Stewart Thorndike, the writer and director of the new horror film “Bad Things” loves “The Shining.” Thorndike really loves that picture and doesn’t want his audience to forget it, so he reminds us over and over again.

While many a great film has been crafted out of homages to other works, it helps to have an endgame regarding your screenplay.

These proceedings start out well enough

Filmmaker Ondi Timoner felt the best way to tell the story of Robert Mapplethorpe was in a narrative-versus-documentary format. Mapplethorpe, the vaunted New York photograper who died of AIDS in 1989, was well-known for his photographs of controversial material, including of New York’s gay scene, and for his early marriage to rocker Patti Smith. “I don’t tend to make documentaries about people who aren’t alive