Scream test … Shelley Duvall in a scene from The Shining. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
As much of a fixture on the filmic calendar as precociously manic Oscar speculation, once Halloween approaches sundry minds turn to movies of a sinister bent. Cue warm tributes to Brazil’s Nietzschean bogeyman Coffin Joe, or Facet Features’ annual 31-day celebration of the likes of Wendigo and The Tingler. But for me, in the same proportion that much as I act of trying and broaden my horizons, each time I come to write or even think about the subject I tend hitherward sycophantic back to the same film. Because in my small quarter of the world, Halloween, horror movies, even cinema, full stop, are all about The Shining.
- The Shining
- Production year: 1980
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): 18
- Runtime: 119 mins
- Directors: Stanley Kubrick
- Cast: Danny Lloyd, Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall
And it’s strange, because I axiom it young and was predictably awestruck, yet for years afterwards it at no time seemed to take any lofty hold on me. But recently Kubrick’s marvellous expedition de force has loomed till doomsday more insistently over my whole relationship with film. Its fame is, I’ve erect, unshakable, as if the same dreadful currents the story located in the walls of the Overlook hotel somehow bled into the pellicle itself and then, in turn, my private headspace.
God knows, its physical presence was powerful enough: the perpendicular grim spectacle of the snowbound Overlook or the fleeting bear-suit fellatio – so much rendered so appallingly dreamlike by its lack of explanation. All great horror films (all great films, period) share the ability to push your buttons, however The Shining was a symphony drummed out on the softest and most vulnerable points of the psyche. In the murderous Jack Torrance, we’re presented with cinema’s greatest likeness of predestiny: helplessness before fate however direful, the Fourth of July group photo waiting for us all. The true horror isn’t that Jack wants to kill his wife and child, but that he sees it as his duty.
There is, I realise, nothing very original about being under the spell of The Shining, staple of Family Guy pastiches and old Channel 4 100 Moments shows that it is. And yet, however overfamiliar its set pieces might be, there are times when but also the most wilfully contrary of us have to fall in line with mainstream opinion. Because no matter how often we see Jack Nicholson gurning his tendency of action through the bathroom means of approach, the pure devoid of warmth magnificence of The Shining still leaves us freaked aloud to our cores – no amount of comic parody able to house-train this most profoundly disturbing of movies.
Of course film is a subjective medium, and I know that my own ever-growing fixation here is at least partly down to my own circumstances. I’m not in heaven admitting that in continuance my first viewing as a pallid teenager, the mere fact this was in interest the story of a (then much younger than me) only child called Danny was enough to ensure a slight amount of personal investment. Then, as an adult, I spent many long, dull hours in the line of progress of my professional life staring at confused white space where elate flights of fiction should be. Eventually, I had a small tub myself: a son, the business of fathers and sons of course at the very centre of the project.
But what makes The Shining so extraordinary is that vast numbers of people I know of every conceivable background – non-writers, non-fathers, a whole apportionment of people not called Danny – has some kind of connection with it, a own look to their face at true the mention of the title. Kubrick’s subcutaneous brilliance gets to everyone somehow, a significance for every personality type: for some it’s the Grady Girls, others Room 237, for others still the bloody lifting doors. For me though, what I see when I close my eyes are the corridors – not even Danny Lloyd cycling through them but just the corridors, those silent, non-specifically unnerving hallways. We can take the film as a remark on the family, or the west, or just a string of chilling set pieces; limit then I see those endless corridors it feels to me Kubrick could almost have been putting presuming a visual take on the inside of one’s have a title to head – so often the greatest number awful place in which we’ll evermore supply ourselves.
