The Shining

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The Shining

1980 Stanley Kubrick

                The shining very well could be the most frightening film that I have ever seen. When I saw the film as a kid I always knew that it was terrifying but I never could really process why it was so frightening, but now that I have put time into thinking about the film I know that it has to do with subtle things that are easy to miss if you’re watching the film in a group setting (I’ve screened the film for a large group of people who spent the whole time just making fun of the film because they were more interested in talking over it than processing it.) The Scary thing about the Shining is the tone. Kubrick captures the terrifying silence of an abandoned hotel so well through his slow tracking shots throughout the film. Everything about the film is a slow build to the eventual breakdown at the end of the film.

The Overlook hotel is as much a character as any of the humans in the film. The hotel is decorated in a way that is completely unsettling; when the camera follows Danny around on his “Big Wheel” we really get to see a lot of the details of the overlook. The patterns on the wallpaper and the carpet of the halls are memorable and really stick in one’s head long after the credits have rolled.

The Shining is about a family of three who spend the winter isolated in the Overlook hotel, a hotel with a dark past. Jack, played brilliantly by Jack Nickolson, has taken the job as the care taker in order to support his really career as a writer. Wendy and Danny, Jack’s wife and son, find themselves with less and less to do as the winter progresses. Danny eventually gets flashes of visions of terrible things that have happened in the hotel in the past. As time goes on Jack becomes more distant from his family and slowly loses his mind. It is up to the viewer to determine whether he has gone crazy because of cabin fever, or if the hotel is in his head making him do these things.