The Office blessed us with a lot of glorious scenes and memorable moments, but the stand-alone sequences that often feature in the intro are some of the best cinematic moments in TV history. Think ‘Dunder Mifflin Lip Dub‘, ‘Parkour‘, and, of course, ‘The Fire Drill’.
Dwight, in his capacity as fire marshal, tests his fellow employees’ fire safety skills by creating the thorough impression that the building is on fire. This scene is emblematic of the comedy genius of The Office.
Dwight’s unhinged behaviour and Stanley’s consequential heart attack unsurprisingly allows this scene to translate all too well into the horror genre, as Twitter user Austin Spencer (@austinthefreak1) demonstrated.Spenser’s horror version of the fire drill scene quickly went viral on Twitter, with nearly 5 million views racked up at time of writing.
His re-editing of the scene takes away the jokes (#SaveBandit), and the music, replacing it with an ominous soundtrack and a sinister tone. The recut is so chilling it actually makes the moment when Stanley falls to the floor seriously harrowing. I teared up.
All in all, it’s pretty damn cool.
I removed all the jokes from the fire drill scene from The Office and added scary music to see how much I could change the tone pic.twitter.com/pBrGNEK53e
— Austin Spencer (@austinthefreak1) January 5, 2019
If you’re a diehard fan of The Office you might have noticed that yes, the opening shot is not from this episode, but actually taken from the episode where Michael burns his foot on a George Foreman grill (a classic).
Spencer acknowledged that he pulled the Dwight-typing-Dwight clip in for pacing purposes and as an allusion to the similar moment in iconic horror film, The Shining.
I had to cut so much out of the intro that the pacing felt a little rushed, so I decided to add that shot to help set the stage ? I was also trying to allude to this moment from The Shining ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/zTaTDZzh1w
— Austin Spencer (@austinthefreak1) January 5, 2019
Now Austin Spenser is fielding a wave of requests to edit other iconic The Office scenes into similarly freaky recuts, and between the CPR scene and Michael (and Dwight) ‘surviving’ in the woods, there’s no shortage of suitable options.