Post by erik on Oct 24, 2013 18:15:07 GMT -5
Set aside for a moment the fact that Jack Nicholson does go over the top ("Here's Johnny!!"), and that as a film it strays significantly from Stephen King's source material.
Even after thirty-three years, there is much more to director Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror film THE SHINING the more one examines it. What he did for science fiction with 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, Kubrick did for horror here; he made a film that people are still talking about to this day, one which, for all its controversy (or possibly because of it), is now acknowledged as a masterpiece of the genre.
People pretty much know the plot by now: Nicholson, his wife (Shelley Duvall) and son (Danny Lloyd), take care of the vast Overlook Hotel during the winter off-season; and, owing to a severe case of writer's block, extreme claustrophobia, and the hotel's ghostly residents, Nicholson goes berserk with violent results. And all of this takes place in a movie that lasts close to two and a half hours, much longer than is typical for a film of this kind. But as with any Kubrick film, multiple viewings are what are required to really "get" all the different nuances of THE SHINING.
For one thing, this is definitely not a conventional horror movie by any stretch of the imagination. Most horror films have (understandably) a lot of dark shadows in them, while, in this film, everything is well-lit. And for another, the shocks usually come every ten minutes or so in most horror films, while this doesn't exactly happen here. But even in a well-lit place like the Overlook, there is always the impending sense of dread and unease, of things happening out of our immediate vision (unless, like Lloyd, we have the "shining"--essentially, a slang term for extrasensory perception). And the shocking moments, when they happen, are much more disturbing than just the mere splattering of viscera and body parts all over creation, as in films like SAW and HOSTEL. Two such moments that remain quite unnerving to this day are Lloyd's horrific encounter with the two dead girls in a narrow hallway, and Nicholson's encounter with a woman in Room 237 who, of course, turns out to be extremely dead. And of course, there is the moment of a huge tsunami of blood spilling out of the Overlook's elevators in slow motion, a highpoint of the horror genre right up there with the shower scene of PSYCHO (IMHO).
Primarily shot on soundstages in England, THE SHINING, besides featuring superb camerawork and production design, also shows Kubrick's cagey use of modernistic classical music: Bela Bartok (the third movement of "Music For Strings, Percussion, And Celesta"), Gyorgy Ligeti ("Lontano"), and, especially, the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, whose disturbing and dissonant music dominates most of the film's second half. In the final analysis, THE SHINING differs from other horror films of recent vintage because, in its combination of both supernatural and psychological elements, it is a film that makes the viewer really think a lot, even as he or she is shuddering, and, judging from how much it is still talked about, many decades afterwards.
Even after thirty-three years, there is much more to director Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror film THE SHINING the more one examines it. What he did for science fiction with 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, Kubrick did for horror here; he made a film that people are still talking about to this day, one which, for all its controversy (or possibly because of it), is now acknowledged as a masterpiece of the genre.
People pretty much know the plot by now: Nicholson, his wife (Shelley Duvall) and son (Danny Lloyd), take care of the vast Overlook Hotel during the winter off-season; and, owing to a severe case of writer's block, extreme claustrophobia, and the hotel's ghostly residents, Nicholson goes berserk with violent results. And all of this takes place in a movie that lasts close to two and a half hours, much longer than is typical for a film of this kind. But as with any Kubrick film, multiple viewings are what are required to really "get" all the different nuances of THE SHINING.
For one thing, this is definitely not a conventional horror movie by any stretch of the imagination. Most horror films have (understandably) a lot of dark shadows in them, while, in this film, everything is well-lit. And for another, the shocks usually come every ten minutes or so in most horror films, while this doesn't exactly happen here. But even in a well-lit place like the Overlook, there is always the impending sense of dread and unease, of things happening out of our immediate vision (unless, like Lloyd, we have the "shining"--essentially, a slang term for extrasensory perception). And the shocking moments, when they happen, are much more disturbing than just the mere splattering of viscera and body parts all over creation, as in films like SAW and HOSTEL. Two such moments that remain quite unnerving to this day are Lloyd's horrific encounter with the two dead girls in a narrow hallway, and Nicholson's encounter with a woman in Room 237 who, of course, turns out to be extremely dead. And of course, there is the moment of a huge tsunami of blood spilling out of the Overlook's elevators in slow motion, a highpoint of the horror genre right up there with the shower scene of PSYCHO (IMHO).
Primarily shot on soundstages in England, THE SHINING, besides featuring superb camerawork and production design, also shows Kubrick's cagey use of modernistic classical music: Bela Bartok (the third movement of "Music For Strings, Percussion, And Celesta"), Gyorgy Ligeti ("Lontano"), and, especially, the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, whose disturbing and dissonant music dominates most of the film's second half. In the final analysis, THE SHINING differs from other horror films of recent vintage because, in its combination of both supernatural and psychological elements, it is a film that makes the viewer really think a lot, even as he or she is shuddering, and, judging from how much it is still talked about, many decades afterwards.
