Stanley Kubrick’s only horror film The Shining may famously have been disavowed by Stephen King for the liberties it took in adapting King’s bestselling 1977 novel, but those deviations are part of what makes the film so effective (leaving aside the shrill edge-of-madness performances, the exquisitely over-designed mise en scène, the unnervingly mobile camerawork, and everything else), as Kubrick repeatedly pulls the rug from under fans of the book who imagine that they know where the film is going (the bathetic fate of Scatman Crothers’ head chef Dick Hallorann being one of the biggest surprises for those who think they are in the know).
The coincidence of initials (SK) between novelist and director is just one of many strange symmetries that lend the film its uncanny sense of diabolical disorientation, where elements that seem tantalisingly to align never quite come together except asymptotically, creating a cognitive dissonance in our pattern-seeking brains. For example, there is the parallelism between the winding corridors inside the Overlook hotel, the hedge labyrinth outside, and the green maze-like pattern on pathetic patriarch Jack Torrance’s tie when he is first interviewed for the job as caretaker; there are the identical twins (Lisa and Louise Burns) who play former caretaker Grady’s non-twin daughters; there is the font on the sign for the hotel’s grand Gold Room which makes it look suspiciously like the Cold Room; and so on and so on.
It is skew-whiff touches like these (and there are many) that, inexplicably, irrationally, do something to the viewers’ mind as we try to process this story of a dysfunctional family of three – Jack (Jack Nicholson), Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and little psychic Danny (Danny Lloyd) – succumbing to both cabin fever and the insidious genius loci as they winter in the icebound, offseason motel with its echoing history of violence, its unnerving ghosts and its deep well of blood to offset the white of the virgin snow outside. Baroque, slippery and utterly devoid of jump scares, this is a strong contender for greatest horror film ever made – where the traces of this family’s, this location’s and this country’s traumatic past of abuse are buried between the lines of a blocked writer’s manuscript, or holed up in a forbidden guest room, or hidden in plain sight behind the frame of an old group photo, and are all easily Overlooked.
Like Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939), Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), The Shining is a film that is so archetypal, that has become so iconic, and whose images and ideas have so thoroughly permeated our culture across multiple media through remakes and sequels, imitations and ripoffs, spoofs and parodies, that even watching it for the first time feels like recovering a lost memory. Meanwhile, Kubrick’s own film itself reverberates as much with the enigmas of Alain Resnais’ similar tale of infernal symmetry and entrapment in a grand old hotel Last Year in Marienbad (1961) – here reimagined as pure horror nightmare – as with King’s novel. Repeat viewings are richly rewarded, but will only add to the mystery, in a narrative that does not so much resolve its infernal ambiguities as leave them frozen in time.
strap: Writer’s (chopping) block: Stanley Kubrick’s superlative labyrinthine hotel horror reveals the chilling dysfunction in a family, a place and a nation
Anton Bitel
