ranked #9 out of 11 movies	rated 3.41 out of 5	total 34 votes

The Shining

Some places are like people: some shine and some don’t. (Dick Hallorann)

Year: 1980
Director: Stanely Kubrick
Screenplay: Stanely Kubrick
Actors: Jack Nicholson,Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, Phillip Stone, …
Runtime: 119 min (146 min original version)


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Summary of The Shining film plot

Jack Torrance, a fomer alcoholic, becomes the winter caretaker of an isolated hotel called Overlook in the Colorado mountains. He takes his wife Wendy and son Danny with him. Jack plans to start a whole new life using the time in the hotel to write a book. Danny who is clairvoyant and has some telepathic powers sees strange things in the haunted hotel. The hotel seems to be sentinent and influences people in a bad way. Slowly the hotel lures Jack in and he slips into insanity. Jack starts to see ghosts. Under them is the former caretaker of the hotel who murdered his wife and daughters. The ghost convinces Jack that his family needs to be “corrected”. Finally Jack looses totally his mind and tries to kill Wendy and Danny.

Main differences between Stephen King’s The Shining book and the film

• In the end of the book, Jack overcomes his madness for a brief period of time and kills himself so that he can’t harm Danny. In the film there is no glimpse of remorse in Jack.
• In the movie the caretaker has two different names, Charles Grady and Delbert Grady. In the book there is only one name. The use of two different names in the film is used to show that Grady has been at the Overlook Hotel in two different time periods.
• The bathtub scene is in the book in room 217, but in the movie in room 237. This is due to the fact that the hotel management of the hotel, in which parts of the movie was made, wanted a different number, so that people don’t get scared in room 217.

What TheDarkKing thinks about The Shining

Kubrick’s The Shining is again not really a horror movie, but a very intense and suspensful thriller. It deals with isolation, alcoholism and the question if someone can overcome a violent past. Obviously Kubrick doesn’t believe that.

The movie isn’t very loyal to the book, it’s more a thing of its own. In the book the character of Jack Torrance appears as an average clerk type of guy with temper and alcohol problems who slowly gets possessed by the Overlook hotel and finally gives in to violence and madness. Whereas Jack Nicholson seems to be insane right from the first scene of the movie. But hey, this is Jack Nicholson after all! His transformation to total madness is quite foreseeable.

Jack Nicholson’s performance as a mad husband and father is still very convincing and thrilling. The movie itself doesn’t rely on many gross images, although the dead woman in room 237 and the blood running down the stairways are quite impressive, but on extremly scary and tension building music. The music - mostly orchestral - increases the terrifying mood and athmosphere of the movie a lot. The film also features the first extensive use of the Steadicam to create long tracking shots which creates even more tension.

Believe it or not - for me the most scary scenes were the shots with the two twin girls. I don’t know why, but they give me the creeps!

Although the film is quite different from the book, and Stephen King is said to dislike Kubrick’s adaptation of his novel, the film The Shining is one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen. Everytime I’m in a house that is quite isolated, e.g. in the mountains when I’m on skiing holidays, I have to think of The Shining and I expect Jack Nicholson is coming through the snow with an axe trying to kill me.

The Shining is surely a movie you won’t ever forget and it doesn’t really get less scary when you watch it a second or third time.

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