Elevators filled with blood. Room 237. Creepy twin girls. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Redrum. Redrum. REDRUM. Almost 40 years after Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining was released, there’s still no other horror movie filled with so many iconic moments. And there’s still nothing as terrifying from start to finish. With Halloween creeping up on us, what better film to place in your Netflix queue this month.
In a certain sense, not all that much happens in The Shining. Certainly the body count pales in comparison to that of your average slasher flick. Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), a struggling writer, applies for a caretaker position at a snowbound Colorado hotel. Although his home life isn’t perfect, he doesn’t blink when the interviewer warns him that a previous caretaker “ran amok and...he killed his family with an axe.” His wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), join him for a few months of relaxation that turn into a few months of increasing terror as they get snowed in at the hotel—which is (surprise!) haunted—and are slowly driven mad.
While this is a familiar horror-movie setup, and of course is adapted from the popular Stephen King novel, Kubrick’s execution was completely unusual. The Shining is not a horror movie that rests on the usual scares: giant monsters, jump scares, piles of corpses. There are a few of those things, but the most terrifying moments of The Shining are when almost nothing happens. When Danny rides a tricycle across a series of rugs or when Jack stares intensely into a model hedge maze. Part of this is the brilliant use of ominous sounds and off-kilter music as a soundtrack, an aspect that has been copied endlessly by horror movies since. But the key to The Shining’s terror is Kubrick’s full embrace of “the uncanny.”
“The uncanny” as a psychological effect was famously delineated by Sigmund Freud, and is essentially the eerie feeling that something is both familiar and strange at the same time. A central driver of the uncanny, for Freud, was doubling: twins, déjà vu, ghosts, mirrors. The Shining is filled with these elements, from the incredibly creepy twin girls that Danny keeps seeing (“Come and play with us, Danny. Forever and ever”) to the second boy who lives inside of Danny, telling him secrets and the idea that Jack is a reincarnation of previous caretakers (“You've always been the caretaker. I should know, sir. I've always been here”). Ambiguity is also central to the uncanny—it's the feeling that we can’t understand what is real and what is false, what is natural and what is supernatural. A giant hairy monster might scare us for a second, but the feeling of unease haunts us long after the film is done. The Shining is a masterclass in cinematic ambiguity. Indeed, the film is so mysterious, so cluttered with clues and confusion, that there’s an entire documentary, Room 237, about the insane fan theories surrounding the film.
Outside of The Shining's uncanny power, it is simply a near flawless film. Jack Nicholson’s completely unhinged lead is widely celebrated, but every performance—from Scatman Crothers as a psychic chef to Shelley Duvall’s personification of terror—is immaculate. And this being a Kubrick film, the cinematography is stunning from the first frame to the last. The Shining is now such a classic horror movie that it’s hard to remember the film was initially hated. Kubrick’s four previous films had each garnered multiple Oscar nominations (including four Best Director nods in a row), but his haunted-hotel tale got zero Oscar nominations and a Razzie nomination for Worst Director. The Shining was simply too strange for critics in 1980. But its uncanny, haunting power stayed with horror fans, and now it’s widely recognized as one of the greatest—if not the greatest—horror films of all time. This Halloween season, grab some popcorn, turn out the lights, and succumb to the strange power of the Overlook Hotel.