In Toy Story 3, our characters’ hell is made by other toys. There are countless horror movies about toys and dolls coming to life, most famously the Child’s Play series, but short of Sid’s well-meaning abominations, who wind up helping Woody and Buzz escape in the first film, there hadn’t been scary toys in the series up until now. He gets back to the horror leanings of the first film, which was altogether more playful with the notion of people being scared by sentient toys. This formative experience might also explain why his Toy Story film (he edited the first two films and co-directed Toy Story 2 with John Lasseter) is so willing to play with horror in a family film. The number 237 is also tagged onto the end of Trixie the triceratops’ online dinosaur pal’s name, ‘Velocistar_237’, and appears as the model number of an ‘Overlook’ brand CCTV camera in the Sunnyside security office. Firstly, RM237 appears on the number plate of a dump truck, (driven by who is believed to be an older Sid, funnily enough), foreshadowing the toys’ eventual reckoning with the trash incinerator at the film’s climax. While Sid’s house had the same iconic carpets as the Overlook Hotel in Toy Story, there are Easter eggs galore here. He also inserted visual references to 237 throughout his own film. Unkrich’s fandom extends to curating a Tumblr blog dedicated to The Shiningand helping to make the recent documentary about interpretations of the film, Room 237, named for the forbidden hotel room in Kubrick’s classic. “I think on one level, it’s because it was the film that got me interested in not only filmmaking but also having a sense that there’s a singular voice controlling the imagery that’s being put on the screen.” “I’ve thought a lot about why it obsesses me, and I think it’s multi-tiered,” Unkrich told Empire Online at the time of Toy Story 3‘s release. For starters, there’s the influence of director Lee Unkrich, who was inspired to look into filmmaking when he watched his favourite horror film of all time is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, for the first time at the ripe old age of 12. For now though, we’re looking at the scary side of Toy Story 3, as evidenced in the film’s various homages and influences in horror cinema.
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