What if cinema’s most iconic, chilling and scary scenes from horror and thrillers were adapted for children’s pop up books? That’s what Oldrids & Downtown’s new content project has done, turning the most famous horror scenes into friendly pop-up book fun for all the family.
The films they’ve looked at for this project are Jaws, Psycho, Poltergeist, The Shining, Stranger Things, It and Alien. All of these, with the exception of Stranger Things maybe, have rightly earned themselves legendary and iconic status. Although Stranger Things looks like it’s well on its way to the same league.
The Shining and It are both adaptions of Stephen King novels. He’s written in the region of 90 novels during his illustrious career and seems to have boiled story writing down to a complete science. He’s also written many short stories, with the figure believed to be in the 200s. He famously despised Stanley Kubrick’s adaption of The Shining. His biggest gripe was with Jack Nicholson’s character who he said he could tell he was crazy from the start. As the book is about gradually slipping into a murderous frenzy, he felt this trampled on the nuances of his story.
Jaws and Poltergeist are the brainchildren of Steven Spielberg, ever heard of him? Jaws was plagued with technical issues during shooting but managed to make 470 million dollars from its 9 million dollar budget, so the labour was worth it in the end. Spielberg wrote and produced Poltergeist but isn’t credited as director as he was shooting E.T at the same time. His contract didn’t allow him to direct another movie simultaneously, although legend has it that he basically directed it anyway.
Psycho, despite being directed in 1960, still lives on as one of the best horror films ever made. The iconic shower scene took six days to shoot, despite being three minutes in the film. Ridley Scott’s Alien was the first popular sci-fi horror the world had seen and enjoyed a tremendous amount of popularity, sequels, video games, prequels and more.
Finally, Stranger Things is the most recent on the list but has already managed to create quite the stir in such a short time. From the visual effects to the story line to the aesthetic, they’ve made a truly engaging thriller series that incorporates so much from other classics from interdimensional travel to top secret government facilities and bone shuddering creatures.
Check out Oldrids & Downtown’s brilliant pop-up book adaptions of famous scary scenes and let us know what you think!
