I have a snow globe containing a dead guy who had froze to death in the snow. What does that say about me? This post first ran in 2016.
There are gifts, and then there are GIFTS. You know the kind: where the Giver is totally in tune with the Givee and knows what would be perfect.
I received just such a gift some years back from Lindsay Teunis, my oldest daughter. Don’t know where she found it, but I’m glad she did. Someone with a creative (read: sick) mind took one of the final frames from the 1980 horror classic, The Shining—the one where Jack Torrance (Nicholson) is sitting frozen to death in the snow after chasing his son with an ax through the hedge maze—and turned it into a snow globe.
When Lindsay found it, she immediately thought of her dad. Uh-oh, what’s that say about me! Heck, I raised my three daughters well. But with me being a writer of horror, among other genres, they got to watch a lot of scary movies back in the day, and darned if they didn’t turn out to be awesome adults. (Although I still bear the guilt of having let them watch Pet Sematary and It.)
Anyway, Lindsay was right: I love my Jack Nicholson snow globe. It resides in a prominent place: the edge of a bookshelf in my guy cave, right next to the chair in which I write, and read, and muck about on my laptop—in other words, where I spend much of my day.
Looking at the snow globe recently, with dead Jack staring at me, I was reminded that I had not watched The Shining for quite some time. The film, directed by the legendary Stanley Kubrick, is a classic in its own right, though it varies quite a bit from Stephen King’s novel. The master of horror had a great many issues with it, so in 1997, at the height of his popularity, he wrote the teleplay for a three-part, award-winning miniseries (presented as Stephen King’s The Shining).
I’ve since re-read the novel, watched both the movie and the miniseries, and wrote about all of them. Check out my posts.
Okay, I need to move Jack back up to the bookshelf. He’s starting to give me the willies.