This post is part of a series called "31 Days of Horror", thirty-one important horror films over the course of a month. Click The Shining (1980): Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall and Scatman Crothers. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson, based on the novel by Stephen King.
Is there a human being on the face of the planet who hasn’t seen or at least heard of “The Shining”? It’s curious, because it’s not your standard “notorious” horror film, like “Night of the Living Dead” or “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre”. It’s the result of a master filmmaker finding something wholly unrelated to the horror in the source material (in Kubrick’s case, writer’s block and the pressure of needing to come up with a new project as the span between films grows) that strikes his very core. Kubrick delivers a horror film alright, but one without monsters and without gore (although, maybe an entire elevator car filled with blood constitutes gore in some circles), instead delving to the heart of what’s fearful to an ordinary human being: isolation, domestic abuse, mental illness, struggling with addiction, and wraps it all up in a ghost story.
It’s hard to tell why Stephen King has been so vocal over the years about his hatred of this film, because it’s a masterful telling of the same material that King himself has been over time and time again in how own work.
In 1980, “The Shining” was the center of my fascination with horror films that had been revived the previous year by Ridley Scott’s “Alien”. Like “Alien”, Kubrick establishes the theme and sense of isolation perfectly in the first twenty minutes of the story and unleashes the terror from there, and it’s an unconventional horror in every sense of the word. For most of the film, you just don’t know whether it’s going to be the story of one man’s breakdown into a pathological killer, or just a plain old-fashioned ghost story, and that’s what makes the film work; the characters in the situation don’t know what’s going to happen and neither does the viewer.
So expert is Kubrick’s mastering of horror in “The Shining” is that he’s able to make a better-than-ordinary ghost story without having a spooky old dark house and shadowy corners, instead providing a very well-lit, sometimes over-exposed environment where the bulk of the action takes place.
Kubrick knew, like Ridley Scott, how to sell an icon, and what better proof of that than the insane grin of Jack Torrence (Jack Nicholson) through the slats of the bathroom door he’s battered with an axe to kill his wife? There’s just so much that’s become iconic from this film, and most of those images are from the handful of stills that were released to initially promote the film, so it’s clear that Kubrick knew very early on what would tap into the brains of prospective ticket-buyers.
The great thing about “The Shining”, and pretty much every Kubrick film is the fact that you can watch them over and over and still get things out of them you didn’t get the first time. With “The Shining”, I know that I could watch it repeatedly for Jack Nicholson’s (very quotable) performance alone. The film is a masterpiece on just so many levels.
The film, or book, or whatever, was actually remade as a TV mini-series starring the guy from “Wings”. Funny how no one seems to remember that.
Get it at Amazon.com:
The Shining (Two-Disc Special Edition)
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