The Shining (1980)

 

The Shining

(1980)

 

This film makes pretty much every single list of “Best Horror Movies” I’ve ever read, as well as lot of “Best Movies” in general. It played no small role in the elevation of the Author of the novel it’s based on to the Pantheon of contemporary greats … never-the-less, the Author, Stephen King, doesn’t much like it and the film’s devoted fans are often in a deep anxiety – the movie’s achievements are undeniable, but is it actually good?

 

I think it’s great, but I appreciate the argument because I think I see what it is really about: Director Stanley Kubrick chose to be unfaithful to the source material (not always a sin) but he went farther, he changed what the story was about. No one denies Kubrick did extraordinary things here, but they do argue about what he was trying to say, and if it was even worth saying. This is an important argument, and so I will start this essay with, what was original author, Stephen King, actually talking about?

 

Part One: The Novel

 

The novel (1977) was inspired by Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House” (novel published in 1959, made into a still unsurpassed Haunted House movie in 1963) and Robert Marasco’s “Burnt Offerings” (novel published in 1973, which was made into a pretty good Horror flick in 1977), but more specifically inspired by a King’s own weird, but uneventful, vacation experience:

 

“In late September of 1974, Tabby and I spent a night at a grand old hotel in Estes Park, the Stanley. We were the only guests as it turned out; the following day they were going to close the place down for the winter. Wandering through its corridors, I thought that it seemed the perfect—maybe the archetypical—setting for a ghost story. That night I dreamed of my three-year-old son running through the corridors, looking back over his shoulder, eyes wide, screaming. He was being chased by a fire-hose. I woke up with a tremendous jerk, sweating all over, within an inch of falling out of bed. I got up, lit a cigarette, sat in the chair looking out the window at the Rockies, and by the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind.”

 

King imagined a Haunted House as not only an inanimate object infused with a specific spirit or sin of its past, but somehow alive, the Vampire in-of-itself. The film retained that, but jettisoned other important themes.

 

King, always the Moralist, explored Seduction as a road to Demonic Possession, wherein the Victim of Possession is also culpable in his/her own Damnation. It focuses on how a good, but flawed, man named Jack Torrance, goes really, really, bad. Jack is a talented writer who loves his wife and son, but also recovering alcoholic struggling with anger issues. Those were the weaknesses that the Hotel was happy to exploit across the long and lonely winter that the family spent there alone. The naturalistically-presented erosion of Jack’s decency takes up half of the massive novel and it is as compelling as the overtly Supernatural elements that it is so intimately intertwined with.

 

The novel is about Bad Things being committed by, and happening to, mostly Good People. In the novel the Hotel is Hell, a place that can harm the Innocent but is primarily a place of punishment of the Guilty in the form of servitude to a corrupt Supernatural Master, and the Punishment reflects (to a degree at least) the idea that though Evil exists, the Universe is fundamentally Morally-Ordered. There are other Victims who are not so Seduced as Jack was, but though never made explicit, it is suggested that death is not a trap for them -- eventually we all die, but we don’t all go to Hell, and across the history of the Evil place, only a very few who passed through are affected by its Curse at all.

 

In the story, the Hotel wants the essence of a true Innocent who has usual power, Jack’s son Danny, but needs to first Corrupt vulnerable Jack and make him its Instrument. In the end, the Hotel is denied, getting less from the one it successfully Corrupted than it expected.

 

Part two: the Movie

 

Kubrick had no intention of telling that story. I read an interview with King (which now I can’t find, so forgive the following paraphrases) wherein King described bizarre 3am calls wherein Kubrick would make demanding questions like, “Do you believe in God?” They would then discuss each other’s concept of the Afterlife and Kubrick would insist that Life-After-Death could not possibly be anything but a good thing. King brought up the issue of damnation in Hell. Kubrick responded, “I don’t believe in Hell.”

 

The movie reflects Kubrick’s already well-established misanthropism. In the movie, King’s theme of seduction by Evil is undermined by the fact that the seduced man looks like he’s about to go postal from the very beginning. Jack is played by the legendary Actor Jack Nicolson and this is one of his most memorably depraved roles. During the first, short, dialogue scene, Jack’s new employer, Hotel Manager Stuart Ullman (Barry Nelson), warns Jack that a former Winter Caretaker of the Hotel fell victim to Cabin Fever and killed his wife, daughters and himself. Jack responds, "You can rest assured, Mr. Ullman, that's not gonna happen with me. And as far as my wife is concerned, I'm sure she'll be absolutely fascinated when I tell her about it. She's a confirmed ghost story and horror film addict."

 

Allegedly, Kubrick insisted the scene be done over, and over, and over, I’ve read it was a total of either 80 or 160 times, deliberately provoking Actor Nicholson’s frustration and rage at the Director until it leaked out into his demeanor in ways the Actor would be unlikely be able to create as artifice; the reason it looked like Nicholson, though speaking casually, seemed about to explode, it was because he really was.

 

(To underline the chasm between novel and film, King envisioned Actor John Voight in the Jack part.)

 

The was not an unconsidered move, because though Moralists like King believe in free will, Kubrick was introducing Predestination, his Jack is not a Good-Man-Gone-Bad but a Puppet-of-Fate; and the Hotel is not a Hell as King envisioned it, but a loop-in-time where the same tragedies unfold over-and-over on a Mobius strip. Both the novel and the film introduce Time-Travel themes near the end, but interestingly, that power is reserved for the Good and forward-looking in the novel but reserved for Evil and backward-looking in the film.

 

Critic Bill Blakemore, while making an argument for an Anti-Imperialist Theme in this film that I can’t endorse, offered something I found compelling, "Kubrick is examining in this movie not only the duplicity of individuals, but of whole societies that manage to commit atrocities and then carry on as though nothing were wrong. That's why there have been so many murders over the years at the Overlook; man keeps killing his own family and forgetting about it, and then doing it again."

 

As the Ghostly Butler Grady (Philip Stone) tells Jack during a weirdly casual conversation between the Living and the Dead in a men’s bathroom, “You're the caretaker, sir. You've always been the caretaker.”

 

As the Character Jack is different (and less sympathetic) in the film than the novel, so everyone who shares Domestic Intimacy with him must be different as well. Jack’s wife, Wendy, in the novel is a potent and powerful Character deeply torn between supporting her struggling husband or casting him aside to protect her son. There was an Autobiographical aspect to this, King was laying bare his own Demons and his uncertainties as to if his wife Tabitha should even bother to love him.

 

In the film version, Wendy is a tragically weak, but also convincing Victim of Domestic Domination and Emotional Abuse even before the actual Violence erupts. Wendy was played by Shelley Duvall, and King is on record as hating the performance, “one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film. She’s basically just there to scream and be stupid. And that’s not the woman I wrote about.”

 

The complaint is misguided, but also a logical extension of other complaints about the adaptation. The simple fact is that the novel’s Wendy would’ve never married the movie’s Jack, so if one takes the perspective of putting Duvall’s Wendy in the context of Nicholson’s Jack, she becomes flawlessly realistic, though infuriating as a Life-Long Victim often is. Notably, this Wendy seemed temperamentally incapable of escaping anyone, but in the end, that’s exactly what she did (I’ll return to this).

 

These radical changes created problems in the Character of their son, Danny. In the novel, Jack’s degradation forces the maturation of the boy, he grows in potency across the length of novel, he becomes the man that is father should have been but never was. An undeniable failure of the film is that its version of Danny, played by Danny Loyd, is little more than a series of reaction shots. Both book and movie are essentially three-character dramas, all others shoved to the periphery. The film’s script’s disinterest in the third character is pretty damning.

 

More shocking still, “The Shining” of the title is Danny’s natural Clairvoyant Gifts, that is what the Vampire Hotel really wants, that is why it took the time to Seduce the father, but that is barely in the film at all. Yes, in the film there are scenes where Danny has visions of the hidden Horrors of the Hotel and him using a talking finger to demonstrate his communication with the Shining’s avatar Tony -- though the vision scenes are effective, the talking finger scenes do not impact the plot and are rather silly.

 

The only Character in the film that accurately reflects the novel is Dick Hallorann, played by Scatman Crothers. He is the warmest Character in the film, and presented as Danny’s potential Mentor as he shares Danny’s Shining Gift. When Hallorann is on screen, it seems as if the Shining will have same role in the film’s plot as the novel. When Jack goes completely insane, Danny calls for Hallorann’s help via Telepathy and the brave old man comes running cross-country to rescue the family. But when he arrives at the Hotel, he fails to contribute to the story at all, as he is killed almost instantly. In this, the film falls into among the most mocked of movie clichés wherein the noble, warm-hearted, negro is included only as a sacrificial victim to the required body count. This is the only really annoying cliché the film indulges, but it also cheapens Hallorann’s significant role in the novel, and therefore goes back to Kubrick’s rejection of the novel’s actual intents.

 

Part three: making the Film

 

Ten years after the film’s release, Critic Roger Ebert interviewed Actress Duvall and asked, "How was it, working with Kubrick?"

 

Her answer heartrending, but also revealing about the clash between the novel and film, "Almost unbearable. Going through day after day of excruciating work, Jack Nicholson's character had to be crazy and angry all the time. And my character had to cry 12 hours a day, all day long, the last nine months straight, five or six days a week. I was there a year and a month. After all that work, hardly anyone even criticized my performance in it, even to mention it, it seemed like. The reviews were all about Kubrick, like I wasn't there."

 

The novel was about the people; the film was about the Hotel. Kubrick’s co-scripter, Diane Johnson, made this explicit, "In a certain sense, it's the hotel that sees the events: the hotel is the camera and the narrator.”

 

In most ways, it was a very new conception of the Haunted House story. Though in its exquisite creation of a sense of looming bad things constantly on the verge of erupting does echo the older, magnificent, adaption of Shirley Jackson’s novel, Kubrick (like King) embraced a bluntness and explicitness that was never part of Jackson’s novel or its film’s aesthetics. Also, Kubrick chose to move away from all the more familiar Gothic tropes: No shadows, gargoyles, or damsels in diaphanous gowns. The Hotel and corridors are brightly lit and quite modern and the film’s solitary female is “dressed like a fashion-challenged kindergarten teacher.”

 

Kubrick creates his own motifs, especially a love of mirrors. Mirrors play a role in several of Danny’s and Jack’s supernatural visons. Every scene wherein Jack talks to/encounters a Ghost there is a mirror in the room, a number of tricks are employed where these mirrors reflect somethings but not others, and often Kubrick deliberately keeps this information at the fringes of a scene’s main action. Mirrors play a perverse role even in the non-Supernatural scenes, like when we realize that we are not looking Jack directly, but his reflection in the mirror, because the letters on his T-shirt are backwards. This is a set up for the reveal of the meaning of the word that repeatedly appears in Danny’s visions, “Redrum” (reverse the letters, you’ll see).

 

King wrote half the novel in room 217 of the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. The room number worked its way into the novel, but in the film, Kubrick changed it to 237, and much has been made of Kubrick’s change, though what the point the Kubrick obsessives were trying to make has always escaped me. In the film, the exteriors were the Timberline Hotel in Oregon, which is similar-looking the Stanley. Virtually everything else is set-bound.

 

The sets were an extraordinary construction, especially the illusion of natural sunlight pouring through massive windows; they would convince anyone that it was all-location shooting. Critic Jonathan Romney called it “an extraordinary vindication of the value of mise en scène.” They were designed by Roy Walker and constructed at Elstree Studios in England; a composite of American hotels Walker visited during research. The main hall was giant and all the other hallways ran from it, the rooms extended of those halls, all on a single sound-stage, a magnificently “real” space. The very vastness, and the fact that the sets had ceilings, created a colossal, echoing, emptiness. “It's a real, complex space that we don't just see but come to virtually inhabit.” In fact, it was lived in: the 17-week-shoot stretched to 46, “something that…[director] Roger Corman could have turned around in a fortnight.

 

“The confinement is palpable: horror cinema is an art of claustrophobia, making us loath to stay in the cinema but unable to leave. Yet it's combined with a sort of agoraphobia - we are as frightened of the hotel's cavernous vastness as of its corridors' enclosure. When Jack attempts to write in the huge Colorado Lounge we wonder what's getting to him more - being imprisoned in his own head or being adrift at his desk as though at sea.”

 

When the family is trying to adjust to the Hotel, Wendy says "Just like a ghost ship, huh?"

 

Critic Chris Justice wrote, “Kubrick always redefines visual space, and he is particularly fascinated with humans' relationship to space…The further the Torrance family slides into paranoia and madness, the more geometric the compositions become; they ultimately find themselves in the outdoor maze.”

 

The just mentioned outdoor hedge maze was constructed in the same studio. The hedge maze scenes evolved both in reaction to film technology being inadequate to capture specific actions within the novel and Kubrick’s evolving re-envisioning what the novel was supposed to be about. It’s the central environment wherein the film’s conclusion plays out, and was repeatedly, gorgeously, foreshadowed throughout the film.

 

There’s a notable scene is early on when Jack walks over to a table-top scale-model of the Maze. He leans over it, and is made a giant by its miniature, suggesting a God's-eye-view which speaks of his emerging madness. He imagines seeing his wife and son walking in the Maze, tiny like insects (one of King’s specific complaints comes to mind now, “‘We’re looking at these people, but they’re like ants in an anthill, aren’t they doing interesting things, these little insects”). When the camera slides in closer to the miniature, Jack’s fantasy translates into a reality. We hear their voices, so small as to be indistinct, progressively louder, but Wendy’s voice is small even when speaking normally, and in the next camera shot we are eye-level with the two walking in the maze and Jack’s part of the scene is left behind.

 

Then, in the climax, a demented and axe-wielding Jack hunts Danny through the snowbound maze. The lighting is surreal and both predator and prey are followed by Kubrick’s ground-breaking Steadicam work. "The Shining" is often referred to as “the Steadicam movie,” not that it was the first use of Garrett Brown’s now-almost-ubiquitous technology (that honor goes to the Woody Guthrie biopic, “Bound for Glory” and the Thriller “Marathon Man” (both 1976)) but Kubrick clearly fell in love with this new toy, and I think I can safely say that in the more than three decades since “The Shining” no one has been able to discover any new compositional possibilities after Kubrick so pushed the new tech’s envelope in this one film.

 

(Kubrick always loved the technical adventurism of new technologies: In “2001: a Space Odyssey” (1968) he made abundant use of Slit-scan lighting effects and constructed giant rotating sets for the simulation of artificial gravity. In “Barry Lyndon” (1974) he shot by candlelight.)

 

“The Shining” appeared the same year as the Slasher-film craze spiraled out-of-control (there was about ten, highly redundant, Slasher films released that year and each following year for the rest of the decade). “The Shining” was no Slasher, but shared some elements, most essentially, its stalking sequences (maybe it should be called an anti-Slasher movie, I’ll get to that). These stalkings were a slowly evolving thing in cinema; going back a little farther, in 1964 Mario Bava’s “Blood and Black Lace” (1964) made the stalking sequences more important than the kill, or the story. Then in 1974 Bob Clark’s “Black Christmas” (1974), in my opinion the first “true” Slasher, strengthened that identification between audience and the killer by lingering on his POV, sometimes with a hand-held-camera.

 

In 1978 John Carpenter added the Steadicam into the mix, so Carpenter was, to a degree, ahead of Kubrick, but as few realized he used the tech, he got no credit for that innovation. A Steadicam is an ultra-light camera mounted on gimbals, allowing the camera to move like a person walking, but without bounce even though the camera is still, essentially, hand-held. But Kubrick exploited its inhumanly fluid tracking, combining the grace of Bava’s tracking with the sinister subjectivity of Clark’s, then going other places never seen before.

 

Through most of his career Kubrick’s camera may have been the most unapologetically subjective in the history of cinema, and it is notable here that it doesn’t much take the stalker’s POV, but instead (best demonstrated in the hunt through the hedge maze) stalks the stalker just like the stalker stalks his prey. As Diane Johnson observed above, the Hotel is the Narrator, but more than that, the Steadicam forces the audience to be intimate with the POV of the Vampire Hotel.

 

Though the climax is the films most lauded use of the Steadicam, its application was tremendously diverse throughout, and my personal favorite applications are a few scenes much earlier wherein the camera is set low, following Danny riding through corridors of the hotel on his Big Wheel (I had one when I was a kid). These scenes anticipate Jack’s later run through the Maze. Especially nice in these scenes was the unsettling effect on the sound of the hollow plastic wheels alternately rattling across wood and then the swooshing over the carpet. There’s also a sensation of inevitability as the kid turns each and every corner -- there must be something bad about to leap out -- but there isn’t, or at least not the first couple of scenes in which the trick is employed. We begin to realize the purpose is the creation of a tense-mundanity of time ticking-off as the family’s isolation increases. A notable aspect of Kubrick’s suspense-building is the almost sadistic habit of stretching-out scenes beyond their breaking point. And then, finally, when the isolation is absolute, Danny turns a corner and something terrible is waiting there.

 

One of the things that made that long-awaited shock-scenes so effective is Kubrick combined it with the exact opposite mannerism, the One-Point-Perspective shot, which he had long been famous for. Kubrick used likes uses a (usually) a stationary camera and architectural lines receding towards an unseen vanishing point, to create the sense of space and humans puny and/or puppet-like within. It is in almost all his films starting with, “Paths of Glory” (1957), but only in “2001…” was it was used as extensively as it is here. Even in motion, and using the Steadicam, the OPP-effect is maintained and enhanced because the camera was locked on to the back the characters heads -- Danny riding his Big Wheel, Jack prowling with his axe -- both through their respective mazes.

 

There are a number of similarities between “2001…” and this film. In both films the weight of accumulating time established with repeated, intrusive, inter-cards marking its passing. In “2001…” the architecture of the room that astronaut Bowman grows old and dies in suggests a high-end hotel room like the one in this film. Both films concern a voyager having surreal journeys of transcendence and beyond normally experienced time, though in “2001…” the transcendence is all Good, while in “The Shining” it is to Perdition. “2001…” establishes good Time-Travel being into the future and the film has a notable visual theme of erasing the past, while “The Shining” bad Time-Travel goes into the past and all the sign-posts of the Hotel’s Evil asserting itself are marked with period clothing and music.

 

Important to this is the much argued-over final scene: After Jack’s death, we’re treated to an extremely long tracking shot (I don’t believe this one was Steadicam, it looked more like crane work) that crosses one of the hotel’s vast interior spaces and closed in on a wall with framed black-and-white photographs. The camera closes in on one in particular photo as “Midnight, the Stars, and You” plays. Finally, we see the image, it’s a huge party that the inscription tells us it was held on July 4th, 1921, Independence Day. In the front row of the crowd of revelers is a smiling, younger-looking, Jack dressed in black tie and dinner jacket.

 

Yes, he’s always been the care taker.

 

I’ll add that there was also a two-minute explanatory epilogue that was cut shortly after the film's theatrical Premiere. In it, Character Wendy is visited at the hospital by Hotel Manager Ullman. He informs her that a search-party was unable to locate Jacks’ body; but this is after we, the audience, had already seen Jack’s frozen corpse and how it was in an easy-to-find location. Jack has now become an Evil version of “2001’s…” Star-Child.

 

Part five: so, who does this story belong to anyway?

 

I’m not the only critic who has made the connection between the films “2001…” and “The Shinng,” but such connections are impossible between “2001…” and King’s original novel. This has led many to convincingly argue that King’s semi-Autobiographical Horror novel became a similarly semi-Autobiographical film for Kubrick.

 

Laura Miller wrote “The two men represent diametrically opposed approaches to creating narrative art. One is an aesthete and the other is a humanist. Kubrick was a consummate and famously meticulous stylist; King’s prose is workmanly and his novels can have a shambolic bagginess.”

 

Part of this novel, and a not-infrequent theme in King's work, is Writer's Block. This is amusing because in his less-than-fifty-year career [note: I originally wrote this in 2016, that effects some of the numbers that follow] he has published 55 novels, 6 book-length non-fictions, 200+ short stories, plus comic books, screenplays, etc, etc, etc. This novel about writer’s block is 417 pages of closely-spaced type that was apparently wrested into coherence in less-than two years. King seems to fear Writer’s Block the way the rest of us fear Nuclear War, the Biggest Bad on the other side of the horizon, but not an immediate crisis.

 

Kubrick, on the other hand, had a public career that extended from 1951 to 2001 (the release of “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” a film actually directed by Steven Spielberg because Kubrick had died two years prior, after working on the project for the prior fifteen years). Kubrick personally directed a total of sixteen features and shorts released over a 48-year period, adding product to his resume every year or couple of years early on, but then progressively, and radically, slowing down. It was 5 years between the release of “Barry Lyndon” and “The Shining.” Another 7 years before “Full Metal Jacket.” 12 years before “Eyes Wide Shut,” which was released the year of his death. Is it presumptuous to suggest that Writer’s (or Director’s) Block was something Kubrick felt more intensely than King?

 

A notable scene in the film, faithful to the novel but more powerfully realized, was when Wendy is shocked to discover that Jack, who hasn’t been talking to her because he is supposedly working on his novel, well, isn’t. Kubrick manages to turn this into a potent Horror-shock effect as she flips through the pages, hundreds and hundreds of them that all have the same few words, obsessively repeated, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” The page layouts insanely meticulous and variable like the typographical fasmagoria of Guillaume Apollinaire, only more geometric and therefore more insane. [Worth noting: Kubrick had the pages individually hand-typed for the production, not machine-typed. Now that shit is crazy.]

 

From behind, Jack appears, startles her, and asks, "How do you like it?"

 

Kubrick acted as if he didn’t want to release the film, rushing re-edits before premier, then re-editing again it in-between the premier and wide-domestic-release, and still he wasn’t finished. This is not the first film he’d behaved this way about.

 

There are other interpretations of this film, like that it is really an extended metaphor of Hitler’s Holocaust or the Genocide of the Native Americans; I don’t put much water in them. There’s also a divergence between American and European critics because, until the emergence of DVDs the different continents were watching much different movies, and the European version is inferior.

 

King was not the only person who disliked Duvall’s performance, so did Kubrick. King clearly blames Kubrick for Duvall, but Kubrick never blamed himself. He was notoriously mean to her on set, and after “The Shining” achieved wide-domestic-release he re-edited the film for the international market and in what can only be explained by spite, he tried to cut Duvall out of the movie entirely, which was impossible, but he did cut a whopping 25 minutes.

 

So, what was lost?

 

The parts of the climax where the Hotel finally reveals itself to Wendy were cut. Before the climax Jack and Danny had visions but Wendy did not; this raises the issue of Folie à Deux and Unreliable Narrators (but only if you choose to ignore Hallorann, which some critics did, because he never fit properly into this script anyway). The Hotel pulling the curtain back for Wendy makes the Supernatural elements of the story more objectively real.

 

Worse, almost every scene establishing the mother-child relationship was excised (which also made Danny’s problematic Characterization even worse). It is notable that both the first and second acts of violence are not committed by homicidal Jack, but Wendy defending herself and her son from Jack, and both times this weakling gets the better of the Monster. But that can’t have as much effect in a version where Wendy’s weakness, and her love for her son, was less established. I read an uncredited review by someone who loves this film, that summarized the European critic’s dilemma deftly, “…makes it possible for critics to conclude that ‘The Shining’ is really about nothing at all, simply a botched genre job - is the fact that this is a film about the experience of watching ‘The Shining.’”

 

Jack, though scary as all hell, is a remarkably ineffectual Monster. He’s bested twice by a weak, shrill, woman and then once more by a little boy, and he manages to kill only one person in the course of the film (Hallorann) and that victim was elderly and not even one of the Vampire Hotel’s intended targets. Remove the visions of acts of Violence from the Hotel’s dark past, and this is the lowest body-count of any Slasher-movie I can think of (which is one of the reasons why, up above, I suggested it was an anti-Slasher movie).

 

In the novel by moralist King, the relatively low body-count (even lower than the film) probably should be interpreted that as the power to harm is not a power worth having, and that really can’t accomplish much. (When I first wrote this, and more so today as I revise it, the Terrorist pseudo-State of Daesh (ISIS if you insist) has lost virtually all its real estate in the Middle East. It is obvious that the threat it represents will soon enough be extinguished…so what do they have to show for themselves? They killed a lot of people, they caused a lot of misery, but that doesn’t really seem like much of an accomplishment.)

 

In the film by misanthrope Kubrick is saying much different things about pretty much everything, so what is he saying? Since the power of the Shining of the title amounted to so little in the film’s plot, maybe the point is that the power of power is not really worth much. This can be seen in many of Kubrick’s films, from futility of the plottings of criminal masterminds in “The Killing” (1956) and the futility of the power of the Nation State in “Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (1964). There was also a scene cut from “2001…” wherein the Star-Child casually stripped humanity of its most powerful technological achievements, the Nuclear Weapons that were so troublesome in “Dr. Strangelove…” And in “A Clockwork Orange” (1971) both the power exerted by the Hooligans on the Rampage and the interventions of conscientious Reformers within the State prove to be for naught. I could give more examples.

 

Assuming I’m on the right path here, it was important that Wendy be weak, and stay weak. She saves her son and escapes, but there no sense of the up-lifting triumph of the underdog, just an underlining of the futility of Jack and the Hotel playing-out its Mobius-strip tragedies again and again and again.

 

Let’s merge the two ideas now: that Kubrick, the Director notorious for his insistence on controlling every-thing, deeply identified with his Villain Jack (so much different than King’s) in a film that is about the futility of power.

 

Not typical Horror film fare, but still a plenty scary idea.

 

 

Part five: in the Theaters and Beyond

 

When first released the reviews were luke-warm, but soon improved. The box-office was initially disappointing, but it managed to find its audience and was ultimately a hit. Cheaper, crasser films, that pulled in less, but showed a better return on investment, became the future of Horror cinema as the industry follow Kubrick’s path. The biggest winner of 1980 was the risible “Friday the 13^th” which stole shamelessly from the previous work of Directors Bava, Clark, and Carpenter.

 

For the next more-than a decade, the Horror-genre exploded with popularity, but also became aggressively populist and self-derivative. The 1980s and 1990s gave us a lot of great Horror films, but better Horror Comedies and fewer serious-minded ones. Worse, Slashers dominated the out-put, so the 1980s were cliché-driven like one other time since the decadent period of Universal and its poverty-row imitators in the 1940s. Kubrick’s film was parodied and homaged endlessly, but few seemed will to pursue his meticulous aesthetic or sense of vision.

 

Horror escaped its self-created adultescent trap in the remarkable year of 1999 ("The Blair Witch Project," "The Sixth Sense," "Stir of Echoes," etc.), and we should all feel blessed by that, but none of those films, nor any that came since, seem to want to carry Kubrick’s torch any farther. I see his fingerprints more in recent SF than Horror, but then, he did more SF than Horror.

 

Author King’s dislike of the film is notorious, though it did make King’s own list of “Best Horror Films.” King eventually was able to get a more faithful adaptation; it was Directed by Mick Garris who has a remarkable record of flat-out awful King adaptations (why does this guy keep getting work?). His “The Shining” (TV mini-series 1997) is not bad, it may even be his best work, but is only most memorable for being unmemorable.

 

King also wrote a sequel to the novel, “Doctor Sleep” (2013), about the struggles of a grown-up Danny. I haven’t read it yet, nor have a seen the film adaptation (2019).

Kubrick died in 1999. Actress DuVall outlived him by more-than twenty-years but had withdrawn from public life because of mental health issues years before his death. After her mental health issues became tabloid fodder in 2016, the internet became abuzz with accusations that her decline was trigged by Kubrick’s abusive treatment of her during the production of this film. The chronology contradicts that, DuVall’s public-life and career continued with great success long after “The Shining’s” release, she only went on hiatus after 1993. By 2023, significantly recovered, DuVall returned to acting and in an interview had far kinder things to say about Kubrick than she had in 1980. DuVall died in 2024.

 

 

Trailer:

The Shining - Official Trailer [1980] HD - YouTube