Where Genre Horror Meets Auteurist Delight – The Shining in Retrospect

May 23, 1980

The central conceit of TWIM, birthed from the expansive brain of my friend and its creator, Scott Sipling, explores the matter of relevance. It queries on film’s staying power and attempts to collapse time in on itself, shrinking the line between pictures’ original release dates and their standing in the public conscience today, in 2021. What a worthy enterprise for examination and analysis. But, I have to say in this one particular case, The Shining is a freaking horror masterpiece that, excepting a few poorly aged moments, thrills and jolts visually and aurally today as much as the day it was born to the world. It’s an all-timer genre flick from an all-time pantheon filmmaker. If that’s not enough to hold your attention now, I’m not sure I can offer any verbose trickery to get you there. But if you still have your doubts, here goes nothing…

To start, maybe I’ll come in the back door a bit. We’ll try to get to relevancy and impact, but let’s just start with the nuts and bolts. The Shining has one of the the all-time great trailers. (It’s tough to find it on YouTube, by the way, despite many authors’ claims). The ACTUAL original trailer is spare and to the point – an elevator with rushing blood and some credits over that haunting musical theme. BOOM. We’re in. And that’s how the film grabs us too. We open on an absolutely sick horn score, and this sweeping overhead helicopter tracking shot, following Jack Torrance as he makes his way to the Overlook Hotel. The scoring is immediately ominous, the cinematography reinforcing isolation. A car heading to nowhere.

As a brief aside, I’ll just state that Kubrick kind of does this with his scoring. To wit, these short, foreboding melody lines that make up a recurring motif. The piano in Eyes Wide Shut, for instance, is Level 1 Primer type stuff. But it more than does the job. The blaring horns are even better in this one. The score returns at various moments in the picture at a near discomfiting volume. It sits in the background in many other sequences, hinting at impending doom, then erupts to punctuate key shots (which I’ll get to momentarily).

Directly on the heels of the terrific opening tracking shots, we meet the hotel’s proprietor, Stuart Ullman. Here, in the first moment of disquiet (when those little hairs on the back of our neck begin to stand up) the stakes are essentially set. To paraphrase – the last caretaker kinda sorta went cray cray and offed his whole family with an ax, before shooting himself in the head. But I’m suuuure that won’t be you. What follows is a slow and meandering “exposition dump,” as Jack and Wendy tour the various floors, rooms, and grounds of the place. Even here, Kubrick’s care and plodding pace is not wasted, as viewers gain spacial awareness of the grounds and familiarize themselves with key settings where later events will unfold.

On to the “shots” we go. Perhaps my greatest argument for not only The Shining’s prominence and belonging in the horror Mt. Rushmore conversation, but also its continued impact lies in this arena. Simply put, I would avow that this film has five or six of the most iconic sequences in the history of cinema. I don’t believe that I should feel the need to offer a spoiler disclaimer for a film that is 41 years old, but here is one for any hypersensitive souls: Read on no further if you haven’t yet seen The Shining! (Also…what’s wrong with you?)

Here are just a few shots which I noted on the most recent viewing:

-The crash zoom on Danny’s face early in the film when he encounters the Grady girls and again on Wendy’s visage when REDRUM is discovered in the mirror (about the 2 minute mark here).

–The steadicam sequence of Danny riding his Big Wheels bike throughout the hotel floors. This recurs again when Danny is running in the maze.

-Jack looking at a miniature replica of the hedge maze which then zooms in on Wendy and Danny and cuts to them inside of it.

-Blood rushing out of the elevator and down the halls in slo mo

-A ground shot looking up at Jack leaning against the pantry door where he’s been entrapped by Wendy.

-The visual aesthetic of the red and white bathroom where Grady and Torrance enter to converse about “correcting” family members who are out of line.

-The shock jump appearance before Scatman’s demise

–“HERE’S JOHNNY!!!”

All that and I literally have not mentioned the two BEST sequences of the film to this point. The Room 237 scene is simply a masterclass in horror filmmaking. The way the sequence pivots from a young beautiful nude to an older decrepit pseudo-corpse leaves unknowing viewers staggered and stunned upon first watch. Again, in the second sequence, that moment of first discovery, finally a glance at the precious manuscript by the bride. And what do we see? Pages and pages with but 10 words – “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.” One after another. Each turning in succession and revealing different spacing and alignment. A totem of the unraveling of Jack’s mind in physical evidence. Another shock to our nervous systems.

What follows is the most harrowing of all. In what I’ve dubbed the “bat sequence” (“Wendy. Darling. Love of my life. I’m not gonna hurt you…”), husband and wife at last face off. One has murderous intentions in mind, the other shrieks and blubbers in an effort to simply survive. If you’re scoring at home, Shelley Duvall swings a bat at Nicholson 41 times as she attempts a retreat backwards up a flight of stairs (another incredibly captured moment). The film now entirely turbo-charged, The Shining rushes onward to its icy, forlorn conclusion.

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Well, stupendous Nick, you may say. A film summary. I could read that 45,000 places on the internet. Tell me why this film remains steadfast among the horror elite. Journey back with me for a few…

It was the summer of ’95 (or maybe ’96) in New England, and a young teenage boy was combing through the paperbacks on his parent’s bookshelf. His eyes alit on a couple of tomes with intriguing names, It and The Stand to name a few. He gulped at their sheer length and continued scanning, until at last he found a little worn book of a much more modest length called The Shining. For the next days and weeks he at first trepidatiously, but then voraciously devoured the text of King’s landmark novel. A whole new world was opened up to him.

That growing boy was me, and The Shining changed everything. In it, my love for horror in general, and for Stephen King in particular was born. Hell, even my adoration for fiction at large jumped up a few levels at that time. At this point, I’ll need to show my real cards. It is unavoidable. I am a toooootal Stephen King homer. I’m prepared to argue that he is a kind of modern Hemingway, and The Stand and Dark Tower series are works of fiction on a par with the all-time greats. Laugh if you must, but these are where my convictions lie. Interestingly enough, I think this matter is not tangential to the question of this film’s relevance. Indeed, I believe it is the squaring off of King vs. Kubrick which may lie at the heart of The Shining’s continued resonance.

My best friend (who may or may not be the creator of this blog) is fond of calling Stephen King a “pop author.” He does not mean it diminutively, but, you know, he kind of means it diminutively. I’ve heard and read others to the same effect. King peddles trash to the masses. He writes about rabid dogs and evil cars, diabolical store owners (Max Von Sydow, yes please!) and menstruating girls under the long arm of cooky religious matriarchs. “Kubrick,” on the other hand, our imagined interloper says as he straightens his bowtie and sips his tea, “Well he was the greatest living filmmaker for 50 years.”

You see, I am not so sure it matters where you fall on this fault line, but it’s the fact that the debate itself exists which heighten the film’s lasting pertinence. Just do a simple search for Room 217 vs. Room 237 and watch how far you fall down the rabbithole before you return to Wonderland. The conspiracies and theories swirling around Stanley Kubrick’s intentionality in the making of this work have grown capacious. Documentaries like Room 237 have only heightened the trend. For some, this deep layered analysis is a part of the “Kubrick experience” writ large, but it takes on special contours in regards to this film. Reddit lovers come out of the woodwork, traipsing out clues and context for their interpretations. Was The Shining about the genocide of Native Americans? “Yes!,” they say. “Here’s why.” Did it point to the lunar landing as a complete hoax? On and on it goes.

Some of what fuels the fire is the expansiveness and genius of Kubrick himself, but The Shining has extra gasoline because it’s author almost immediately disowned it. Nicholson was far too handsome. Not enough of the regular man, King said. Wendy much too demure, weak and off-putting, lacking the depth and personable nature of the book’s character.

It’s not surprising to see why King felt this way, because The Shining may just have been his most personal novel. It was almost uncomfortably autobiographical, concerning itself with an author dealing with the twin death eaters of alcoholism and writer’s block. “White man’s burden” is what Torrance calls the liquid hard stuff in the film. And a deeper dive into the first Gold Room sequence reveals that it was PRECISELY at the moment that Jack offered his soul for some libations (“God, I’d give anything for a drink. I’d give my goddamned soul for just a glass of beer.”) that Lloyd the bartender first brought ghosts into his realm of awareness.

I do not want to speak for a man I admire so much, but it’s likely that King just couldn’t see himself anywhere in The Shining. Well, that and Kubrick completely changed the story’s ending, thereby altering at least one of its main points. Yet, what I consider to be the primary purpose and themes of his work are writer’s block, the battle with substance abuse, and the work/life balance of an author and his family. (For my own part, Eyes Wide Shut offers a MUCH richer canvas for exploration into hidden themes and Easter eggs. But that’s a story for another article). Regardless of which of the two men’s camps you find yourself, Kubrick emphatically DID brings these themes to light in an exceptional way.

So, where does that leave me? Well, let me be as bland as possible…I adore them both! I respect King’s feelings about the film, but, as I’ve argued above, it is simply masterfully crafted by Kubrick. Moreover, we have to consider the medium here as well. King’s work may be a little more grounded in everyday characters, but film is a visual medium. This picture simply does not work as well if Duvall and Nicholson don’t behave like their hair is on fire throughout. Indeed, Jack Nicholson simply has one of the all-time expressive faces. He is about the best at seething, simmering rage that we have. His hamminess works to maximal effect as he loses his mind on camera (and a little off), but it soars to the stratosphere when it’s paired with Shelley Duvall’s growing hysteria. (Kubrick practically wrecked the girl’s life when filming this. It was in the myriad of takes and badgering, among other things. But in so doing, he seems to have tuned her frenzied neuroses to the perfect pitch).

Bringing this all together, I ask again: What do we really have on our hands? I believe it to be the work of a literary master adapted by a cinematic genius who marshaled the talents of all-star crewmates like John Alcott for cinematography, a singular score, and dialed-to-11 performances from the great Jack Nicholson and talented if wearied Shelley Duvall. A film text so rich in details that it could be watched and rewatched and unpacked at considerable length. One that helped show the way forward in filmmaking with epic steadicam shots. And believe it or not, to add to its lore, a film this great was nominated for, wait for it, ZERO Oscars or Golden Globes. None, nada, zilch, zip. Cinematography and score? Nope. Director or Best Picture? Think again. Oh, but it did receive one tidbit of recognition – inaugural Razzie nominations for Worst Director and Lead Actress.

The Shining belonged to a time when major studios had deep pockets for behemoth auteurs, yet let them play in the sandbox of lowdown genre pictures. Stanley Kubrick utilized these resources on a difficult 51 week shoot that left all involved feeling the effects of his finicky, punctilious style of direction. His peculiar genius. His final product does the work of a tightrope walker in a circus, a film with the pop sensibilities of its author and the artistic chops of a wunderkind. One of the greatest films ever put to celluloid, The Shining and its bevy of iconic moments remain crystalized in our mind’s eye to this day.