THIS is horror, and it's from Stanley Kubrick

Rating: 10/10 (30 August 2013)

"The Shining" is a cult Horror film, made by Stanley Kubrick and Warner Bros in 1980. It is based on Stephen King's novel with the same name as the movie. The film's real running time is almost 2 1/2 hours, unless you are thinking about the 25 minute shortened European version. More about it later in this review.
Plot: Jack Torrance (played by Jack Nicholson) drives to an isolated hotel called Overview Hotel, together with his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and his son Danny (Danny Lloyd). There he is supposed to work with some writing project. Meanwhile Danny is "seeing" disturbing stuff like blood flooding from the elevator and two scary little girls who wants him to play with them, while talking to his imaginary friend Toby. While time passes, Jack becomes more and more psycho while surrounded by the ghosts of the former hotel guests...
I can't tell you anymore of the plot, mainly to avoid spoilers. But this film is really a great masterpiece, if not one of the BETTER Hollywood Horror movie i have seen in a while. Stanley Kubrick and Warner Bros, who also made the highly controversial "A Clockwork Orange", made a good effort with this film. Referring to the longer American cut I saw in a week earlier, Mr. Kubrick also managed to make a somewhat good character development, which many of these scenes have been reported as missing from the two hours long European cut. The music is the thing which made the many of the intense scenes creepy. I sat through this film as if my eyes were glued into the screen.
My favorite scenes must be the surreal "elevator blood sequence", and the climatic sequence beginning with the iconic "axe-through-the-door" scene.
Different versions: The ending of this film was originally around two minutes longer when released theatrically for the first time, but Stanley Kubrick and Warner Bros decided this ending to be cut, making this film to run for 144 minutes, not 146. For the European release, Kubrick cut off further around 25 minutes of stuff mostly involving character development and scenes taking place far away from the film's iconic hotel. As good as 99% of the intense scenes are intact in this version. If you don't mind the cuts, the European version is also a good choice.
This film is rated 18 in Norway. It's Norwegian title is "Ondskapens Hotell", which would have been literally translated into English as "The Hotel of Evil".
Conclusion: Unless you can't stand scary movies, I will highly recommend you to watch this film at least once. Some other great masterpieces from Stanley Kubrick include "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) and "A Clockwork Orange" (1971).