Horror springs eternal.

Rating: Null/10 (6 June 1999)

The Shining is an incredibly intricate hedge maze of a movie lurking beneath a leering death mask of bloodshed and mayhem. Like Jack Torrance, Kubrick was undergoing a painful creative rebirth while making this movie, having traded in the spic-n-span philosophical certainties of A Clockwork Orange and Dr. Strangelove for a more ambiguous, intuitive kind of poetic logic. As a result, The Shining is not as satisfying as his previous films, not as surefooted or smugly self-confident. Watching it can, on occasion, be as frustrating as watching a baby larva squirm free of its shell. But it's also the most fascinating film Kubrick ever made, so odd and inhuman it's like something beamed down from another galaxy.
It's hard to believe this gothic monstrosity had its humble origins in a Stephen King novel, but if you need proof, just look at all the clueless dingbats who prefer the "faithful" miniseries. Granted, King and Kubrick were uniquely ill-matched -- while the former is all about surface incident, beasties and aliens and spiders, the latter places the emphasis on subtext, what roils and stirs BENEATH the surface. Stephen King's novel of The Shining, like all his novels, is as flat as a pancake and profoundly unscary. That's why people read him at the beach.
Kubrick grafts about twenty dimensions onto the painfully thin story and arrives at something altogether more ineffable and... "Kubrickian" is the only real word for it. He taps into a host of fears, most of them embedded so deeply in our psyches we don't know they're there -- or if we do, have long since given up trying to express them ( and I'm not talking about the fear of being attacked by a wigged-out Jack Nicholson, although more than a few motorists in this city are traumatized by just that possibility)
Kubrick gets plenty of eerie mileage, for instance, out of our fear of not only death, but of obsolescence, as embodied by the gaily-attired reveller-ghosts of The Gold Room. The presence of this completely dead world, with its dead music and dead fashions, serves to remind us that the world we live in now is equally doomed, along with everyone in it. This lends a whiff of mortality to the proceedings -- a whiff so pungent it can even carry over into real life. Just go to a party after watching the movie and you'll see what I'm talking about. People appear silly and unreal, like chattering skeletons.
There's also the primal and universal childhood fear of seeing our fathers turn on us, but this website is not the place to get into all that. For now, just let me say that Nicholson is a grinning Beelzebub beyond compare, Shelley Duvall is as impossibly elongated as a Kafka sketch come to life, and the gay guy in the bear suit really weirds me out.
I recommend you watch The Shining back-to-back with Roman Polanski's The Tenant. Both deal with the recurrence of psychosis and the endless cycle of violence. Polanski's film is funny and kitschy, however, which keeps it from achieving the same kind of nightmarish stranglehold.