"The Shining"

Rating: 10/10 (14 June 2009)

OK, so I just got done reading the IMDb FAQ page on Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror-thriller "The Shining," and I still don't have a clue about what to really make of this film's events. I just see it as a brilliant example of a pure and terrifying descent into madness that is heavily influenced by malevolent supernatural forces.
An adaptation, or should I say, re-imagining of the Stephen King novel from which it's based, "The Shining," to me, is a film that is very open to all sorts of interpretations, which also makes it hard to categorize as a straight-forward horror film even though it seems to throw in some haunted house theatrics as well. But make no mistake, this is one of the most eerie and unsettling horror films ever made.
The film is set at the Overlook Hotel in Colorado, where Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and their psychic young son Danny (Danny Lloyd) have arrived to serve as the winter caretakers until the Spring the next year. The Overlook's beauty hides a dark and horrific history that eventually comes to claim the sanity of Jack, and the troubled man comes to act upon the supernatural forces at work in the hotel that are driving him into complete madness.
"The Shining" is an epic horror film, perhaps the first (according to some). Nicholson is loony from the start; he's not some well-meaning family man who succumbs to evil supernatural forces at work in a haunted hotel. It's a trademark performance from one of the most skilled actors to ever work in Hollywood. His acting, as usual, is over-the-top and menacing, but once he begins to act upon his own murderous impulses and begin terrorizing his family, it's all the more greater because of Nicholson's sense of timing. His trademark line - "Here's Johnny!" - is one of the most famous and memorable in the horror genre, and cinema history, in general.
Kubrick, a master craftsman who co-wrote the film with novelist Diane Johnson (after first rejecting a script from Stephen King himself), sets up the film brilliantly so that it all goes downhill from the get-go, especially with its eerie opening sequences and musical score. The Overlook is vast and labyrinthic, and we get a sense of just how vast and labyrinthic it is through the various - not to mention, ingenious and groundbreaking - unbroken steadi-cam tracking shots. I also find it hilarious, and an example of how in-control Kubrick was of the material, of the numerous takes he had his actors make during this film. This sort of technique can be overly demanding on actors and crew members, but I see it as a master filmmaker demanding nothing but perfection from his actors and crew members, and the hell he puts everyone through really pays off in the end. (James Cameron, my personal favorite director, has the exact same reputation.)
Kubrick also has a real taste for horror imagery: he's able to make simple human figures - a beautiful nude woman in a bathtub, for instance - instantly become an object of pure, unbridled horror in one of the film's most infamous and unsettling sequences. It may seem gratuitous, even voyeuristic for some tastes, but the way Kubrick handles it is pure genius. There's also those famous shots of blood pouring out of an elevator, and lastly there are the two twin girls - who are supposed to be objects of innocence due to their age - that come to haunt the Torrances' young son Danny in some of the film's most frightening sequences.
"The Shining" probably ranks third on my list of Kubrick films, behind "Full Metal Jacket" (1987) - often cited as his weakest for some reason - and "A Clockwork Orange" (1971). "The Shining" is an example of a film adaptation of a famous book that actually supersedes its source material and becomes something else entirely. King says he dislikes Kubrick's film, because it strips away many of the finer elements of his novel (King would later have greater say in the 1997 made-for-TV movie). But "The Shining" is one of the damn finest, most well-made and scariest horror films I've ever seen, a perfect example of a master filmmaker at the top of his craft.
10/10
P.S.: This movie has also been parodied to death. It was parodied in one of the "The Simpsons Treehouse of Horrors" episodes as "The Shinning."