The selling point for The Shining couldn’t have been the idea of Stanley Kubrick crafting a horror film because every Stanley Kubrick film is a horror film. But the pitch could have been a Kubrickian horror movie; incidentally The Shining is both a Stanley Kubrick film (and therefore a film about life’s horror) and also a horror movie. It has all the gothic trappings of midnight showing shock fare: ghosts, an axe murderer, lots of blood, and soundtrack-fueled paranoia. However, it is the wedding of these trite conveniences with Kubrick’s vision that truly elevates The Shining.
The plot is harmlessly pedestrian. Jack Torrance is a recovering alcoholic/school teacher who takes his family to Colorado to be the winter caretaker for the isolated and haunted Overlook Hotel. As the weeks pass, his cabin fever worsens and he begins to suspect of family of conspiring against him to keep him from his “work.” Reading that description perhaps prompts more intrigue than is merited. In his adaptation, Kubrick seems intent upon removing nuance or progression and even most violence from the story.
Jack Nicholson’s much noted performance is famous for his externalization of Torrance’s madness, but the significance lies in the film’s first dialogue scene. With each exaggerated raise of the eyebrow and jut of the lips in his meeting with Mr. Ullman, we know that Torrance is crazy well before he begins threatening his wife and son with an axe. As Nicholson hams his way through various scenes with gusto, the plot unfolds rather unremarkably. He snaps at his wife; his son sees ghosts and hears voices; he has a frighteningly realistic nightmare; he grows more paranoid and sees ghosts and hears voices. If the methodical yet mundane set up is the expected prologue for relentless violence to follow, the payoff never fully arrives. There is murder, but Torrance is a pitifully inept villain. His wife dismisses him with one swing of a baseball bat and locks him away in a walk-in cooler. He is left to parlay with a condescending hallucination only to be outsmarted by his 10 year old son.
The most surprising element in the film is that none of this is surprising. If the pitch was in discovering how Stanley Kubrick would make a horror movie, he seems disinterested in following through. From the moment Mr. Ullman divulges all of the shockingly unnecessary details about the previous caretaker’s murder of his wife and twin daughters with an axe, viewers know that it is inevitable that Torrance try the same with his wife and son. The conclusion’s inevitability only increases the anxiety that it takes so long to arrive there. Ten minutes in, the script neatly lays out the monster, his motive, his weapon, and his intended victims. It takes another 130 minutes in which little new information is offered before the film reaches its psychological climax.
However, the main reason that The Shining doesn’t fail miserably is that visually the film penetrates the proscenium to unite the film’s space and the viewer’s consciousness. In redirecting the cinematic gaze away from the plot, Kubrick demands that the audience focus on other things. By announcing all of the story’s details at the outset, Kubrick signifies its insignificance. Instead, he offers a psychological landscape for viewers to lose themselves. Mood overpowers and dominates the story. The long, unbroken helicopter tracking shots accompanied by the depressingly labored electronic score that open the film are a study in visual storytelling. As the mountains and cliffs overwhelm the placid yellow family car ambling through the scenic curves, we realize that we like Jack Torrance are descending into the locale’s isolation. With signature images like the elevator gushing blood and the gradual zoom in on Nicholson’s wearied manic face, The Shining is more rewarding when taken as a silent film than a horror movie.
Another similarly ambitious horror film is Halloween. Carpenter, like Kubrick, tells a visually compelling story with such talent that the ordinary nature of the script can be forgiven. But if Halloween is about how absences in the frame can form an imaginary and real presence, The Shining is about how camera movement heightens the viewer’s identification with the characters and more importantly the frame’s environment. Through the invention and implementation of the steadicam, we follow Danny as he discovers more and more of the hotel’s dark corners, while Jack stays isolated and stubbornly and fruitlessly bangs a tennis ball against the wall. This contrast creates dual feelings of claustrophobia and agoraphobia when seeing the frame of different character’s perspectives. The Shining is a marvel because it is perhaps the first and only 3-D horror film.
In repudiating the horror genre and its conventions, Stanley Kubrick has made a bold gesture. Rather than a genuine attempt at a scary movie, The Shining is an experiment in psychological warfare. In a different world, it could easily be the darker sibling of the films that Alex Burgess is forced to watch in A Clockwork Orange. With his scope and ambition, Kubrick has transcended the horror genre by revealing its inadequacies to create a different type of work. The Shining is a terrible horror movie but a great horror film.
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