Shining brightly

Rating: 8/10 (17 February 2013)

With only a couple of caveats, it's entirely justified that Kubrick's "The Shining" be lauded as one of the most frightening horror films ever made. More on those deterrents later, but there's no doubt the film is a technical masterpiece in its use of sets, lighting, colour and sound to create an increasingly more terrifying atmosphere as the film reaches its conclusion.
What Kubrick does brilliantly is subvert the stereotypes of the horror genre, so that instead of a darkened claustrophobic atmosphere, he gives us a vast brightly lit hotel for the Torrance family to be moved around in while his ghosts aren't shadowy phantoms but vividly drawn presences.
Only at key moments does Kubrick stop the constant movement of front and back-tracking camera-shots, notably in depicting Nicholson's Torrance character's conversion to madness and his grisly death by exposure to the snow overnight. Otherwise, we get the wonderful device of the steadicam following young Danny's buggy as it wheels around the hotel corridor, the remarkable shot of the sea of blood pouring from the elevators, the eerie lighting used in the chase sequence in the maze, but the best shot is when Nichoson gazes down at a model of the house maze which cuts to a an extreme long-shot of his wife (played by Shelley Duvall) and son, lost in the real-life maze.
It certainly gripped me from the start but there were odd scenes which defied explanation, such as the pin-up pictures of black women in Scatman Crothers' character's home, Nicholson miraculously escaping from a locked room after conversing with a "ghost" and Duvall's ever stranger visions as she escapes out of the hotel near the end.
I must say though that I do agree with the original writer Stephen King's opinion of the casting of the leads. I've never been a fan of over-actor Jack Nicholson (his "Here's Johnny" scene, far from being terrifying strikes me as hilariously over the top) while Shelley Duvall as either wife or mother seems like an even bigger mis-casting, which is an understatement compared to the usage of Scatman Crothers as another "shiner" who makes an unlikely attempt to save the day, or should that be night.
For all that though, "The Shining" is a bravura work, injecting new life into an old genre, thoroughly out DePalma-ing DePalma along the way. Oh, and don't watch alone as I mistakenly did tonight!