One of the few genuine horror films

Rating: Null/10 (6 June 2001)

One of the problems with Stephen King is that ultimately, he's not good at writing horror. This isn't a harsh condemnation; very few people create convincing horror; the genre is so choked with bad writing and bad filmmaking that successful horror films these days are almost always of the post-"Scream" detached-ironic-half-parody variety; few if any know how to actually use horror to actually frighten a viewer anymore. So it's not bad that King can't write a convincing, terrifying horror story; it's just bad that King insists on sticking to this genre when his forays into sci-fi (The Dark Tower), drama (Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemption) and apocalyptic epic (The Stand) are far more successful.
So it's not surprising that "The Shining" is at best an unimpressive book. Good thing then that Kubrick makes it into an entirely new creature in his film. Kubrick downplays the showy gimmicks King uses to make "Shining" a flat-out haunted house story and gives us something far more chilling: a portrait of a man losing his mind.
In Kubrick's film we are provided with the inverse of a haunted house. Jack does not go insane because the house is full of ghosts and murder; the spirits of the Overlook Hotel emerge almost in response to Jack's madness. Up until the end, it is unclear if this entire nightmare is supernatural or psychological in nature; it could easily be nothing more than the tale of a man going mad. Nevertheless, it is chilling in a way that the vast majority of horror films never manage to become; its presentation, and not its content, is what proves terrifying.
Kubrick's slow shots of the hotel keep us drenched in atmosphere and setting more than the activities of the characters; the hotel becomes as much a character as the unfortunate family members are. Nearly all of the terror is fueled by the anticipation of terror rather than actual terror itself; without the slow crawl of the camera to the woman in room 273, her transformation into a laughing carcass would be far less upsetting.
Some have balked at the movie's slow pace, or its excision of some of the more fantastic elements of King's novel (such as the reanimated corpses of hunted animals), but the movie's pace and subdued tone are flawless. I have never been scared by the cheap gore of many of King's books and movies, but Kubrick knows how to manipulate the emotions of an audience in a way that proves far more chilling. Fear is a psychological phenomenon, after all; only in a movie that dwells in the mind as much as "The Shining" does can one truly experience the fear that horror is meant to instill.