We live in a world where commercial directors speak (and breathe and live) the same pop culture language as the people they've been hired to peddle all kinds of products to. The result: television advertisements have gotten more clever, more specific, and most importantly, more ready to become instant viral sensations on the internet. A new IKEA commercial, whose release in the chilly weeks of October is no coincidence, cleverly parodies one of the most famous horror movies of all time and it's pretty cool.

The final punchline doesn't even come close to delivering on the promise of the set-up, but the set-up should get a smirk from even the most hardened horror movie fan: a young boy steers his big wheel through the halls of an empty IKEA store while a steadicam ruthlessly pursues him. It's a pretty thorough recreation of that famous sequence in 'The Shining,' where young Danny Torrance drives around the nearly empty (but very haunted) Overlook Hotel before crossing the path of two creepy twin ghosts.

It may not be a subtle joke to anyone with even a passing knowledge of cinema, but it's weirdly comforting to know that we live in a society where a major company builds an advertising campaign around a Stanley Kubrick movie. This is the age of the geek, indeed.

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