2012 Film Challenge #14: The Shining

There is something frightening about an abandoned house—after all, what terrible thing could have happened there to cause people to abandon shelter? Hatred? Madness? Murder? A derelict house is almost like a corpse—a still, cold remainder of something that used to be alive. We see the outward signs of humanity, but the spark within is gone, like a ghost. When the wind shifts and it creaks, it is almost as if some grey, clammy dead thing in the weeds has shuddered and twitched.

This creepiness of the simultaneous presence and absence of humanity we've given the name haunted, and the vagueness of that fear has been codified into the idea of the ghost. You see, it is not some intangible thing that bothers us—not our own death, certainly—but rather a discombobulated failure of death; the trace of some specific person remains, unloved and invisible, and perhaps if we solve its riddle we can send it on its way like a lost passenger at a railway station.Why, if we only return the jewelry box to Aunt Martha's crypt this whole spook problem will be solved! What is there really to be afraid of at all, when you get right down to it?

It's true, we humans are adept at dressing up our fears, giving them charm and familiarity and some sort of logical place in our world. We assign rules and codes of conduct to them: vampires only come out at night; a werewolf can be killed with a silver bullet; the devil fears the sign of the cross. So too does the haunted house have its own jolly charm; it is baroque and cobwebby and creaky, and there are black cats and hidden staircases, and somewhere in a back closet when you least expect it and really need to find a can opener there is a grinning white skeleton all propped up and ready to topple.

When he was in the process of planning his own haunted house movie, director Stanley Kubrick even went so far as to tell author Stephen King that the ghost story is essentially an optimistic story, since to believe in ghosts is to believe in the afterlife. And surely we can trust Stanley Kubrick when he tells us that his story is going to be cozy and warm and uplifting, right? So, why not snuggle into a blanket, turn down the lights, and have a little shiver with the biggest, grandest haunted house of them all? Why not check in to the Overlook Hotel—and The Shining.

However, I should mention that from this point on things are going to get very spoiler-y, so if you haven't seen the movie you should probably stop reading now and go track it down. Come on back when you're done. We'll wait.

Okay. All set? Good. So, yeah, sorry, I was kinda jerking you around, and Stanley was too. There's nothing optimistic about The Shining. Oh my, no. There is only the same terrible things we feared all along—hatred, madness, and murder. And death. In spades.

But maybe there's a bit more, and that's where it gets interesting.

What fascinates and frightens me about The Shining is that it is more than just a story about a group of people being menaced by an unseen presence in a strange place. The titillating chill of the ghosts is what brings us to the theater and drives the plot, but perhaps what the film is really about the evil that resides within us, and how a seemingly ordinary man could go bonkers and try to murder his wife and child.

The tension is there all along, if you know where to look for it. Jack Torrance is, of course, played by Jack Nicholson, an actor who exudes an iconoclastic charisma that it is hard not to like. With a too-straight face he informs his employer-to-be that he is a writer, one who is "outlining a new writing project." Of course we believe him; we like successful, creative people, and that's the sort of person we like to see as the hero in our movies. What if we're wrong, though? What if Jack isn't really a writer? What if Jack is actually just a failure?

Maybe Jack's not really even all that charming. Hints of disaffection with his family life can be glimpsed in the Torrances' first scene together as a unit; his responses to banalities of his mousy wife, Wendy—played to cruel perfection by Shelley Duvall—have a hint of curtness and condescension, a tone which spirals downward as the movie goes on. His conversation with Danny has an even more loaded, equivocal tone to it; he speaks to the boy with an attitude that falls somewhere in between parental care, cool snark, and wariness; it is almost as if he were speaking to a much older child, one who he fears might be growing up to be a bit smarter than he is.

There is in this something of real life; our children do get stronger as we decline, and sometimes our children show themselves to be smarter, stronger or more talented than we ever were in our youth. A good man might look on this with pride; an average man might look on this with regret; a weak man might look on this with hatred.

Danny's precociousness and unusual self-possession is, like much else in the movie, intensified by a supernatural element. Danny "shines" with extra-sensory perception, and moreover he has within himself another whole person, the eerie personality known only as "Tony." It is chilling to imagine that this equivocal, crackly-voiced presence is yet another ghost, but we could also interpret this as being another version of Danny—perhaps the Danny that is to come?—and a version of Danny that seems to be much more knowledgeable and intuitive than his unhappy father.

Once in the hotel Jack struggles to live up to his assertion that he is a writer. Perhaps out in the world he blamed his lack of productivity on distraction and the cares of the day; perhaps he was happy to put off his ambitions  just so long as he had a glass of bourbon in front of him. However, isolated in the Overlook, he has to confront a possibility that he has perhaps been avoiding all his life: he might not really be a writer after all. He might really just be a caretaker. Even worse, he might simply be a drunk.

Kubrick takes these everyday demons and family tensions and uses the supernatural to explode them to the scale of a bloody Greek myth, like Kronos devouring his children. The malevolent forces in the Overlook close in and take hold of the weakest of the three; disaffection becomes hatred, and resentment becomes murderousness. Everything goes haywire, and suddenly we learn that it is not just the hotel we need to be afraid of.

Many critics panned the film on its release, perhaps not understanding why the great Stanley Kubrick would be slumming it with a horror movie. Or perhaps they just failed to see the point. "There's something inherently wrong with the human personality," said Kubrick in an interview. "There's an evil side to it. One of the things that horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious: we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly." Personally I think he also wanted to remind everyone that he was one of the greatest directors of all time by making one of the scariest movies of all time. As far as I can tell he hit pretty close to the mark.

Like most of Kubrick's movies, The Shining also has a weird, mesmerizing quality that gets under our skin and makes us feel like we're seeing the world in a way that we've never quite experience before. Many of the conventions of the haunted house movie are turned on their head; there are no dark, cobwebby corridors or creaky crypts. The Overlook is grand, spacious, and even magnificent. Everything is clean and bright. It is, however, a maze, and there are some passages that it is not wise to travel down alone.

It was also the first film to make extensive use of the Steadicam, and so the camera's-eye-view has an eerie fluidity to it, where we seem to glide through rooms and ooze around corners. Perhaps the most stunning example is Danny Torrance's headlong Big Wheel ride through the endless hallways; the camera races just behind like a wolf about to devour its prey. Another more subtle but terrifyingly effective use of the camera is in the scene when Jack is chopping down the bathroom door; the camera is centered not on Jack, and not on the door, but on the head of the axe, and with each swing it snaps from left to right so that the audience feels the force of every blow.

Over the years the reputation of the film has grown, and now it is viewed as a something of a classic, maybe even as one of the greatest horror movies ever made. If nothing else, it is has stuck in the mind of ordinary moviegoers, lodging within the top fifty of IMDB's popular rankings, and the almost bizarre extent of its adoration is the subject of a new documentary, Room 237.

I tickles me to know that there are crazy-ass fans of The Shining just like me, and that the movie has worked its way into other people's consciousnesses in the same way it did mine. To me it's more than just a ghost story; it is a brilliantly executed piece of film art, an invention of the mind captured with precision on celluloid. It has its surface level, but something lurks beneath as well. Like all the best horror stories, it takes our worst fears and with a magician's flip turns them into a toy that we can hold in our hands. We can look at it and giggle…and shudder….