Cinema Sweet

The second film in our series of Horrifyingly Good Hallowe'en Movies is...

The Shining
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, Scatman Crothers
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Released: May 23, 1980

"Here's Johnny!"


These immortal words have been repeated and parodied so many times that you might think they'll never be scary again. You'd be wrong.

Based on the book of the same name by the master of horror, Stephen King, 'The Shining' is a skin-crawlingly claustrophobic psychology horror film which sees the Torrance family move into the isolated Overlook Hotel where the father, Jack (Jack Nicholson), a recovering alcoholic, will work as the caretaker throughout the winter months while the hotel is closed and completely cut off from the outside world by the snow. Jack is undeterred by the hotel manager's warning about cabin fever, planning to use the solitude to work on his writing, even after he is told that a former caretaker, Grady, went insane and murdered his wife and daughters with an axe before shooting himself.
Jack's son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), is not as enthusiastic about the hotel after he begins to have terrifying premonitions about it, told to him by his 'imaginary friend', Tony. The cook, an old African-American man called Dick Hollorann (Crothers), tells Danny that these premonitions are actually a 'Shining' - something which he possesses too. But the hotel also has a 'shine' to it, and some bad memories staining it to boot.
Things begin to go badly wrong a month after the Torrance's move in. In the empty hotel, Danny repeatedly encounters two young girls, who he also 'sees' lying butchered in a corridor beside a bloody axe. And then there is the woman in 237 who attempts to strangle him - the woman whom Jack also encounters but tells his wife Wendy (Duvall) that he saw nothing in the room. Jack's slow descent into madness becomes increasingly more terrifying as he imagines a ghostly bartender serving him drinks in a completely empty and unstocked bar, and then a full blown costume party where he encounters a waiter he believes to be the former caretaker, Grady, who tells him he must "correct" his wife and child. As Danny is haunted by the word 'redrum', Hollorann races to save them, and Wendy discovers the chilling 'writing' which Jack has been doing since they arrived, Jack begins to stalk the halls of the possessed hotel with an axe... And you know what they say. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Forever. And ever. And ever.

The film deviates from the book in several crucial ways. For example, where Tony is an actual figure in the book (a representation of the future Danny Anthony Torrance), he is reprisented in the film by Danny putting on a gruff voice and talking to his finger, and I think it loses something in this, and perhaps even gains a hint of the ridiculous. The creepy hedge animals in the book are replaced by a hedge maze in the film, losing another whiff of the supernatural. The roque mallet which Jack terrifies his family with in the book is instead an axe in the movie. The fate of Hallorann is significantly different, and a little disapointing I found. The ending, too, is very different, although the eventual outcome is virtually the same.

It is undoubtedly a good film, a classic, and it deserves to be watched. The claustrophobia is reasonably well portrayed, and some parts are genuinely chilling, but the problem is that others just aren't. The film would have been far better if it had tried to follow the book, but in many ways it doesn't. The supernatural element which makes King's novels so very unsettling appears to be downright ignored - the inhuman evil of the hotel itself is overlooked by the madness of Nicholson's character. That's another huge problem with it. What should be a slow descent into madness is altogether too fast and unrealistic, ruining what was in King's novel a tragedy about a man succumbing to both the supernatural and the very real powers of alcohol and rage. Jack Torrance's character comes across as evil, when in fact he is a loving family man who is led terrifyingly astray - this is obvious in the novel, for example, by Jack regaining one last shred of his personality before his death to tell his son to run and that he loves him. I can fully understand King's hatred of the film. Kubrick took his character and tore it to shreds.

All that said, you should still watch this film. It will genuinely chill you at least once, I gaurantee, and it is a classic. My only advice is that you watch the film before reading the book, because otherwise the film will be a massive dissapointment. But do read the book, and please feel free to leave your own opinions here about which is best - as an avid reader and a Stephen King fan, I may be a little biased.

Cinema Sweet Rating - 7/10 (9/10 for the novel!)