kent’s novel, Kubrick’s Game (2016), is constructed around the conceit that there was ‘a hidden game within [Kubrick’s] films.’ Ian Christopher’s The Games Room (2020) is subtitled ‘A novel insight into Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining.’ It alleges that ‘The Shining is a puzzle, a maze’ to be solved. Simon Roy’s Kubrick Red: A Memoir (2014) is both an interpretation of the movie and a memoir in which the two are intertwined. There is even a podcast, The Shining 2:37, dedicated to parsing the film 2 minutes and 37 seconds at a time. Jack Torrance’s nightmare of cutting up his wife and son into little pieces precisely augurs what this podcast, as well as what other scholars, fans, and critics, have done to The Shining.”
About to embark on a world tour, global pop sensation Skye Riley begins experiencing increasingly terrifying and inexplicable events. Overwhelmed by the escalating horrors and the pressures of fame, Skye is forced to face her past.
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“Clever marketing by the people making Smile 2. Using Jack Nicholson’s son on the movie poster making a face eerily similar to his father’s trademark sinister smirk? That’s given me enough intrigue to watch it now even though I hated the first movie.”
“While originally slated for a streaming only premiere on Paramount+, the studio behind the film gave Smile a full theatrical release, a move that paid out $217 million at the global box office. The smiling success of the first film no doubt convinced Paramount to sign on for another. If the latest installment can pull off similar results, it could be the start of the newest saga in a long line of classic horror franchises. After the release of the first film, Finn spoke briefly about the possibility of a sequel: ‘I do think that there is still a lot of interesting stuff to explore in the world of Smile. There certainly are stones that I left unturned by design.’”
“For fans of the first film, it’s more of the same, and for any casual horror viewers who are up for a funhouse thrill this October, it’ll do the trick.”
Patrick Cavanaugh: Do you find that horror movies influence your comedy?
Tim Heidecker: I think they do. I grew up watching all the classics, and I think people like David Lynch and obviously Stanley Kubrick, with The Shining. But I don’t go too deep into the slasher stuff.
Tim Heidecker in conversation with Patrick Cavanaugh4
1Jacob Stolworthy, “Horror fans lured into watching Smile 2 after ‘genious’ casting of Hollywood actor’s son”, 16 October 2024.
In 1971, a family living in the town of Hexham was plagued by a series of paranormal events. After bringing a pair of small stone heads into their home, the family became terrorized by the ghostly sounds and images these objects exerted. Hexham Heads adopts an impressionistic approach to this contemporary folk tale.
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“Tinted by the red safelight of the darkroom, the film (re)constructs a breathless pastoral horror about a place crystallised in time and terrorised by two 6cm tall stone heads whose current location remains unknown. We visit Rede Avenue – the original source of this supernatural energy – through the shivery stillness of Chloë Delanghe’s grainy photographs and an erratic composition of Sam Comerford performed by an ensemble of musicians across Ireland and Belgium. In Hexham Heads the joint mysteries of photosensitivity and the stone tape theory – which speculates on how minerals can record and replay the energy of hauntings – create a volatile chemical reaction. Delanghe and Driesen defy the impossibility of capturing ghosts in the lens by immersing us in a psychogeographical journey through infinite doors, windows and passages.”
“A film that is both theoretical and sensorial at the same time, in short, in which the reflection on images, cinema and genre becomes one with the filmic experience, with the uneasiness generated by an atypical and unconventional horror, in the challenge, perhaps impossibility, of giving a new weight to images and to our way of looking at them.”