Stephen King Season: The Shining (Dir. Stanley Kubrick, 2h 26m, 1980)

The year is 1974, and Stephen King has booked into the Stanley Hotel, a few miles outside the town of Estes Park, in the mountains of Colorado. Now a successful author, with Carrie under his belt, and the equally successful 'Salem's Lot mere months from publication, he's left Maine as much to find inspiration as he has to go on holiday. King is also, as a Rolling Stone interview given in 2014 recalls, beginning to realise he's an alcoholic. For the moment, though, King and his young family find themselves practically alone in a hotel about to close for the off-season, and the eerieness of a nigh-abandoned hotel, a ballroom playing taped music, and a late night sojourn to the bar at which King is the only patron, gets his creative juices going, as does a nightmare of his son being chased through these abandoned corridors. King wakes, lights a cigarette, and by the time the stub reaches his fingers, as he gazes out on the moonlit Rockies, his next novel is taking shape.

Several thousand miles away, and two years later, a secretary is sitting outside the office of Stanley Kubrick, the regular thud of mass-market novels hitting the wall punctuating the silence. Kubrick's last film, Barry Lyndon, whilst collecting four Oscars, has been neither a critical success, savaged for being essentially a three hour filmed artbook, and a cold technical masterpiece, nor a commercial one, with Warner Bros disappointed by a $20 million gross against its colossal budget of $11 million, and its poor performance in the States. Kubrick, in short, needs a film that is as much a commercial hit as a critical one, and with his usual meticulousness, has taken to reading great piles of popular novels, in search of inspiration.

Furthermore, the success of 1973's The Exorcist, a film Kubrick turned down for Lyndon, took twenty times the historical epic's gross, and forty times its budget, and Stanley is very keen to redress this balance. The regular thud continues, as book follows book follows book. And then, almost by the absence of dustjacket and bookboard and paper meeting plaster and carpet, the thudding stops, and continues stopping until the secretary pushes open the door to find Kubrick pages deep in the proof of a soon to be released novel by an American author. Stanley Kubrick has found his next film. Stephen King's novel is about to become one of the most terrifying films in cinema history.

What follows, as a struggling writer, battling the twin demons of alcoholism and writers block, and his family find themselves looking after the colossal, and increasingly claustrophobic Overlook Hotel, is a descent into horror that takes in the supernatural, the disturbed ghosts of the Old West, and the inner madness of the human mind. It is a film that takes in everything from the creative process, to domestic violence, to, as the expertly curated Room 237's talking heads discuss, anything from a metaphor for the Holocaust, to an admission that Kubrick faked the Apollo 11 landing, from child abuse, to a grand-scale teardown of the very language of horror cinema, turned inside out and refracted back into the medium. It is a film about madness, about ghosts, and about power and violence.

It is a film about a sadistic perfectionist director driving a woman to madness and a nervous breakdown whilst shielding her young co-star from harm. It is a career best from one of cinema's greatest actors, as he gives into almost animalistic insanity. It is a film that leaves its original author cold, and its composer cutting ties with her long-time collaborator. It is a film that towers, axe in hand, and the grin of Jack Nicholson on its face, as it stalks the corridors of cinema, its legacy all-encompassing and never matched. As the British poster will read, two years later, above Jack Torrance (Nicholson) bursting through the door of the Torrances' bathroom, madness in his eyes, as the terrified Wendy (Shelley Duvall) looks on, "The tide of terror that swept America is here". And its name is The Shining.

The plot of The Shining, something that Kubrick regarded as the true genius of the book, rather than King's writing, is one of the most famous in cinema history, but, from the top: Jack, a struggling author, his wife, Wendy, and their precocious and pregconsicent son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), find themselves, as Jack takes over the caretaker role, at the Overwatch Hotel, now closed for the season. As the winter goes on, so Jack's writers block, his battles with alcoholism and the sinister forces inside the hotel conspire to drive him mad, with Jack's madness, and the visions of violence in death in the hotel encountered by Danny winding up the tension in the ever-more claustrophobic hotel until it erupts into open violence. What follows is one of horror cinema's greatest finales, with Jack, now utterly controlled by the murderous spirits of the hotel, turning crazed axeman, and rampaging through the hotel, before, lured away into the snow, Jack freezes to death as his family escapes.

Over two and a half hours, Kubrick weaves a spell like nothing else in horror cinema; The Shining, above anything else is a film of atmosphere-it's present practically from the film's opening shots, of Jack travelling to the Overlook. Another director, and indeed the 1997 adaption, would have cut this completely, or reduced it to its consistuent parts. The opening credits, though, accompanied by this driving shot, perfectly capture the tone of the entire film to come. The camerawork is almost frighteningly still, a gliding presence across the landscape, taking its time to catch up to Jack's VW. Accompanying it, though, is perhaps the greatest soundtrack cue in horror cinema, at the start of one of its great, and incredibly unnerving, soundtracks. Wendy Carlos & Rachel Elkind's score may have largely fallen by the wayside, Kubrick turning to avantgarde European composers like Ligetti, (also used in 2001-A Space Odyssey) and Penderecki, but Carlos and Elkind's score, through its use of the ancient and ever menacing Dies Irae, and the strange, animalistic noises that belie the influence of 1979's Eraserhead on the film, perfectly sets the scene.

Throughout the rest of the film, its sonic palate of discordancy only grows-it is, in essence, an echo, a horrifying manifestation of the dwindling sanity of Jack Torrance, and the growing malovelence of the hotel-it is music designed to disturb, to disconcert, to, in blunt terms, scare the fuck out of its audience.
Penderecki's music, in particular, is practically designed to hurt its audience, austere, often violent sounding, and the two excerpts from Utrenja, in particular, coming towards the very end of the film, as the Overlook's utter evil comes into play, is a cacophony of chants and almost screamed vocals, thundering percussion, string stabs, and omnious chanting, used with Kubrick's usual astonishing precision. Nowhere is this seen better than the Redrum sequence, where the sudden arrival of
Utrenja, astonishingly loud of the soundtrack, the crashzoom on the horrifed Wendy, and the shot-reverse shot of the now-reflected writing to spell out MURDER is equally suddenly interrupted by the first crash of Jack's axe into the door. It is a moment purpose built to scare.. 

It is practically, undeniably, the blueprint for modern horror cinemas use of score, as well as image, to disorientate and scare its audience, from the overly common -whump- that accompanies so many horror movie jump scares, to horrifyingly well-wrought sound-collages that leaves audiences disorientated and horrified. Even when the post-war avant-garde classical, isn't jolting into view, the sound effects themselves are a perfectly built melange of howls, disembodied creaks and whines, and mesh perfectly with the score to provide something that, even on its own, would be one of the best scores in horror. This, though, is only the beginning. And for this, we need to turn to perhaps one of the greatest scenes in the entire of horror cinema.

The Shining is a film about isolation. Once the Torrance family arrive at the Overlook, the film goes out of its way to show how alone they are-we hear news reports, and then see falling snow, that leaves the hotel isolated, not to mention Kubrick and cinematographer, John Alcott almost losing Nicholson, Duvall and Lloyd in colossal shots where the hotel looms in every direction. The Torrances are alone. They must be alone, because the film takes great lengths to show it. Yet, the film has also gone out of its way, through the first encounter with the mysterious figures of the Grady wins, who suddenly appear whilst Danny is in the hotel's game room, but also through Danny's imaginary friend, Tony, and the film's first, astonishing, iconic shot of blood cascading out of the elevator doors, that will recur, over and over throughout the film, to disconcert, to tell us, in plain cinematic language, that, the Torrances, and by extension, the viewer themselves, are in danger.

We see Danny trundling along the corridors of the Overlook, the steadicam, used by its inventor, Garrett Brown, to effortlessly track behind Lloyd-most of the sequence shot with Brown sat in a wheelchair with a spedometer attached, to ensure each sequence could be shot at the same speed. The camera follows Danny at a distance, out of the kitchen. We cut. Danny trundles down another hallway, we turn the corner, and-
And the camera backs up a little, Danny coming to a sudden stop. Because in the middle of the hallway stand the Grady twins. Someone else is in the hotel. Up starts the drone of dread, as Kubrick starts the familiar back and forth of dialogue, of shot, and reaction. Shot, reverse shot. Shot of the Grady children, as their wonderfully creepy delivery echoes across the hallway, reverse shot of the ever more panicked Danny. Shot, rever-

And then Kubrick pulls his masterstroke. He inserts into the shot reverse shot a third shot, of the two Grady twins lying bloody and dead on the floor, their father's murder of them already known from Jack and the hotel staff's discussions earlier in the film (something largely cut from the European cut). It's...horrifyingly effective. It is nightmarish. It is a small boy trying to make sense of horrific acts, trying to convince himself that everything is going to be ok.

It's a moment, this idea that there is something, someone, that is here that cannot or should not  be there that the film plays several times perfectly, none of these better than the arrival of Lloyd, (Joe Turkel), the Overlook's barman, whose sudden appearance in the film, as a veritably Faustian figure, entices Jack back to the bottle, and whose demeanour and presence indicate that, undeniably, the Torrance patriach's grip on sanity is slipping fast, not to mention the horrors of Room 237 and the bizarre figure of the bear suited man. But it is the scenes in which, far from the ghouls and the ghosts, and the lifts of blood, that The Shining reveals itself. Within the colossal hotel are two of the greatest performances in horror cinema, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the scene heralded by the nine most infamous words in horror cinema:

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

It is the moment around which The Shining pivots. It is the moment where Jack Torrance becomes the sum of all his fears, a raging maniac bent on hurting his wife. It is the moment where Wendy Torrance realises her husband is gone, replaced by the menace and fury of the Overlook Hotel. By this point, Jack Nicholson is in full flow, a wide-eyed, wild animal of a performance, a completely insane performance that would later land him the job of the Joker. Shelley Duvall is fragile, exhausted, mentally and physically worn down by hundreds of takes. It is the moment, buried dozens of takes deep into a scene where Kubrick finds his sweet spot, where performances lose the definition of acting, and take on that of instinct, or outlandish distortion, some of Duvall's lines barely making sense in the context of the scene. It is a moment that runs on horrific, dreamlike logic. It is a moment of pure, abject horror, the moment a wife loses her husband to madness, the moment a husband threatens and ridicules his wife

It is also the moment where The Shining clicks into place. It is the moment, four watches in, that The Shining reveals itself as a piece of cinema. Not as a horror movie-that's two watches and nearly an hour back in the film, where Danny turns the corner and finds himself not alone. This scene is the moment where Kubrick's intentions become clear, why The Shining probably has more in common with 1977's Hausu or fellow 1980 film, Friday the 13th than you'd originally think. For, whilst being a horror movie, perhaps the horror movie... The Shining is also a satire of horror movies.

Let's unpack this a little, starting with this very scene. Duvall's performance may well be that of the genuine horror movie heroine-her treatment at the hands of Kubrick is one of the reasons I still have reservations about this film, hesitate to enjoy it, knowing it literally caused her a nervous breakdown and mental health problems that still haunt the actress to this day, and to largely retire from acting, but Jack Nicholson has, by the third act, largely morphed into a goddamn cartoon, his and Wendy's character development dumped out by Kubrick, to be replaced by, well, creepiness. It is a magnificent performance, as only Jack Nicholson can do it, but by the time he hacks through the bathroom door, pops his head through and bellows, in one of cinema's single greatest ad-libbed lines:

HERE'S JOHNNY!

His perfomrmance is so over the top, so utterly hilarious, that this single moment overhangs the entire film; looming across culture with a wide-eyed, wild grin.  But it is not an outlier. Yes, the film's sudden violence, its suddenly appearing bartenders and murdered children, its crashing cacophany of middle 20th century European avantgarde, and its generally disturbing and alarming sense of fear is genuinely terrifying, but it is also practically a grab-bag of tropes, of horror stapes that, in some cases, go back to practically the dawn of cinema as a medium, if not before. Whilst many of the building pieces are King's, the way they're set into place, from the unnerving, perfectly tailored to scare, score, to the almost detached sense that everything is shot in, compared to the up-close and often nervy work of gallio cinema, Hammer Horror et al, are pure Kubrick, and some of them drop into place with an ironic twist. The almost absurdly cursed backstory of the Overlook, the astonishingly over-the-top performance from both Duvall and Nicholson, even the iconic tidal wave of blood, are practically Kubrick deliberately playing with, and remaking, the rules of horror cinema, as he so often did with the rules of cinema itself.

Perhaps, I'm reading too much into this, too aware of The Shining's astonishing longevity in popular culture-hell, one of my neighbour's doormats welcomes you, carpet and all, to the Overlook-but attempts to (or, at least trying to) understand The Shining has practically become a cottage industry, with everything from the massacre of Native Americans, explained via the Overlook's site's building of a burial site, appearance of Native American artefacts, to the Holocaust, in its depiction of the evil of man, to the appearance of the Overlook, to the appearance of German typewriters, to, in perhaps the film's most bizzare theory, that the film is one COLOSSAL admission for the (equally barking) theory that Kubrick faked the Apollo 11 Moon Landing, knitted sweater and all. This is without going into the book's themes of the cycle of violence in alcoholism, child abuse, and broken family

But perhaps this is picking flaws with the carpet in a film that is colossal, all emcompassing, and practically changed the very nature of horror. Thousands, nay, millions, enter the Overloook every year, and get lost within it. It towers over horror cinema. Forty years on, despite King's misgivings, despite the film's production, despite just how much the film has been watered down by the decades of reintepretations and remixing, there is no film like The Shining. If nothing else, The Shining is an astonishing response to horror cinema as a medium from one of cinema's great masters, &, through its maze of theories and interpretions, a grip on its audience like few films in all of film

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)


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