Watch: What If David Lynch Had Directed Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’?

If David Lynch had directed Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining"–let’s just stop there. In a sense, he did, just as much as Kubrick directed many of Lynch’s films. (In a sense.) It’s been said many times that there are only 4 or 5 good ideas, and they keep being passed around over and over, re-shaped, re-imagined. And the creative animus, the deranged, meticulous force of imagination that fueled Kubrick’s mind when he took a good thriller by Stephen King and made it into a horrific masterpiece could well have been flowing through Lynch’s mind when he made… anything. Except, perhaps, ‘The Straight Story.’ Or ‘Dune.’ This mash-up (though it’s a lot more) by Richard Vezina has a lot of beautiful little touches: a log truck rolling by outside the window as Jack Torrance is conducting his entrance interview at The Overlook; Dick Hallorann ending up in the tractor from ‘The Straight Story’ when he’s driving to the hotel to save the lives of Torrance’s family; Torrance watching ants gnawing and gnashing their teeth as he looks at a model of the hotel grounds… Far from just a random supposition, the question at the heart of the piece prods us to pay more close attention to the similarities between these two cinematic emissaries from the dark side of the mind.