Terrifying, Brilliant, Stunningly Well-Made, Astonishingly Creepy Classic Horror Film

Rating: 9/10 (11 May 2008)

Jack Torrance is a struggling writer with a wife and young son, who takes a job as the winter caretaker at a remote hotel in the Colorado Rockies called The Overlook. He hopes the isolation will help his writing, but slowly the hotel seems to exert an insidious and malefic influence over him ...
I think horror films are my favourite kind of movies, and I think The Shining is my favourite horror movie. The reasons why are hard to explain. It's an almost perfect movie technically, its plot is gripping, terrifying and extremely original (notable within the notoriously repetitive haunted-house sub-genre) and the performances are truly iconic, but it's more than that - it's something intangible in the atmosphere. I find the ghost story often works great in fiction but not so well on-screen; in The Shining the music, photography and art direction somehow combine to create an incredible atmosphere of dread and unease. The Overlook (all of which was built on sets at Elstree Studios) really becomes its own character in the film - the ultimate Bad Place - and when Jack finally descends into his rampaging homicidal lunacy for the finale he literally becomes The Overlook personified, as if the hotel has somehow gradually poisoned his soul until there's nothing left of the real person he used to be. It's this amazing sense of the evil of the place, as Danny tracks his trike around the corridors and the camera prowls around behind him, which somehow leaps off the screen and chills the blood. It's a metaphysical horror film, and it's the best one ever made. It's also scary in the best entertaining traditions - there's something delicious about the way it sets up this unusual, isolated family trio, and all the scares come from your anticipation of something bad happening to them; there is very little actual violence and only one on-screen death. The golden rule of horror storytelling is to create characters worth caring about, and this is, beg pardon, a shining example of how to do it well. Upon first viewing, Nicholson's tour-de-force performance as Jack (the loony par excellence in his extended gallery of loonies) tends to dominate, and it is exceptional, a wild study of a man losing his mind, but both Duvall and six-year-old Lloyd are incredible too. Duvall plays the living end of vulnerability and hysteria to perfection, and Lloyd delivers a beautifully innocent child's performance - watch his scenes with Crothers (who is also wonderful) where he just can't stop staring at him. There are many many great scenes in this movie - the astonishing opening credits helicopter swoop through the mountains, the creepy hag in room 237, the ghostly ballroom soiree, the all-work-and-no-play-makes-Jack-a-dull-boy moment, the blood in the elevator, all the incredible low-angle Steadicam shots through the hotel, Danny running through the snowy maze, the attack in the bathroom - but more importantly it all melds together so beautifully. The film is simultaneously exhilarating (watch out, Jack's gone nutty), deliciously enigmatic ("I'm sorry to differ with you sir, but you are the caretaker. You've always been the caretaker."), and visually gorgeous. John Alcott's photography is simply the best - I cannot think of a film with more extraordinary and exquisitely tailored photography. Some people complain there are too many of Garrett Brown's incredible tracking shots - rubbish, there are exactly as many as needed and no more. I also love the sets, by Roy Walker and Les Tomkins, which are both amazingly convincing (the only real hotel shots are the few very wide exteriors, which are of the Timberline Lodge in Orgeon's Mount Hood National Forest) and amazingly disturbing. After viewing this movie you feel you know that place and could walk around and orient yourself, which is a great testament to any film. Because of the new innovation of the Steadicam at the time, the sets were deliberately built as a full space (as opposed to the usual three-walls principle), which only adds to their aura of gloom. Finally, there is Kubrick's typically inspired use of music; weird electronic shrieks and crows by Wendy Carlos which first unsettle us, and then an indescribable battering-ram of avant-garde symphonic screeches, thuds and growls by Bela Bartok, Gyorgy Ligeti and Krzysztof Pendericki, which hammer us into submission. Watch scenes like the one where Jack chases Danny through the maze, and you'll see photography, art direction, music and editing in simple perfect harmony. There's a lot of weird stuff about this movie which I can't help talking about, purely because it's one of my all-time favourite flicks. Oddly, it was shot in quite a narrow ratio, 1.37:1, and then blown out to 1.85:1 for projection. This review is of the European cut, which is 115 minutes; the US version is thirty minutes longer (and equally good) but the only differences are a few extra shots, a lot of very slightly shorter sequences and two missing scenes, one with Anne Jackson (as a doctor) and another with Tony Burton (as a car rental guy). The movie makes substantial changes from Stephen King's brilliant novel (which is an absolute must-read); the book's central metaphor is the hotel's boiler (which eventually explodes), there is a hedge topiary of animals (which come alive) rather than a maze, and Jack's alcoholism and weak character is much more to the fore. King and Mick Garris made an excellent four-hour TV version in 1997, which is highly recommended and much more faithful to the original story, but not the masterpiece that Kubrick delivers. There is also a hilarious parody called The Shinning in The Simpsons 1994 episode Treehouse Of Horror V. I simply can't rate this movie highly enough - it's everything a great horror film should be and so much more, and it's a showcase of what real cinema can do, made by an absolute master of the craft. Watch it over and over again and be amazed at the genius of Stanley Kubrick.