Money has always been tight in my family, and because of my mom's creativity and our desire to have fun no matter what, we learned to celebrate every occasion. I grew up having Golden Globe parties, having a party for The Vampire Diaries season premiers, and a little party for every random holiday that came our way. All of that being said, I was raised to celebrate every occasion and to use creativity to make it fun instead of using money all the time.
Recently I came to the horrific realization that my friend had never seen the movie The Shining, which is an obvious classic everyone should see at least once in their life. While it's fun to just sit down and watch a movie, I wanted to make it special and the experience as memorable as humanly possible. So here is what I did to make a movie night into an experience.
1. Obtaining the movie
While I was fully confident on hosting this movie night, it didn't dawn on me until later on that I didn't even own the movie. I checked on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime to see if any of them offered it for free. Unfortunately, the cheapest I found the movie was for around $5 to rent for 48 hours. I even checked to see if Walmart had it to purchase for cheap, but they were out of stock.
Someone recommended I check my local library for the movie, which wasn't something I had ever considered. To my surprise, they did! My library card was free because I lived locally, and the rental was for a week so I was lucky enough for them to have it in stock for me to rent.
2. Decorations
I tried Googling ideas on how to decorate for this movie, but unfortunately, I had little results. This movie is a little difficult to decorate for because there honestly isn't much to go by in terms of setting the scene (unless I have a lot of fake blood, a costume, or snow). So I had to get creative and think about key scenes I might be able to recreate. For my decorations I relied mainly on my printer and things I already owned.
For my living room decorations, I typed the classic phrase from the movie "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." Over and over, just as the scene in the movie. I made around ten pages and spread them across my coffee table as a sort of table cloth and used various formats of the phrase. Additionally, I used a kitchen knife from my drawer (representing Wendy's weapon from the movie), and a typewriter coaster set I already owned from Amazon https://www.amazon.com/The-Lakeside-Collection-GetSet2Save-COMINHKPR141524/dp/B01LDKPSEI/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=typewriter+coaster&qid=1584313539&sr=8-2 and the candle is just because it smelled nice and gave a spooky glow. Something I wish I had found was a toy axe (I looked at the Dollar Tree and Walmart and neither carried one).
These decorations were ones I looked up on Google images and printed and cut them out. Obviously the key room, 237, I had to put on my bedroom even though my friend had no clue what it meant at the time. To make it creepier, I used my Philips Hue lights (not pictured) and turned them red in my bedroom to make it creepier. I hand-wrote Redrum with a red pencil for my bathroom and cut out and attached the classic axe scene from the movie with Jack (Jack NIcholson) to the back of my bathroom door. Unfortunately, my printer was low on ink so the quality was awful, but it still worked. I simply printed out two copies of Jack and managed to cut them in a way to make it look like the scene from the movie.
3. Food
Unfortunately, I didn't take photos of the food we had for the movie night. My friend wanted to make our own pizzas, so we bought two three-packs of pizza crusts, two bags of shredded mozzarella cheese, a bag of cheddar cheese, a pack of pepperoni, a bag of bacon bits, two jars of pizza sauce, BBQ sauce, and some grilled chicken I already had on hand. We pretty much had a pizza buffet with six different combos. It was amazing. I am unsure exactly what the ingredients cost overall because they paid for the food while I set up the party, but I believe it was around $25 and really was enough to feed around 4-6 people rather than just two.
While the movie doesn't show major food options, you can always do chocolate ice cream for dessert to represent the treat Danny (Doc) and Hallorann shared in the kitchen early in the movie.
4. Drinks
For the drinks, we started off with something simple which was basically my own version of RedRum. Again, I'm sorry I don't have a photo of it because I made it while we made pizzas so I was caught up in the moment, but basically here are the ingredients:
Redrum
Ice
1.5 ounces of Bicardi
0.5 ounces of Grenadine
Sprite to top off glass
Basically I filled a glass with ice, added the Bicardi and Sprite and gave it a little stir, and then slowly added the Grenadine so it settled on the bottom of the glass. It's a really gorgeous drink and simple to make. We had the cocktail as we made pizzas.
The second drink we had was, of course, inspired by the movie. While it may be wrong to drink what the alcoholic (Jack) drinks in the movie, we just had to complete our theme by matching the movie.
In the scene, where Jack is at a bar in the resort asking for bourbon, it is shown this very drink (which isn't a bourbon, but is shown in the movie) being poured into a glass.
***Highly recommend not mixing dark and light liquors in one night. If you do, be careful.
We shared a Jack Daniels drink during the famous bar scene towards the end of the movie. For me, purchasing this whiskey was the only cost I had for this night, which was around $23 for the bottle. I have used it for multiple drinks since then so it was well worth the money.
Overall, the night was a complete success and we had an absolute blast making pizzas, drinking cocktails, and them finally understanding what the decorations meant. If you decide to have The Shining theme night, let me know how it goes and overall have fun planning out the night!