The Chickening
2016 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Davy Force, Nick DenBoer
Genres: comedy, experimental, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
A frame-by-frame digital remix of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining that recasts Jack Torrance as the unraveling night manager of a fried-chicken resort, mutating the horror classic into a hallucinatory poultry-themed comedy nightmare.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
This is the kind of premise that makes everyone else in the room uncomfortable—which is exactly why it works. Taking Kubrick's most meticulous nightmare and remixing it into a fever dream about a chicken resort shouldn't be funny or smart, but the audacity of that collision is everything.
A clever conceptual gesture, but one that ultimately trades in irony rather than interrogating it; the film gestures toward postmodern remix culture without the formal rigor that would make the deconstruction of Kubrick's technique actually land as critique.
The real sleight of hand here is how the directors use digital compositing not as spectacle but as precision—each warped frame, each grotesque feather overlay, each moment where Kubrick's blocking becomes unhinged by poultry obsession, is a choice that compounds into something genuinely unsettling and original.
Reviews
Nothing Can Prepare You For THE CHICKENING
'The Chickening' Is a Brain-Melting Remix of 'The Shining'
Festivals
- Toronto International Film Festival 2015
- Sundance Film Festival 2016
- Fantastic Fest 2015