15 June 2014

STANLEY KUBRICK: ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY

We now hit the point where Stanley Kubrick, Methodical Auteur, turns into Stanley Kubrick, The Hermit Artist. Four years, almost to the day, separated the premieres of 1971's A Clockwork Orange and 1975's Barry Lyndon, not quite enough to make it the biggest gap in his career to that point; and given the complexity and scale of the Barry Lyndon shoot, this was not a particularly inexplicable wait. It would be nearly four and a half years till the director would finally release his follow-up, though, and from that point onward, the wait times in between his films approached mythic, comic levels. To put it the simplest way I know how: Kubrick's entire career spanned 48 years, 1951-1999, and in the first half of that span, from Day of the Fight up to Barry Lyndon, the filmmaker made ten features and three shorts. In the final 24 years of his life, he made a grand total of three feature films.

And to inaugurate the new, deathly slow phase of his career, he made what would appear to all outside evidence to be his most openly populist movie since the broad satire of Dr. Strangelove: his 1980 film The Shining was a haunted hotel picture adapted from one of the biggest hit novels by Stephen King, as popular a writer as you could imagine at the turn of the '80s. I don't know how people felt at the time, being as I was unalive and so not yet the horror fan and Kubrick devotee that currently blogs for you, but I imagine it would be akin to learning that Terence Malick had just read this "Hunger Games" thing, and couldn't wait to take a crack at making it into a movie.

Of course, any fears that Kubrick had decided to take it easy were thoroughly unfounded: The Shining is one of the most aggressively opaque films of his entire career. There was even a 2012 documentary, Room 237, given over to several fan theories about just what the almighty fuck was going on, springing from the theory that as fussy and controlling a director as Kubrick must have peppered the film's structure and mise en scène with clues to the "solution". Since Lord knows those clues aren't on the surface of the script he wrote with Diane Johnson. But even without the unabashed crackpots populating that movie, The Shining has long had the aura of being some kind of puzzle box, and that you can somehow make sense of it all and turn into a very straightforward, logical affair, even the random shot of the dog-man blow job.

So the first thing I would like to do is to restore to The Shining its dignity as a genre film. In other words, sometimes a haunted hotel is just a haunted hotel. While it's surely the case that Kubrick was a control freak who liked to explore deep messages with his stories, and it's been well attested that his career is one big series of genre hops - now a war film, now an satire, now a gladiator film, now a space movie, now a costume drama - he wasn't really prone to subverting those genres. Barry Lyndon, on top of it all, is a great period epic; 2001: A Space Odyssey is great science fiction; and The Shining is a great ghost story. Of course it has thematic depth and complexity and speaks troubling and interesting things about the sanctity of the nuclear family; but if it's frequently inexplicable, self-contradicting, and ends with a giant "what the fuck?" mindscrew, I don't know why we need to use subtext to answer those complaints. Not when at the level of surface text, it's about a mentally fragile man being driven insane by malevolent ghosts. If it's confusing, disorienting, and weirdly unresolved, guess what? That's what makes it a fucking good horror movie. The Haunting is all of those things, and nobody ever said it was Robert Wise's attempt to metaphorically apologise for the genocide of Native Americans.

In fact, the film's desire to be, above everything else, the ultimate experience in grueling terror, is clear just in a quick glance at how Kubrick & Johnson assembled the screenplay. There are some key plot differences between The Shining movie and The Shining novel, like the wholesale reinvention of the climax or the movie's wise removal of the living topiary animals that King isn't ever quite able to describe without them sounding faintly silly, but the main difference between the two incarnations of the story is one of tone and focus: the book is almost entirely about how a man trying his very best to overcome his dormant alcoholism and less-dormant rage issues keeps slipping and in the process endangers his family, and that's something that the film quietly removes. Not least by casting Jack Nicholson, in what very well might be the defining role of his entire career, as a barely-contained rageaholic who doesn't have to slide into madness over the course of the movie; he seems to already be most of the way there from the very first time we see him, with that smirking Jack Nicholson stare out of eyes that look like angry little daggers. Nicholson's Jack Torrance isn't fighting his demons; he's fighting to hide his demons. That's a massive change that serves to make the movie much more about violence and danger than it is about fatherhood and addiction.

But the real tell is in recognising that there are, in fact, three different versions of The Shining: it premiered with a 146-minute running time that was shaved down to 144 minutes with a rejiggered, shortened ending before it opened in the United States. And this version was then slashed down to 119 minutes for Europe, and it is this last version, apparently, that Kubrick preferred as the final version of his vision. Like most Americans, I've never seen this European release, though I know exactly what the differences are, and with every new cut, Kubrick was driven by the exact same impulse: take away "character stuff", leaving only the most high-impact version of the film's horrifying arc (he also took out one short sequence of skeletons in a cobwebby room, which was a smart impulse - the scene in question looks so unrelentingly hokey that I don't understand why he ever even filmed it). Everything I'm about to say is about the American cut, which will matter a lot when I start to go on about its pacing and such, so reader beware. And I'll say this much: nothing I know about the European cut leads me to believe that I wouldn't prefer it to the American version, and by quite a lot. Even though, by all means, I already love the American version.

So the film, anyway, is about the Torrances: father Jack is in the process of interviewing for a job at the unbelievably remote Overlook Hotel in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, with the implication being very quietly forwarded that this is because it's the only job he can get at this point. He's left, for the moment, his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and his son Danny (Danny Lloyd) behind in Boulder, but they'll be joining him for the work itself: six and a half months as the winter caretakers for the hotel, separated from the rest of humanity by an unforgiving alpine winter. This would already be a trial, except that the Overlook has a history, one elliptically alluded to by the the hotel's head chef, Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers), when the takes Danny aside during the family's tour of the building to explain that he and the boy share a secret: a kind of psychic ability that Hallorann calls "shining", and which Danny has rationalised by putting it in the voice of "Tony", a little boy who lives in his mouth and communicates with an uncanny gravelly squeak as Danny wiggles his index finger. This sensitivity makes people like Hallorann and Danny more susceptible to the Overlook's peculiar nature: as a place where many bad things have happened, it has become something of a library of malevolent psychic energy, and Dick is concerned, without having to say it, that Danny might become victim to the hotel's dark appetite.

The real concern is Jack, though, who at some point in the past dislocated Danny's arm in a drunk rage, and hasn't apparently fully reconstructed himself since: he's remained sober, and he's working on a book - it's to have privacy to make these tasks easier that the Overlook job appealed to him in the first place - but he's not happy about it. So as the hotel goes to town freaking out Danny with visions of the last children to overwinter at the place - the twin daughters (Lisa and Louise Burns) of the caretaker from 1970, who flipped out and killed his family with an axe - it's seduction of Jack is subtler and more insidious than throwing a lot of spooky terrors in front of him.

Or, y'know, the short version: a family of three spends the winter in a haunted hotel, and the dad goes nuts. Basically it's all the same: the details in The Shining certainly do have their necessary merits, giving some context and shape and making us feel more for the tormented Torrances, but the best parts of the movie are entirely those which use composition, sound, and camera movement to create a totally visceral experience at a level which largely circumvents storytelling concerns - I have no means of knowing whether Kubrick had seen any Italian horror films from the decade preceding his film, but he basically made their English-language analogue, albeit with a little more attention paid to linearity and explication of what, broadly, is happening. Still, we're basically in Suspiria territory: gorgeous style and completely nonsensical content that is more, rather than less frightening because it feels so hard to parse in everyday, real-world terms.

I would be hard-pressed to say whether the visuals or the soundtrack end up being the most important part of the whole; certainly, I think the soundtrack gets less attention and love than it deserves, because it's fucking spectacular. I'm not just referring to the music, though as was increasingly typical for Kubrick post-2001, the music is sublimely used. In particular, something I had never noticed before, which is that all of the really good scare moments, the ones that are enough even the make hardened ol' horror cynic Tim Brayton cringe a little, and feel all the hairs on his neck do a dance, and a small dribble of pee starts to think about evacuating his body - especially the girls in the hall, and the stack of papers next to the typewriter - these moments are all accompanied by a moment where the music crescendos to a shrieking, high-pitched peak that slices right through your head and into your skeleton. It's not just scary, it's forcing itself to be scary by audibly tormenting and fucking with the viewer.

But there are other sound effects I had in mind, not least of which is the noise of Danny's big wheel on carpet and wood flooring, an alternate ripping, clattering sound and muffled hum, repeated just often enough to really start to get mesmerising, fucking with the viewer at least as much as the piercing score does.

But The Shining is well-known as a film of its visuals. Where A Clockwork Orange is the film Kubrick made after he discovered zoom lenses, and Barry Lyndon is the film he made with super-fast lenses and natural lighting, so is The Shining his movie about Steadicam, and for all that we must necessarily credit Kubrick and photographer John Alcott for their work in lighting the Overlook to look so bleary and unnatural (it is as much a staged, artificial world as Barry Lyndon is a resolutely, even radically tangible and physical realistic one), I think that neither of those men deserve as much credit as does Garrett Brown, the film's Steadicam operator and inventor of the device in the first place, whose work was so indispensable that he was even given his very own card during the end credits. The device was fairly new yet when the film was shot, and this is its best possible coming-out: it is to Steadicam as The Wizard of Oz is to color and Avatar is to 3-D, the film that comes along early (but not first) in a technology's existence to say, "here's this new toy that's awesome to play with, and by the way, it will never be used this well again no matter how hard you try". The slithery, fluid Steadicam tracks through the halls and rooms of the Overlook are deservedly the stuff of legend, giving the camera a relentless, hunting feeling whose strange and alien glassiness - even almost 40 years after it debuted, there's still something shockingly smooth about a really good Steadicam shot - feels as otherworldly and inscrutable as any of the nightmares it depicts throughout the movie.

Of course, Kubrick being Kubrick, Steadicam isn't the only visual craft on display that elevates the film to heights almost totally unknown by horror: there are the usual wide-angle lenses to gently distort space (neither as prevalent nor as prominent as in A Clockwork Orange), and compositions which describe the geography of the interior of the building as a kind of prison, in a fashion reminiscent of Fritz Lang, though I don't otherwise really detect any specific Lang influence anywhere in Kubrick. And the director is particularly alive to the possibilities of editing this time around; not that Kubrick films ever boast sloppy editing (quite the contrary), but there's some really special stuff that he and Ray Lovejoy cooked up this time. That same shot spotting the girls in the hallway, where every cut brings them closer to the camera as the music gets more intense is a great, and obvious example, but what really stood out to me as I watched the film this time was the incredibly aggressive use of dissolves: great long ponderous dissolves, not simply fading scenes into each other but having them significantly overlap, so that the characters seem to still be involved in a dramatic moment as they've almost faded into oblivion. The metaphorical possibilities of applying that to a film about ghosts should be obvious; it's also part of what explains, in the American cut, at least, the unusual pacing of the film - at 144 minutes, it's almost obnoxiously long, and it certainly doesn't move very fast on a scene-by-scene basis, but the flow between scenes and through scenes is so erratic and irregular, and the chronology keeps bunching up and then flattening out, that the movie's very structure and moment are almost ganging up on our sense of clarity and normalcy.

With such a beautiful assemblage of aesthetic elements combining to make things good and unnerving and freaky, The Shining wouldn't need a decent human element at all - again, look at the Italian horror films of the period - but it has a remarkably strong central cast that gives it that element anyway. Indeed, taking solely the three co-leads - and there are good actors in the supporting cast, as well - The Shining has probably the most conventionally great acting in Kubrick's post-Strangelove career: Nicholson's glaring insanity isn't much for subtlety, true, but the angry, brutal sarcasm and nastiness that he brings to the role is the best thing that could possibly happen: this is not, ultimately, Jack's story, but a story of surviving Jack, of surviving the complete collapse of the nuclear family and fatherly authority into something psychopathic and deranged. And Nicholson's embodiment of that, is so absolutely terrifying and raw that it's no wonder he's spent the remainder of his career more or less in its shadow. Duvall, in the only major role she got outside of a Robert Altman film, seems somehow no less inhuman than her co-star, though in a completely different way: she's all jangled, meek nerves and passivity and trying to reduce herself, a mousy, retiring creation even by Duvall's standards - it is known that Kubrick was a titanic asshole to her, and while that's regrettable, the way it comes out in her performance is so fantastic that I can't really say that I care. And all this fragility and smallness both makes it more horrifying when she shows up on the receiving end of Jack's rage, and more triumphant when she finds the internal fortitude to survive that rage.

Lloyd, though, is easily the stand-out: both because it's inherently impressive when a six-year-old does anything that looks a lot like acting, and because Danny is the most demanding of the film's roles: Jack and Wendy are both, ultimately, variations around a single theme, but Danny has a whole range of emotions and basically two entirely different personalities. When Lloyd busts out the Tony voice, it never stops to be creepy, especially towards the end, when his frenzied screams of "redrum!" in a tortured, animalistic squawk are nearly as terrifying as anything else that happens in the movie. And he does this all while functioning as the film's de facto protagonist, given the way the plot favors him and the camera continuously favors his perspective and height. I'm sure a fine Shining could exist with everything in place but Lloyd; it's only with Lloyd, though, that it becomes basically the best version of itself that could be.

The film's message is simple and bleak: evil exists, has always existed, will always exist, and it's only possible to keep away from it, never to beat it. The cosmic nihilism of this slots in nicely with Kubrick's depiction of cruelty and inhumanity elsewhere in his career, and the things he was best at as a director - methodical framing, lighting, and color; creating self-contained realities operating according to a clear, consistent set of rules; unhurried pacing that encourages the growth of a particular mood - are the things that all the best horror films tend to enjoy. And I am sorry that he only made the one, though of course he only made the one of anything. Still, he was willing to dive into straight-up genre filmmaking, and that's something to be deeply grateful for: many self-conscious Important filmmakers don't like to muddy themselves with disreputable genres and stories. Thankfully, Kubrick had no such restraint: the result is simply one of the best scary movies ever made, one of the best scary movies even imaginable.

31 comments:

  1. I certainly like this movie a lot.

    But I've heard a lot of people call it the scariest movie they've ever seen. Or "the only movie that has ever scared me." Or similar things.

    And... I don't get it. I don't recall it ever having any visceral effect on me whatsoever, even the first time I watched it. John Carpenter's Halloween scared the shit out of 20 year old me. This? It was entertaining, but scary? Not at all.

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  2. I'm with Brian here. I enjoy this movie, sure, but I also feel a little bit alienated from it just because I've heard people talk SO MUCH about how utterly terrifying it is, how it traumatized them when they saw it as kids, etc--but to me, it just...wasn't frightening. At all. It just didn't have that sort of impact. It's entirely possible I'm just missing some sort of horror movie gene (I've never found Halloween to be even a tiny bit scary either), but regardless, BLAH.

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  3. I've seen the movie in both cuts (and aspect ratios), and I have to say that I really prefer the 144-minute version. I think it's much better at building mood and letting character moments breathe. It's been a while since I saw the European cut, but I recall it lacking the sense of disintegration of the family and of Jack that you get with the longer version.

    Of course, this is from the perspective of someone who has never found the film very scary at all, so it may be the case that the shorter cut is scarier for someone on the film's wavelength. I just can't get behind Lloyd's performance as Danny; his acting never felt convincing to me and I find the scenes with Tony to be far hokier than the room full of skeletons. Without that, the horror really doesn't have that much of a backbone. The scene with the twins never did it for me either, but I think that might just be a case of having seen it parodied so often before I ever saw the film.

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  4. God, it's been a long time since I've seen this. Too long. I'm somewhat in the same boat as GeoX and Brian in the sense that, while certainly creepy, it didn't strike me as the scariest thing ever when I saw it. But then, that was many years ago, and having popped it in briefly about a week ago, I found it scarier now than when I saw it first. But I certainly don't disagree with anything you've said here; it's about as perfectly made as is conceivably possible. That being said, having seen only the American cut, I do feel that the pacing is a little bit too slow, which is why I've been interested in the European cut since I heard of it.

    By the way, a friend who watched it and loved it tried to get me to watch Room 237 once. My anti-symbolism rage bells went off almost instantaneously. I still haven't finished it.

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  5. I will never be able to enjoy this movie properly, since I'm such a fan of the book. It's so very not the thing I love that I can't remain objective.

    But so much of it just seems sloppy to me. And I understand that the vague and inexplicable can be horrifying, but to me it just feels like dead ends left over from the novel that Kubrick didn't see fit to remove.

    Case in point, Dick Halloran. His character has absolutely ZERO point in the film. All of the time devoted to him adds nothing, and eventually he shows up and BANG axe to the head. Done. Why? It's not scary. It's ridiculous. Another example: The novel had a climax. This film doesn't. I still don't see how that's in any way an improvement.

    The visual style of The Shining is great, no doubt. But Duvall's shrieking is wearisome, and Lloyd is uninteresting. Again, I'm not sure how much of that is me missing what strong characters Danny and Wendy were in the novel. Nicholson does knock it out of the park, so I'll give it that much.

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  6. I've only seen the European cut, and to be honest, I can't think of anything that of value that could be added to that cut which wouldn't make it deadly dull at that length-as it is, it's near perfect.

    That said, I fall into the camp of those who consider it one of the scariest films ever made-and that's mainly due to the editing and music (maybe I'm just a scaredy cat, but the ending scenes, and the simple moment when a title card jumps up that says "Tuesday" scared the hell out of me!) Even it wasn't utterly terrifying, the film would still be valuable as one of the most formally beautiful horror films (along with Eyes without a Face and The Night of the Hunter). A lot of that cresit must go to the unearthly steadicam work, as well as the great use of colour.

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  7. I never even realised there were two different cuts, let alone an American and European one. That being said, I'm only familiar with the European cut (I assume... given my DVD is from the UK) and am one of those people who finds it the scariest movies ever made. Indeed, that length seems about perfect for a film of this nature, so I'd be interested to see how much it changes with an extra 20 minutes added on!

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  8. I'm dreadfully ashamed to say that I only saw this movie right through for the first time a few months ago, and adored it beyond measure. More even than the book, which I'm also a fan of. Not the scariest horror I've ever seen, perhaps, but it definitely gave me the chills more than a few times, which is more than most can claim.

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  9. Just about any novel adapted for film will completely fail to surprise a viewer who has read the novel first, except in the negative: every scare is expected well in advance and any scene changed or missed rankles because it was expected. That's why I never really understood the whole "read the book first" mentality. Sure the book is likely to be better, but the movie is an investment off only a couple hours while even the fastest reader will need at least a day. The movie's not likely to spoil the book, but the book will absolutely spoil the movie.

    That said, and as a devotee of the novel, which I have read to tatters twice now, I loved the movie, though in a very different way. Take from out what you will, but my favorite part is the screaming, jump-from-your-seat scare cue over the bland title card "WEDNESDAY". I nearly fell over with fright at that one and then did fall over laughing.

    Also this movie lets me properly appreciate the best Treehouse of Horror episode ever made, so that's a double bonus.

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  10. I found the King book kind of ridiculous, actually; especially the highly comical topiary death bush stalking Halloran scene. King's tendency to repeat the phrase 'take your medicine' ad nauseam didn't help matters either. I think the movie The Shining basically improves on the novel in every aspect imaginable mainly because Kubrick is on an entirely different plane of artistry than King could ever dream of reaching. Case in point: King's TV movie version of The Shining. Yeesh.

    Anyway I'm with you Tim, the room 237 style deconstruction of The Shining is missing the forest for the trees; things like the First Nations motif are definitely present in the feature but hardly constitute an overriding theme or message.

    As far as the two versions go I prefer the American cut but the European cut has its charms too. The European cut is a more streamlined and efficient machine but the American cut gives us more insight into the Torrance clan's relationships with one another, which gives Jack's descent into madness more of a punch.

    And Halloran's death scene in the movie is great; it's a masterful subversion of audience expectations that gives the audience a glimmer of hope Halloran will save the day only to have Kubrick yank it away immediately.

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  11. @Travis - "Ach, I'm bad at this."

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  12. Briam Malbon brings up a good point regarding an aspect of the film that's not discussed very often: Tim, what's your take on the title cards? I reckon they're effective as hell at conveying an oppressive sense of dread - if, e.g. the film cuts from a scene that took place on Tuesday to a title card saying "Thursday," the viewer is prompted to ask why Wednesday was skipped - the conclusion they'll come to is, of course, that Wednesday was uneventful and Thursday was not. And because we're watching a horror, "eventful" of course means "horrific." The beauty of it is, the viewer jumps through all of these mental hoops without even consciously realising they're doing it. Fiendishly smart direction.

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  13. @ Andrew Testerman,
    Lol. One of the best parodies ever. "Hmm, that's odd. Usually the blood gets off on the second floor."

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  14. I feel similarly to Brian, GeoX and Jakob regarding the film. It seems more cerebral than a viscerally terrifying horror film. To take a few films in comparison, I would say Jaws, Alien and HAlloween always did more for me -- in terms of frightening moments -- than The Shining (although, I'd be interested to hear if anyone feels that The Shining did for hotels what Jaws did for the ocean). Obviously, these are very different films, but I do think the three have two elements that the Shining doesn't quite possess in my view. First, they all have central protagonists you can root for and identify with -- Chief Brody, Ripley, Laurie. Danny may be the de facto protagonist, but he's also withdrawn and aloof, and Tony doesn't help with identification. Second, the other three films all have singular entities that are monsters: actual things that lurk. The Shining, as a haunted house film, doesn't have a creature lurking, but relies on the collective atmosphere of a place. IN any case, I have found the film scarier as the years have passed, mostly because I think it is saying something quite twisted about human nature.

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  15. JCB - your list of three films (all of which I love, none of which "scare" me) raises a question that I mull over a lot: is there a difference between being scared by physical threats (sharks, aliens, psychos) than by paranormal/immaterial threats (ghosts, madness)? Because almost without exception, the films that actively scare me fall exclusively into the second category. I'd love to know if anybody else has thoughts on the matter.

    Thrash - I'd have to think about that. It's a fantastic question.

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  16. Lots of spoilers in my comment! This Kubrick retrospective has been great reading and I am salivating at the thought of your Eyes Wide Shut piece. As to The Shining and some of the comments here: Halloran’s death is so shocking and effective precisely because of the build-up and his continued presence throughout the movie. The death is not telegraphed at all, he seems exactly like a character who would swoop in at the end and help save the day. Part of the genius of the movie is every time I watch a part of me does not think he will die, even when he is taking that last long, silent terrifying walk through the hotel’s entrance. Even when I know exactly what pillar Jack is behind it still wrecks me every time it happens. This followed up by Danny’s screams and Jack’s animalistic charge toward him is horror through sheer force and it is glorious.
    The thing which prevents The Shining from being perfect is unfortunately the lack of descent on Jack’s part. Your analysis that Jack is more hiding demons is spot on (and more eloquently phrased than I’ve read in any other Shining discussion) and I agree completely but this is a tad problematic. I am left with no lingering horror after the movie is over because it does not seem that Jack succumbs to some evil, terrifying force but rather just unleashes what is already present which is scary in the moment but has never been haunting like the absolute best type of horror. In a strange way it does relate the previous question about which is scarier between a physical threat or a paranormal/immaterial threat. I too have always found the latter to be far more frightening because it gets inside your head and stays with you afterward. Despite the hotel’s manipulations Jack becomes so central to what can actually hurt the family that the threat does become almost purely physical and loses some impact and power. I have never felt this movie really looks at alcoholism or its destructive effects or the horror of a loved one turning on you because Jack’s psychosis is so domineering that the horror it provides tips it hand fairly early on.
    I have another quibble with the hedge maze finale. I am not at all saying the boiler dues ex machine of the book is a great ending but the maze is not even as compelling as watching Wendy race around the hotel, mostly because Danny is in full on sprint mode while Jack can only manage a grinning hobble. It always burns me to know that once Halloran dies the momentum is lost a little from the amazing scenes which preceded it (the axe to the door and the way the camera traces is its movement is beautiful and terrifying). Also, there is a moment within the maze chase which bothers me more than anything: Jack stops the chase and has a look on his face indicating he realizes where Danny is at and is going to somehow trick him or come up behind him and then…nothing, Danny runs off and Jack flails about. If the two of them had even encountered one another once in the maze I believe that scene would have played so much better.
    Still, I can only nitpick these things because I have watched it so many times. And I can watch it so many times because it still holds my interest and still evokes such strong, palpable dread. I can say nothing about the end scene which hasn’t been said elsewhere except it is a great ending (way too overanalyze) and most closely provides the feeling of haunting which I mentioned earlier. Also, I love the companion article on the aspect ratios. Even when I bought the blu-ray of The Shining I could still not part with my DVD copy for this very reason. I don’t feel so bad about that anymore.

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  17. Re: concrete vs. intangible threats, my first thought was how many successful horror films blur that line. The ghosts of the Overlook Hotel turn Jack into an ax maniac, Freddy Krueger is a psycho who attacks his victims inside their minds, almost all the murders in Suspiria are committed by a man with a knife, yet the scariest thing in the film is the eerie mood of the dance academy itself, etc. Even many more clearly physical monsters have an immaterial aspect. The Xenomorph is the fear of the unknown unleashed on the humans by the logic of capitalism, capable of appearing almost anywhere on the ship it pleases not unlike a ghost. Michael Myers is, of course, an immortal avatar of Evil and Slutshaming. At the other end of the spectrum, even Ingmar Bergman ended The Hour of the Wolf with the artist's personal demons devouring his body along with his mind.

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  18. That is an interesting concept. The list of movies that have scared me as an adult is vanishingly thin. (As a child, it's a bit longer, of course.)

    Halloween - Never in my life has a movie scared me more. I was shaking during the last 15 minutes or so. Literally shaking. Holy Christ do I love that movie. One of the very few truly perfect films.

    The Descent - Yeah, this movie? SCARY AS SHIT.

    Paranormal Activity 2 - Don't ask me why Part 1 had zero effect on me, but this one unnerved me completely. I don't know, can't explain it, but there it is.

    Um... That might be the whole list, actually. So two definite physical threat movies, and then one that is a demon that sometimes becomes a physical threat...

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  19. A side note : given 3D hasn't added much to many films (particularly when trying to compensate for already empty experiences such as Avatar) I would replace your selection with Gravity. Others might plump for Hugo.

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  20. I'll still defend Avatar as an 8/10 movie, but I get where you're coming from. My back-up title would actually be Coraline.

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  21. Count me in the group who never found “The Shining” scary. I’ve always responded to it as a mood piece, and on that level, it’s hugely effective. On par with “Suspiria”, only made with big studio money, and the obsessiveness only Kubrick could bring to it.
    But it’s story engine is fundamentally broken. It’s all threat and no payoff, and its 144-minute running time made it a maddeningly unsatisfying viewing experience when I first saw it in 1980 when it was released.

    But Kubrick’s evocation of the Overlook Hotel is one of the great examples of world creation in cinema. If I ran a movie theater, I’d pair up “The Shining” with “Blade Runner” for a double bill. I think they’re both strong in similar ways, and weak in similar ways. The stuff happening right in front of the camera is muddled and half-formed, but the stage around it is groundbreaking and phenomenal, and way more interesting.

    I’m glad Tim mentioned the sound, because it is amazing. So much of what is great about the movie is happening on the soundtrack. That mood, that fucking oppressive mood. Combined with the imagery, Kubrick made the Overlook one of the great horror characters in history. It’s too bad it only bares its teeth, but is never allowed to bite.
    For horror stories to be effective, there has to come a time where the audience believes the creator of the story wants to hurt you. And the best stories achieve this. But before you can hurt someone, you have to get close enough to your target to attack.

    But all of the tools a storyteller would use to bring an audience close enough- namely, empathy for the characters- is not what Kubrick was about as an artist, at all. Kubrick was all about The Remove. And that detachment is what keeps “The Shining” safely at bay. The movie is always threatening to break out of its cage and lunge for the audiences throat, but it never does. There’s a frustrating fussiness to “The Shining”. I always get the feeling watching it that, once Kubrick had constructed the Overlook, he was afraid of messing up the wallpaper.

    Stephen King has described the movie as a staggeringly beautiful car, pimped out to the max, and cherry to a T. The problem is, it has no engine. I think that’s an apt analogy.
    But what a car! Few horror movies are as artfully designed, with settings that are simultaneously surreal and prosaic. The Art Direction is unmatched, and the cinematography legendary. The Overlook is profoundly unsettling, and an amazing achievement. One example-

    http://www.damianloeb.com/cache/art/early/Damian-Loeb_Room-237_41x168in-oil-on-linen-2001_FULL.jpg

    Kubrick brought the creepy atmosphere in spades. It’s just a shame he couldn’t figure out (or wasn’t interested in) doing more with it.

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  22. I guess it's a pretty obvious thing to want a horror movie to scare you, but I've never really gone into a film hoping that it would leave me shaking with terror or give me nightmares. I do want the film to shake me up a bit, absorb me, keep me on my toes. If it does more, that can be a good thing, but I certainly don't judge something harshly for *not* freaking me out.

    What I mean is: I love several horror movies listed here like Halloween and Jaws which didn't really scare me. Others, like Psycho and Alien, did on first viewing but not on subsequent viewings. Peeping Tom disturbed me quite deeply without exactly frightening me in any particular moment. The Shining I find to be nearly perfect, suffused with a mesmerizing atmosphere of dread that totally sucks me in--but am I ever genuinely afraid? Does it make me jump or scream, leave me shaking? No. But it leaves me with the feeling that I have just watched a masterpiece, and little morsels of dread to chew over after. I am not sure why I would need more.

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  23. Also, as to the film's characters/depth: I like the book and I totally understand King's dissatisfaction with the film, but I think the movie is working at a different level on a different project than King, and the movie is consequently better and deeper. Not better in terms of character, but in style and form, and not deeper in terms of emotion, but in atmosphere and theme.

    I have not seen Room 237, and from what I've read about it, most of the theories it illustrates about The Shining sound goofy and over-the-top. But I don't think the little details and signifiers strewn throughout the film should be ignored, and the fact is there are a *lot* of Native American symbols there, which is made significant by the hotel being built on a tribal burial ground. With the appearances of the (sinister, wealthy) 1920s party guests and the way Grady tells Jack to take care of his family, the whole hotel seems to be built on concepts of white male privilege and power. The hotel is suffused with history, and that history is one of suffering caused by those with power and the belief that they ought to use it to stomp out anyone in their way.

    I don't think you can sum up the movie as "an indictment of Native American genocide" or "an attack on the nuclear family" or even "exposing the unjust power structures within the nuclear family"--I don't think it's so ideologically driven. It's more that *this* family has come to a place that symbolizes white conquest of the frontier, suffused with appropriated Indian designs and culture, every nook and cranny filled with ghosts of those who went before and ether died violently or did the killing, the whole place a maze and a time capsule--the family comes to this catalogue of white male crimes and finds itself attacked and ripped apart by the father in their midst who becomes the representative of all patriarchal tyranny and madness, who kills the black man/subservient worker, who attempts to kill the subservient wife, and who can only be bested by the younger generation, fleet of foot where he is slow. The father is left behind in the museum of horrors, absorbed into the place's history, a locus of human madness and violence that cannot be destroyed, only left behind--if you can escape the maze.

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  24. @StephenM,
    Well said. I'm totally serious when I say I think you've solved what exactly the Shining is about. It's taking a specific story and making a universal statement about an aspect of human history. Brilliant analysis.

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  25. "The Shining" in Kubrick's own words-

    http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/interview.ts.html

    Just reread this for the first time in years, and holy crap was he a pretentious ass!

    The Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park-

    http://www.collativelearning.com/the%20shining%20ahwahnee%20hotel%20.html

    Timberline Lodge, Mount Hood, Oregon-

    http://www.exteriabp.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/timberlinelodge_exteriabp.jpg

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  26. I'm not so sure I want to count myself in the "not scary" club just yet. Like I said I haven't seen it in years, and I respinded to it more in the small bits I saw a few weeks ago than I did in my entire first viewing. Needs a rewatch. And even in the event that it doesn't scare me personally, I can completely see why it would scare other people. Random, inexplicable ghosts will do that. Especially the twins. Which leads up to Tim's question about paranormal vs. "realistic" terror. Personally, I've always found the concept of paranormal horror scarier, mostly because the worst a slasher villain or Buffalo Bill will ever do is kill you. Slowly and painfully, perhaps, and that is terrifying, but ghosts and such (do we count aliens here) can often do much much worse. That being said, the film that scared me more than any other is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, although you could argue that that film almost made Leatherface and his family into a supernatural force by shere assaultive mood.

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  27. I wish I loved this movie like I love his other movies. I definitely wanted to. When it was announced that Kubrick was making "The Shining", I couldn't believe it. I couldn't fucking wait. I was wailing "shut up and take my money!!" decades before that became a thing.

    Even though my first viewing left me frustrated, unsatisfied and not a little bit angry, I still went back to see it 8 more times before its theatrical run ended. Even though I was still bothered and put off by all the things I'd felt he'd gotten wrong in his movie, I still responded to the things that were overwhelmingly brilliant and successful and amazing about it. The stuff that only Kubrick could have put on the screen.

    And even when Kubrick fumbled the ball (as I feel he did here), his bungles are still 1000x more interesting than most other filmmakers' successes.

    I'll never stop wishing it was a better horror film, but it's an amazing Kubrick film, that's for sure.

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  28. Re: the question of whether physical or paranormal horror is scarier. I've been thinking of a few of the movies and stories that have given me the chills, and I think I've found the common thread. What I personally find scary is when characters' torment is depicted as being irresistible, where no course of action available to them can alleviate their suffering. By and large, psycho killers, zombies, aliens, etc. don't scare me because however powerful they may be, they're bound by certain limitations. They can be contained and fought, even beaten. Their nature and existence is definable and knowable.

    Metaphysical horror (I'm thinking here of stuff like The Beyond, Paranormal Activity, The Blair Witch Project and, yes, The Shining) I find scarier, by and large, because adversaries like ghosts and possessed locations and what not offer less insight as to how they might be fought. The films that scare me the most, actually, are surreal horror pieces like Inland Empire, Videodrome or Tetsuo: The Bullet Man, because they go a step further and inflict incredible cruelty on their characters without them even knowing what's causing it. To me, horror increases as one's agency to resist it decreases. Against a tangible Other, you can at least go down swinging, but what the hell can you do against the betrayal of your own senses, mind and body?

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  29. Bumping this a little to ask a screenplay-related question of the non-book readers who’ve commented.

    About 2/3 of the way through the movie, the action abruptly cuts to Halloran lying in his Miami apartment, watching the weather report on the TV. Then there’s a high-pitched whine on the soundtrack, and he starts to “see” the events unspooling at the Overlook in real time, Jack going into room 237 etc. This is intercut with a shot of Danny having some sort of seizure.

    As someone who’s read the book, here’s how I interpret what’s going on here-

    1) Danny is seeing what’s happening to his father going in to the room, and in his panic, he’s transmitting his experience to Halloran across thousands of miles of distance. He’s sending a cry for help.
    2) The sheer force of the vision shocks Halloran, making him realize that Danny’s power as a psychic means that he and his family are in terrible danger at the Overlook, and that it was a huge mistake on his part to have let them stay there for the winter. It’s at this point that he begins making travel plans to journey to the hotel.
    3) Halloran knows there is a malevolent “energy” in the hotel, but that it is basically powerless, invisible to the vast majority of people who go through the place. It is only the more psychically “aware” people who see things, experience things that others don’t. What’s happening to the Torrances has never happened before to the extent that it is i.e. the “ghosts” in the Overlook are manifesting to the point that they present an active, physical danger to the family in a way they normally don’t. The irony is that Danny’s power is the reason it’s able to manifest to this extent, that he is the “battery” that it is feeding on, and that Halloran needs to get Danny away from there, essentially “unplugging” the hotel from its power source.

    Now, I realize I’m bringing a whole fuckton of narrative baggage from the book, and am filling in a lot of story that may not actually be there in the screenplay. So I’m curious- how did you non-book viewers interpret what’s going on at the Overlook?

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  30. @Rick

    As someone who has never read the Shining, I'm just there for the mood without particularly caring about the specifics of the plot.

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  31. 'The Shining' is, to me, one of cinema's crown jewels. It's influence on today's filmmakers is immeasurable. I do think Mr. Kubrick borrowed certain visual/auditory elements from 'Rosemary's Baby', 'The Exorcist', and 'Suspiria', but still gave us something entirely unique and visionary. The overlit and sterile mise en scene, the editing, the sound design, the cinematography, the playful approach to temporal and spatial order...my god, what a groundbreaking film.

    I do hear the 'I didn't think it was very scary' criticism a lot, and never know quite how to respond. I don't really find any film 'scary', as I know that I'm watching make believe, but the thought of my father wanting to mutilate my mother and I with an axe is fairly chilling.

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