The Shining

The Shining (1980) is Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King, and King disliked it intensely. Knowing why changes the way you watch it. In the novel Jack Torrance is a decent man and the hotel takes him apart slowly. In Kubrick's version he is already cracked in his first scene. King's objection was that there is no journey. Kubrick was not building horror out of transformation, he was building it out of inevitability. The hotel is the real trick. Corridors do not connect, windows appear in walls with nothing behind them, furniture moves between shots. Much of this was deliberate and it makes viewers uneasy without their ever working out why. This was also the first large scale use of the Steadicam, which is why the tricycle sequences down those corridors do not resemble anything else in cinema. What Shelley Duvall went through during production is its own subject, and Kubrick's methods are judged far more harshly now than they were then. Good for: horror, Kubrick, and viewers who enjoy arguing about interpretation. Less good for: there is violence toward a child and sustained domestic threat. Anyone wanting jump scares will be bored. This is slow and cold on purpose.