Huh??

Rating: Null/10 (7 November 2002)

SPOILER ALERT-I saw this movie when it first came out and was not impressed. I even watched it again a year or so later on cable and still didn't like it. A few months ago I was talking to a couple of guys who loved the movie and they were talking about all this subtle, symbolic stuff that was in the movie that supposedly made it so creepy. I started to think that maybe I'd been missing something all along. One guy described the "blood-filled elevator" scene as representing "fear of menstruation". Since I was 16 or 17 when I first saw the film I thought that maybe some of this "symbolism" had gone right over my head. So I go out a couple months ago and rent the movie and watch it again for the first time in over 20 years and all I could think afterwards was that those guys were talking out of their a**es. Fear of menstruation? Huh? The first person in the movie to have this vision of the blood-filled elevator was the kid, Danny. How old was he? Five? Six? Why would a 5 or 6 year old BOY have a fear of menstruation. Wendy (Shelly Duval) sees the same bloody scene later in the film but I guess her son is more afraid of menstruation than she is since he had the vision first.
These guys also tried to tell me that the movie had something to do with American Indians. An earlier post on this site says the same thing and suggests that we research it on the internet. This movie was released in 1980, way before the internet as we know it existed. Were we supposed to sit around waiting for the internet to be invented and for someone to put up a "The Shining" site so that this movie would finally reveal its scary treasures? If I have to research the movie on the internet for it to become scary then the movie doesn't work. As for the Indian thing, one of the guys observed that as the movie progressed Wendy started wearing her hair like an Indian (whatever that means) and that in one scene she was wearing moccasins. OOOhhh SCARY!!! Didn't this story take place out West? Don't people out there who AREN'T in symbol laden horror movies wear all kinds of Indian and Indian inspired clothing and jewelry? What the hell?! So what.
Finally, I thought that Shelly Duval was horribly miscast and Jack Nicholson was creepy right from the beginning of the movie so that I never got the sense that he was gradually going insane once he arrived at the hotel. For a time I thought that the movie was being intentionally ambiguous about whether the hotel was having a malevolent effect on Jack or whether his "personal demons" were getting the better of him. The film might have been better if it had maintained this ambiguity but instead it scuttled it altogether as soon as we see that Wendy is seeing some of the same apparitions that her son and Jack saw. So it's not all just in Jack's head. And of course there was the fact that the previous caretaker had gone nuts and murdered his family.
I'm not one of those people who was disappointed that the movie wasn't faithful to the book. I didn't like the book either. If only someone could go back in time and stop Stephen King from writing that novel we could have been spared both his dreck and Kubrick's.