Halloween Movie Marathon Part 3

The Shining

Kubrick never contented himself to make an 'homage' to a genre.  He would instead erect a monument to it.  2001: A Space Odyssey continues to battle it out with Blade Runner for #1 sci-fi film ever made on just about every top 10 list out there.  He turns the genre itself into the film's principle character.  In 2001 it was the ascension of consciousness.  In The Shining it's just plain terror.  There are a lot of interpretations as to what exactly Kubrick is commenting on here, but in my mind if you just make a film about evil itself, then all applicable commentary naturally follows (the Holocaust, the Trail of Tears, class tyranny, racism, familial abuse, patriarchal violence, sexual violence).  The Shining represents vileness in all crevasses of the human heart and all manner of wrongdoing.  This is the power of genre filmmaking.  Instead of setting out to allegorize one specific issue (e.g. the evil of the Holocaust), you exorcise the spirit of that event and send it coursing through the events your narrative.  You'll tend to come out with flat characters and a storybook plot but stories like these must necessarily be told in broad strokes.  "For the near-blind you have to draw large simple caricatures" --Flannery O'Connor.  The apocalyptic nature of this film and its lack of character complexity was what caused critics to at first pan this film.  Heck, even Stephen King didn't like it.  Years later, as with most of Kubrick's films, opinions took a positive turn and The Shining was hailed as one of the greatest horror films of all time.

Watching this film for the first time was an engrossing experience.  I was shocked to learn how few critics liked it when it came out.  It's just so huge and heavy.  I actually expected to not have a profound experience with this movie since I'd thought myself to have absorbed most of its key moments through the general osmosis of homage and satire (most memorably The Simpsons' parody).  The film has become so iconic that I didn't think that could really offer me anything that I hadn't seen before, but even in 2010, it definitely did.  I was afraid every second of this film.  It was unsettling in a way that I hadn't experienced before, a kind of relentless fear from which there is no escape.  Stephen King famously remarked that Kubrick was a man that "thinks too much and feels to little."  This may be true, but you need a thinker to take you through the headspace of a psychotic.  Kubrick slights every other element to the tale in favor of patterning the mind of the aggressor.  Even the ghosts, which one would think would be pivotal to a story about a haunted house, are left somewhat to the backdrop.  Kubrick's specters are the pantheon of a disturbed mind rather than a spiritual force.  The Shining is a monolith of a thriller.  It is at once dense and sparse, like the contrast between the massive hotel interiors and the sense of claustrophobia it induces, and it drops on your psyche like an anvil. Repeat viewings of this film would surely yield many more opportunities for interpretation but I think I'm content to visit this house of horrors only once.

The Shining - A (freaking) +
Scarometer - Deeply disturbing.  No 'jump out at you' scares.  Entirely, 'doubt your psychological stability' kind of stuff.  Hugging your significant other will do little to lessen the haunts of The Shining, especially because you'll likely be questioning the power motivations inherently laced into your very embrace.  This is no roller-coaster ride, it's a draught of pure fear.