30 Films That Made Me Who I Am - #5

The Shining

     I have to admit this first:  I have never read the book.  It's one of the few Stephen King books I have yet to read.  Just have never gotten around to it.  I have, however, seen the 1997 mini-series that was directed by Mick Garris and which King himself did the teleplay for.  It wasn't too impressive, being pretty much a literal adaptation of the book, with no surprises.  Still, it was better than some King stuff made for TV. (The Tommyknockers being the one I usually think of.)  King made that mini-series due to a long festering idea that Stanley Kubrick didn't actually make a film of his book, but rather made his own film with ideas from the book.  That's a relevant criticism; I do agree with him on that front.  King also really disliked the casting choice of Jack Nicholson, which I do not agree with.  In my mind, Stanley Kubrick's 1980 imagining of The Shining is an almost perfect film.

     I'm a huge Stephen King fan, having read approximately 3/4 of his printed works.  When it comes to adaptations of his work, I'm not as big of a fan.  I do like this one, Carrie, Misery, The Dead Zone, Cujo, Christine, Pet Sematary, and Stand By Me if we're just counting works based on his novels and not his short stories.  There have been numerous clunkers made such as Firestarter, Graveyard Shift, The Mangler, Sleepwalkers, and Maximum Overdrive (directed by King himself, and good in a so-bad-it's-good way.).  The TV adaptations are hit or miss with things like Storm of The Century being hits and things like The Tommyknockers being misses.  

     Stanley Kubrick supposedly decided to do this film by chance.  He was going through stacks of books reading the first few pages of each trying to decide what to make next.  (Almost all his films were literary adaptations.)  For some reason he chose The Shining, which is odd as the book's opening is just a post-coital sex scene involving Mrs. Torrance.  It has nothing to do with the rest of the story really, and is not present in the film.  Stephen King was overjoyed when Kubrick decided to do the film, as he loved 2001: A  Space Odyssey.  Kubrick would call up Stephen King at all hours of the night asking him random questions such as "Does God exist?".  The film shoot was not a pleasant one, either.  Shelley Duvall, who plays Mrs. Torrance, frequently got on Kubrick's nerves as she wasn't giving the performance he wanted.  Duvall herself became physically ill for months and started to lose her hair due to the stressful experiences.  The script was being revised every day, sometimes minutes before a scene was to start shooting.  Scatman Crothers broke down in tears after Kubrick demanded he do a scene where he explains to Danny what 'shining' is 148 times.  Kubrick was infamous for being very demanding on his actors, and yet not telling them precisely what he wanted.  Apparently only a fraction of what was filmed ended up in the film, as numerous takes took up a lot of what was filmed.  The filming took place over a year when it was scheduled to take less than 6 months.

    What makes the film so good?  Gosh, that's hard to nail down.  It's not your typical jack-in-the-box horror film.  There's one jump scene I can think of in the film, and the movie is deliberately slow and tension-building like Halloween but on a more epic scale.  There's but one onscreen murder, there's a lot left unexplained, and the film is shot to confuse.  For instance, if you try to map out the hotel, it's impossible.  The hotel setup is incomprehensible if you think about it or try to map out it's insides.  Kubrick also breaks the film-making 30 degree rule, which states that if you do two shots of something or someone in succession, you need to move the camera at least 30 degrees lest you get a jump-cut.  Well, in some cases, Kubrick doesn't.  For someone who's been shooting for so long, it's hard to believe that would just be coincidence.  This film also has what I believe to be the first appearance of furries in film.

    Positively frightening!  Why does it frighten me?  Because it's like some of my nightmares where I see things that make absolutely no sense.  You ever been afraid to go back to sleep because your dream was just too weird for you?  Happens to me all the time.  Last night I was finding dead decomposing bodies in an abandoned old WWII bunker with a ghostly little girl following me.  Somehow I became convinced she'd done the killings, which was a bit of a twist.  It's things like that which can make horror films work.  Sometimes the scariest things are the unexplained.  This is where Stephen King gets things wrong sometimes, as he explains away everything by the end of the books.  Kubrick never explains things.  He wants viewers to make up their own minds, and this is the case with 2001 as well.  Explaining the evil or the haunting makes things not scary anymore.  It's like being convinced your house is haunted, and then learning that the banging and groaning you've been hearing were just the plumbing.  Problem solved, no ghosts here!

     The film is a symphony.  Alternating between almost complete silence and building to crescendos like no other movie I've seen. Things like Danny on his little tricycle going over carpet silently, and then suddenly going over the hard floor with a deafening roar to the wheels.  20 minutes will go by with nothing happening, and then suddenly you're completely surprised, like with the twin girls all of a sudden appearing at the end of a hallway during Danny's tricycle run.  If the film IS a symphony, the last 20 minutes are the 1812 Overture, as Jack goes completely insane and gives chase around the hotel trying to kill his wife and Danny.

    I first saw the film when I was 16.  My dad had owned the VHS tape since probably the late 80s, and I finally was old enough to watch it.  It's stayed with me ever since, and sometimes it still freaks me out.  It's a deeply unsettling film.  That's exactly the right word for it.  It's not disgusting or scary per say, but it stays with you and sinks in.  You're left thinking about the film wondering what the hell you just saw.  It's like Eraserhead in that way, but this one doesn't cause me headaches.  There's no other movie like this, and so it sticks out... in a good way.  Also, the film is pretty much a PSA for why no-one should marry a writer.

And now for probably my favorite scene...