Shining

A well crafted movie preview (or “trailer” as it’s called in “the biz”) can make a bad movie look enticing and make a good movie look dreary and unappealing. This reminds me of that time that the preview for Billy Elliot made me cry. Dance, Billy, dance! I partly blame Enya. Her music is very powerful.

The video trailer below, entitled “Shining,” is a tribute to the magical alchemy of clever editing.


“Shining” was created by Robert Ryang, a Manhattan film editor’s assistant. It was the winning entry for a 2005 film contest sponsored by the New York chapter of the Association of Independent Creative Editors. The contest rules were simple: take any film and make a trailer which casts that film in a different genre. Sound and dialogue could be altered, visual images could not.

And, presto! Stanley Kubrick’s stylistic horror classic (and arguably, one of the few truly successful film adaptations of a Stephen King novel) is transformed into a hilariously moronic tale of a jaded writer and his relationship with a precocious yet vulnerable kid in need of a father figure. About A Boy, Three Men and a Baby, Annie, Kolya, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom…..I love this genre!

I can’t tell what’s more frightening: the evocative terror of The Shining in its original form or the idea that a cinematic masterpiece could so easily be transmogrified into Jerry Maguire style dreck through crafty, selective editing and an overused Peter Gabriel tune. Either way, it's pretty scary. It’s a dark, dark world out there.