This movie may be Grand Guignol imbued with the Theater of the Absurd, but it's lower-case-"a" absurd, too. It has a wickedly black sense of humor that, for once, heightens the horror, not deflates it. I still laugh when the music builds to a crescendo only to have the chords crash frighteningly upon the appearance of the word "TUESDAY"--scariest Tuesday ever!; the cut to Danny's horrified doctor as Wendy tells the story of Danny's injury is just priceless; you've got to think that even Wendy and Danny noticed the, ahem, appropriateness of the Road Runner cartoon they watch; and what can we say about Dick Halloran's interior decorating? That last bit is, I think, particularly telling: Kubrick takes one of Stephen King's great everyman heroes (I actually am quite fond of them) and turns him into both a dirty old man and a blaxploitation parody. It's very funny, and very mean. It's a kick in the teeth of the notion that anything in this movie will be capable of heroism, capable of creating sense, capable of defeating evil. This evil knows our hopes and, to paraphrase Lou Reed, pisses on them. It's the proverbial boot stamping on the human face. It's a dead man with a bleeding head saying "Great party, isn't it?" It's wrong.
I truly had to debate with myself as to where to rank this film in my countdown. For years, this was the scariest movie I'd ever seen, no question; The Exorcist came close, but the horrible purposeleness of this movie, as well as the unparalleled terror of those images, kept The Shining in a class by itself--the class of movies that can still keep me up at night, afraid. Eventually, I saw a movie that beat it. I saw that movie under just the right circumstances, though, and I don't know if it's worth arguing whether it really is "scarier" than this one. All I know is that any time I think of those two little girls, I believe that pound for pound, scene for scene, horror--arrogant, arbitrary, absurd, cruel, evil horror--comes no more horrifying than this.
Except, perhaps, for...
(to be concluded)
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Postscript: I did a lot of writing about The Shining back in my film studies days. Kubrick films hold up under close reading better than those of any other director, in my opinion, so it should come as no surprise that I actually manged to pull off two separate close readings, separated by three years. The first was a study of the film's employment of duality, and especially mirrors and mirroring--you can download it here, and I truly do think you'll be surprised to see just how much thought went into every shot in the film, as evidenced by just this one trope.
Article comments
1 - emma
You might copy those images to another host. Only a small banner gif is shown when remotely linked it seems.
2 - Rodney Welch
I went to see The Shining at the theatre with the greatest hopes of being scared to death. I mean, it was Kubrick, right? A so-called master filmmaker who had certainly battered my senses with A Clockwork Orange. And Jack Kroll in Newsweek certainly thought it was scary. Can't fail, I thought. Unfortunately, I thought, the movie was all foreplay and no climax -- it promises, tempts, lures, and taunts you with the idea that there will be a big payoff. There isn't -- at least, not really. It's certainly not the kind of picture that makes you jump out of your seat.
And yet, over the years, I've come to appreciate it, although not the way most of it's fans do, because it didn't scare me. Instead, I appreciate it in a kind of distant, arm's-length, perhaps even academic way. I see it as a mood piece, a psychological study of a man who realizes he is nothing -- a man who wanted to succeed, as a father, a husband, and a writer, and finds he can't. Jack Torrance is a man who thinks he has writing talent and discovers that he has nothing to say, and his rage about having nothing to say, nothing to offer, nothing to give his family turns him into a violent beast; he sees them as the enemy. It's really, in its way, a study of alcoholism, told in somewhat horrific metaphoric terms; a man who can't escape his sense of failure, and who turns on the wife and child who make him feel that sense of failure just by their very existence. That, to me, is what the real story is; it's a story of a man's midlife crisis where the horror is all interior.
3 - Jim Carruthers
I re-watched "The Shining" a couple of weeks ago on the DVD re-issue (there's a really comprehensive "making-of" doc with extensive interviews with Kubrick, Nicholson and Duvall).
This was about the third or fourth time I'd seen the movie. The first was when it was first released, the second a couple of years ago at a rep theatre with a badly deteroriated and faded print.
The DVD really represented how the horror comes from beneath and within, plus how "The Shining" is one of the best adaptations of Stephen King's books. However, I should note, while I was a child, my parents spent a couple years employed as caretakers at a seasonal resort (though no where near as isolated as the Overlook).
One thing which provides an interesting contrast is the made for teevee adaptation of "The Shining" which was good, but not great.
And if you need a writer's block double feature, pair "The Shining" with the recently released DVD of "Barton Fink".
4 - Rodney Welch
Cool -- I have Barton Fink lined up to watch over the weekend. And you're right about the double DVD set; fascinating documentary of Kubrick and crew just being themselves.
5 - Eric Olsen
I find the subject of writer's block to be beyond my ken. My problem is that I alwyas have too much to say, never not enough. i am always disgorging large amounts of blather and then having to sort it out, rearrange it, eliminate a lot.
That's the main reason I have found blogging so rewarding: I can just blab on and on about whatever hops into my fevered brain all the livelong day and no one seems to mind much.
By the way, I found "Barton Fink" to be disturbing, claustrophobic and overwrought. I kept thinking, "just start writing down whatever pops into your head, one thing leads to another, it doesn't have to be perfect, that's what editing is for."
6 - Rodney Welch
I think I should have said above that Jack Torrance's interior horror becomes externalized. And I can grok the writer's block thing, because I really don't like writing badly, don't like writing sentences I know are horribly wrong -- which is not to say I don't, of course. I've always had this belief that writing is about knowing your thoughts, knowing what you want to say, having some basic grasp of your own point of view, and left to my own devices I'm not always real sure what that is; in fact, I usually don't know what I think until someone tells me what they think, and I rather immediately find myself agreeing or disagreeing strongly. I'm a shitty blogger, no question, but I'm a pretty steady responder.