The Shining

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dul boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no plany Makes ack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dul boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play make Jack a Dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All workand no play maks Jack a dull boy
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
All work and no plany Makes ack a dull boy
All work and no play make Jack a Dull boy

I sleep so much better after watching this

This is one of Stanley Kubrick's best films. A true horror movie without having to rely on jump scares or gimmicks. The score is truly unsettling and with the cuts of disturbing imagery it builds tension well. Jack Nicholson gives the performance of his career here. The Overlook Hotel is so unique. The attention to detail and production design is flawless.

One thing that can be said about this film, and not all other GOAT films, is that literally, everyone finds it entertaining. I'm not a huge Jack Nicholson fan, but this film might suit him as an actor more than any other film. Honestly, it's hard to imagine anyone else being able to accomplish what he did in this film. And while Danny Lloyd (Danny Torrance) made only two films in his career, this is probably one of the all-time great first time acting jobs. Out of all of Kubrick's films, and I'm a huge fan, this is the one I go back to the most.

Do yourself a favor and also watch Room 237. It's one hell of a pairing that speaks not only to the brilliance of this film but also the depth and complexity of fan culture.

I am a big fan of the book, but I also love this movie is awesome I have no problem (just a bit) with Kubrick changing the ending, the only reason I won’t give it a 10 is the whole Dick story... we see him travel for 2 min at the hotel before dying without doing anything? Pfff... but still great movie

[9.6/10] I think a lot about liminal spaces -- those eerie, in-between areas that come with a certain unnerving air. There’s no firm or official definition of what qualifies. The closest attempts to cabin the concept in terms of areas that are “transitional” in some way. But I tend to think of them as defined by absence. “There should be something here!” Cars, furniture, *people*. But there isn’t. All there is, is empty space. And something about that is quietly disturbing.

*The Shining* is a film built on liminal space. (And sure, also an Indian burial ground.) With three family members cooped up for the winter, the easy, arguably natural approach is to make it feel claustrophobic. You are trapped here. There is no refuge. There is no escape. The sense of the walls closing in could dovetail with that psychological feeling of being cornered.

Instead, director and co-writer Stanley Kubrick achieves something transcendent by doing just the opposite. All there is at the Overlook Hotel is space. Long winding hallways. Gartanguan foyers. Grandiose ballrooms. Sprawling kitchens. Dizzying passageways. And an endless expanse of snow.

There are a plethora of reasons *The Shining*’s setting is infamously creepy. The exquisite sound design. The masterful cinematography. The striking production design. (And, you know, the literal ghosts there.) But I think the strongest of them, the most important of them, is that disquiet excess of space.

From the very beginning, *The Shining* gives away the game. The movie begins with a transition to the image of a tiny dot of car lost in a massive landscape. It sets a tone, of something tiny dwarfed within something massive, that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up before Jack Torrence ever sets foot in the hotel.

Kubrick and company give us the contrast. We see the entryway bustling with people, customers going about their day, even the frantic pace of the transition for the winter. For fifteen minutes or so, the Overlook hotel is frenetic and full of life.

But soon, all of that is gone. In its place are three people in varying states of emotional perturbation, left with nothing but this oppressive surfeit of room to fill with it. *The Shining* is a measured movie, one that is deliberate and unhurried in how it unspools itself. And in that slack pace, the audience feels the gnawing eeriness of that ubiquitous sense of space, and the upsetting sense of a conspicuous lack of what ought to be there, and what may have taken that place instead.

Kubrick and cinematographer John Alcott do an incredible job of making you feel the presence of something dark inhabiting the Overlook Hotel long before we lay eyes on any spook or spirit. The way the Torrence family is shot and framed creates the sense of something there with them. For so much of the movie, they are shot at a distance moving in parallel lines with the camera, walking straight toward the camera but never quite getting closer, walking away from the viewer but never quite covering the distance.

Kubrick and Alcott love to capture the Torrences moving in those direct lines, either toward us without progress to create the sense of impassable space, or with the camera behind the backs of the characters as they walk or stalk or big wheel their way through the hotel, evoking the sense of some outside presence following them along.

The film has its close-ups to show the reactions of its impressive cast of actors. It has creative shots from above and below to give us the famous stair or convey the tilted power dynamic in play. It has a raft of symmetry and one-point perspective that makes the film the unsuspecting answer for anyone who ever wanted a horror film directed by Wes Anderson. But for so much of the movie, the camera itself is a ghost, moving alongside Jack, Wendy, and Danny, making us feel the expanse and the same disquieting air.

The same goes for the film’s soundscape. The film deploys a terrifying cacophony when the moment heightens, with strings and buzzes and crescendos to fit the moment. But it also gives us steadier, more softly unsettling noises to contend with in time with its horrors, from a single piano key pressed repeatedly, to the diegetic swirl of the ice clanking on Jack’s glass of bourbon, to the simple but somehow unnerving contrast between Jack’s bike rolling over carpet and hardwood in turn. *The Shining* has plenty of quiet stretches, with an oft-sparse sonic space to match its physical one, but when it deploys its sound, it does so to full effect.

In that, the film is, as the kids say, “a mood”, and could get by on that alone. I wouldn’t exactly call *The Shining* a hangout movie. But it has an undeniable sense of place, and a chilling aura that could carry the picture on that alone. You feel the disturbia of the Overlook Hotel, almost regardless of the story that unfolds there, which is an achievement of craft in and of itself.

And yet, it is that story that puts the film over the top, and the actors that sustain it. Danny Lloyd gives one of the all-time great child performances in cinema history, a tribute not just to the young performer, but to Kubrick and the team who guided him. Danny Torrence is, at once and convincingly a little boy in an abusive home, a disturbed child communing with some otherworldly force, a possessed creature, and a terrified young man in a desperate attempt to flee.

HIs long questioning gazes of mistrust, his gapes in horror at the grisly visions that dance across his mind, his creepy little “Tony” voice, all come together to create a performance that is both sympathetic and also horrifying.

Scatman Crothers does yeoman’s work as Dick Hallorann, a member of the hotel staff who bonds with Danny over their shared psychic sensitivity. Crothers isn’t given nearly as much to work with as the rest of the main cast. Despite that, he makes the most with it, as seemingly the only one truly looking out for Jack and Wendy in a horrorshow where rescue seems impossible, selling both a sympathy for Danny and deep reticence over the evil that lurks within those walls.

And in a film with a quiet undercurrent of race and class, to have a Black man play the most traditionally heroic character in the film, to see him cut down by a walking ball of toxic masculinity, and to have his determination *still* be the thing that ultimately saves the innocent people in peril, comes with a certain power.

Then there is Shelly Duvall, and my goodness, her performance could have been half as good and still been amazing. There is a quietude in her Wendy Torrence, a sense of someone trying to manage the unmanageable, to excuse her husband, protect her son, maintain the patina of domesticity amid untenable circumstances. She is nigh-instantly sympathetic in that, both in circumstance and in the way she carries herself amid this twisted place.

So then when all hell breaks loose, and she wails and cries and shrieks in the face of a neapolitan ice cream of horror, it too comes with an undeniable power. You believe the terror, you believe this seemingly helpless woman trying to defend herself, you believe the frantic sense of danger she endures with expressive eyes and a jaw-dropping expression that sells Jack Torrence’s derangement in reaction as much as he does in action.

Jack Nicholson’s performance is, naturally, the lodestone of the piece, though. Stephen King, who penned the original novel, once opined that Nicholson was a poor choice because his history of playing people with mental illness telegraphed Jack’s descent too plainly. But I don’t buy it. Kubrick’s Jack Torrence is not a man twisted into a monster. He is a monster hiding behind a mask of politeness and genteelness. It is a story of that mask slowly cracking, slowly revealing the craven creature who lurks behind social niceties and the basic trust society confers on someone like him.

So the phoniness in job interviews, the barely-restrained displeasure with his family, hiding behind his fake smile, make the air of phoniness and perfomativeness to Nicholson’s performance in the early part of the film seem like a subtle preview of what’s to come rather than a betrayal of the premise.

And when the mask falls, the gloves come off. Nicholson’s Torrence is a masterclass in cinematic derangement. It is, not for nothing, an almost courageously ugly performance. Nichoslon looks unkempt. His hair is disheveled and crawling up his forehead. He contorts his face until it's all wrinkles and jowls. He slouches on bars and hunches through the hallways and glares with a sense of the polar opposite of “dashing.”

Above and beyond that aesthetic, he is pure menace incarnate. Once Jack gives into his demons, the performance becomes outsized. The transition from quietly chilling moments like his embrace with Danny, to his violent eruption at his wife, let Nicholson off the chain in a way that is viscerally frightening. In the actor's hands, you believe that Jack Torrence is capable of anything, and that's what’s truly frightening.

The menace subsists on a story with layers. Beyond the brilliant intercutting of glimpses of horror with galling reaction shots, beyond the iconic wave of blood spilling out from the elevator, beyond the practical elements of fright that suffuse the films, there are multiple ways to read the horror at its center.

One, and in many ways the most literal, is as a terrifying but straightforward tale of the macabre and supernatural. Some terrible event stained the Overlook Hotel in a spiritual fashion. All the best people” were here, and did all the worst things, beginning with who they stole this land from. That reverberates in a way few can detect, but all are encompassed by. The hotel claims Jack, drives him to reenact the grisly deeds of Delbert Grady, instills in him the broken vengeful values of a different age, in conspicuous opposition to Black service workers and “willful” children, and women who dare to exist.

It’s a fair read. Who unlocks the door for Jack when Wendy traps him in the pantry? What are the phantom images of the hotel reverted and transformed that Wendy sees when the place’s hold on its victims seems at its zenith. What are the echoes that Danny sees and his ability to reach out to Dick Hallorrann if not a reflection of something true? As a pure ghost story, one of easily dismissed portenst that grow in number and severity until it’s too late to avert the ghastly descent, *The Shining* succeeds on those terms.

But if you’re willing to chalk up a few things here and there to coincidence and trauma-induced hallucination, it’s easy to chalk up the horror elements here to what the hotel’s manager describes as cabin fever. Is Jack really seeing ghosts, or is an already angry man cracking under the isolation dn the knowledge of what happened here? Is Danny having premonitions of horror, or is he a poor child wracked by seizures and a troubled home?

Regardless of the literal truth within the text (and I tend to subscribe to a “the ghosts are real” read), *The Shining* uses the ambiguity to build its accumulating frights. There’s a steady drip of things that are hard to explain, isolated moments piling into one another, until the difference between horrific demons inflicting their wrath and a mere mortal’s psychotic break become indistinguishable.

And yet apart from the phantoms of the Overlook hotel, apart from the possibility of isolation-induced mania, the most frightening element of *The Shining*, the one that elevates its horror tio something more transcendent, is the gripping, at times painful depiction of a family full of abuse.

Wendy makes excuses for her husband to strangers. She reassures her son that everything’s alright and his father is fine even when things are going off the rails. Danny has a palpable unease around his dad, making Jack’s moment of forced affection with his son, the hot-and-cold temperament abuse victims are familiar with, one of the film’s scariest. These are all hallmarks of people who suffer in homes of domestic abuse.

And that is Jack’s scariest guise: not as a demon-addled slasher, or a cabin fever-filled maniac, but as a run-of-the-mill abusive father. The story of him dislocating Danny’s shoulder in a way that made his son retreat to the comfort of an imaginary friend is heartbreaking. The way he responds to Wendy’s gentle entreaties with anger and bitterness are agonizing.

As much heightened, unhinged glee as Nicholson injects into the role, there remains a germ of gut-wrenching truth in the way Jack Torrence blames his own struggles, his own failures, his implied mistakes as a father, a husband, and a provider, on those under his same roof. He takes out his anger at the world on them, and while the dimensions here are outsized, but for too many, the reality of it is too close to home.

Regardless of the literal truth in-universe -- this film, this family, this story -- is one of domestic abuse made manifest with the abstraction of fiction, reflected back at us through a horrifying lens that captures as much reality as it does of the fantastical.

That is the thing about liminal spaces. Their power comes from the idea that something is missing, something is lacking, somehow we’re bereft of what ought to be there. That is a feeling that occupies minds, not just backrooms of airports or abandoned theme parks or the yawning pandora’s box of a hotel with a dark history. In the maw of *The Shining*, what those among us choose to fill those spaces with is sometimes the most frightening part.

I watch this movie every Halloween and im really looking forward to it this year too. Its a timeless classic.

There are entire websites, books, TV shows & even other films dedicated to deciphering Kubrick’s masterpiece so my few paragraphs don’t have much extra to offer. The fact that it has sparked more conjecture and theorising than almost any other film probably says enough about what a fascinating puzzle The Shining is.

I’m not a horror buff at all but something about the mysterious plot and the eerie pacing sucker me in every time. Very few films stick in your mind shot for shot quite like this one. Like the rest of Kubrick’s work it’s timeless and always reveals something new with every viewing. This time I noticed that Wendy never actually gets hurt despite Jack coming at her with an axe. Spoooooky.

http://benoliver999.com/film/2016/12/03/theshining/

Specjackular movie.

It never loses its creepiness factor and I love that about The Shining. Even after multiple views it's always great like it was the first time, a true classic!