"Five months of peace is just what I want."

Rating: 9/10 (10 March 2012)

Back in the Seventies when Stephen King's horror novels were coming out, I would challenge myself to read them in the dead of night with the rest of the lights in the house off and no one else around. Most of the time I could force myself through a couple of chapters, but every once in a while King's narrative would stimulate the imagination so wildly I'd have to put the book down. Like the Sandy Koufax card in 'Needful Things', or the clown in the storm drain in 'It'. With 'The Shining', it was the idea of those dead twin girls inviting little Danny to come and play.
I only saw this film once before when it first came out and thought it was a masterful representation of the Stephen King book. Watching today, I thought it was a bit slow and too deliberate at times in it's exposition, with Nicholson's character Jack Torrance a little too over the top in the early stages. But you have to admit, he carries over that crazed catatonic look of Randle McMurphy from 'Cuckoo's Nest' quite effectively. By the time he turns into a would be ax murderer at the finale, he's firing on all cylinders and his manic performance is a wonder to behold.
For me, I guess the scariest moment of the film didn't have anything to do with murder and mayhem. It was catching Wendy's (Shelley Duvall) reaction to those dozens of typed pages of manuscript bearing a single sentence over and over again in various iterations. At that moment, you knew that Jack's mind had unraveled to a point of no return and he had completely lost it. Imagine the frustration and paranoia of typing the same thing repeatedly until the mind simply snaps. That was just a powerful scene.
Anyway, going back to my opening thought, the idea here would be the same. Try watching this one in the middle of the night with nothing but the TV set on and the room completely dark otherwise. No cheating now, you have to watch the movie all by yourself.