13 Nights of Shocktober: The Shining

by A.J.

This is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has arrived, the weather is cooling down, and October becomes the month-long celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. So, in the days leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some horror movie recommendations to help you celebrate Shocktober.

Night 8: Shelter-in-Place Night/Stephen King Night 
“I wish we could stay here forever... and ever... and ever.”
The Shining

The poster for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining advertises it as “A Masterpiece of Modern Horror.” For once, the marketing does not exaggerate. Each scene is crafted with superb skill and contains iconic characters and images. The influence of The Shining on later films and pop culture is immeasurable. Countless movies and TV shows have referenced The Shining; it’s one of the few movies that people will understand a reference to even if they have not seen the movie.

The plot follows what happens to a family living alone and isolated in a snowbound hotel. Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) has taken a job as the winter caretaker for the Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Jack, his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and young son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), will be entirely alone at the Overlook and, once the heavy snow falls, entirely cut off from the rest of the world. Early on we learn that one of the previous caretakers suffered from “cabin fever” and murdered his wife and two daughters with an axe then killed himself with a shotgun. Not to worry, Jack assures the hotel director, his wife loves ghost stories and horror films (though it’s unclear if he tells her about this) and he is looking forward to outlining a writing project. The hotel itself has a sinister supernatural side and the ghosts of the hotel influence Jack to harm his family. Unbeknownst to his parents, Danny has a psychic power, a sort of telepathy, that makes him a target for the malicious ghosts of the hotel. The Overlook chef, Dick Halloran (Scatman Carruthers), also has this power, which he calls “the shine.”

Watching the film this time, I found that The Shining’s sense of terror comes from Shelley Duvall’s performance. Jack and Danny are caught in the hotel’s supernatural schemes, but she is alone in not understanding what is happening or why. She is the audience substitute and the scene of her running through the hotel experiencing something frightening at every turn is the experience of a viewer watching the movie. Jack Nicholson is an actor not afraid to go big, or even over the top for a role. When Jack (the character) begins to unravel, Nicholson contorts his face, makes his eyebrows go wild, and speaks in a comic tone though his grin is all danger and menace. Child actors can make or break a movie and here Danny Lloyd gives a performance that really makes the movie. Danny is a smart child but never feels as though his precociousness is required by the script; he always feels like a real kid. When he goes catatonic and starts shouting “REDRUM!” while holding a knife it is genuinely creepy. Scatman Carruthers gives a good performance as the kindly chef. He handles explaining “the shining” well and also convincingly conveys the danger of the hotel even while trying to hide it from Danny.

The Shining is difficult to classify: it’s a haunted house story, a ghost story, sometimes it plays like a slow burn psychological horror story, other times it has intense shock visuals. It’s an odd, unique movie. Little is made of the fact that the hotel was built on an Indian burial ground. Long stretches of the film are filled with mundane things like Wendy and Danny watching TV, Jack throwing a baseball against a wall, or Danny riding his tricycle around the endless hotel hallways. Then a music “scare” cue will hit startlingly on something random like Jack taking paper out of his typewriter or a title card letting us know that it is Tuesday. If you’re paying close attention you might notice that Danny seems to be riding his tricycle on the ground floor then turns a corner is on the second floor. In a film about a haunted hotel, a “mistake” like this works in the film’s favor. The vision Danny sees of creepy identical twin girls in old fashioned dresses asking him to play with them “forever and ever and ever” is chilling and one of the most iconic images in horror cinema, perhaps only topped by the image of gallons and gallons of blood pouring out of the elevator doors in slow motion. When the horror hits, it hits hard.

Around the time I read the novel, I started calling this movie Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to firmly differentiate it from the 1997 TV mini-series (starring Steven Weber) and Stephen King’s novel, to which the film is less than faithful. King has been quite open about his disdain for Kubrick’s adaptation which he feels misses the whole point of the novel. To King, the story of The Shining is about a man warped by alcoholism into a threat to his family. To Kubrick, alcohol is merely the catalyst, the result is pure terror, and the cause is not important. In an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, King talked about a phone call he had with Kubrick that revealed their fundamental differences when it came to ghost stories. Kubrick told King that all ghost stories are inherently optimistic because they imply something existing after death. King replied, what about Hell? After a long pause, Kubrick said, “I don’t believe in Hell.”

I end up re-watching The Shining every few years. I even got to watch it at the Stanley Hotel, the real-life hotel in Estes Park, Colorado where King stayed with his family on a lonely, snowy night and was inspired to write the novel. I ate a delicious steak and drank a fine whiskey while sitting under a portrait of Stephen King at the hotel restaurant; easily one of my vacation highlights. The Stanley Hotel had no hedge maze, but such was the influence of the movie that it eventually grew one (it was only knee high and not very ominous when I visited). It seems too on the nose to describe The Shining as haunting, but that perfectly describes the film. It stays with you and creeps into your thoughts and you wonder if you ever really left.