The Overlook Hotel

As far as mash-ups are concerned, few have the daring and the ambition of Antonio Maria Da Silva. His Hell’s Club video was a viral hit, and this new effort takes things one step further, not in the least from a technical perspective. AMDS crafts a sequel of sorts to The Shining by cleverly and mischievously combining dozens of movie clips. Using brilliant compositing techniques, great color grading, match-on-action cutting and by keeping lines of vision constant, he succeeds in creating a visually and narratively coherent universe out of his very eclectic source material.

 

It’s the technical expertise that draws you in, but it is the storytelling that keeps you watching for the nearly half an hour that this video is long. This is a narrative mash-up, that functions both as a stand-alone piece of surreal horror and as a tongue-in-cheek tribute to some of the genre’s most famous characters and practitioners. Our guide is Jack Torrance, alive and well: he’s alone in the Overlook hotel, at his writing desk, surrounded by the ghosts of Stephen King’s imagination (and that of some fellow horror writers). Although his voice over narration is often a bit too explicit and obvious, it helps in weaving together the different vignettes into a dreamlike tapestry.

 

The primary objective of AMDS is to pay hommage to horror, and his primary motive may well be the joy of crafting such a technically wondrous montage. But there are interesting analytical and essayistic elements to be found here as well. The video can be seen as a summary of Stephen King’s tropes and tricks, his fixations and fears: one of the reasons this mash-up is so coherent is exactly the consistency of King’s oeuvre. Around the twelve minute mark, an inspired montage brings together many iconic Jack Nicholson characters, here playing off each other, thus giving a short but unique view of the actor’s trademarks.