Recently I was visiting family in Pennsylvania. I forced my poor mama to watch The Shining (1980) for the very first time! She didn’t exactly enjoy it per se, but she’s glad she saw it.
This was just the second time I’d ever watched it. The first time was in high school. Some of my friends were really into horror movies, which were pretty big back in the 80s anyway. I never really liked horror movies, but I went along with it so as not to be a killjoy. By the time I saw The Shining I had already suffered through tons of slasher films, including Friday the 13th and The Evil Dead and all kinds of trash. When my friend put The Shining VHS tape in, I was pretty skeptical. But I actually thought it was good. I didn’t really find it scary, but I never found horror movies to be very scary. I thought most of them were gross and stupid; by contrast, The Shining was pretty interesting.
Watching it about 40 years later, I agree with my teenage-self. It’s a good flick. I’ll never understand why Stanley Kubrick chose to make this particular movie. I’m very curious; it seems like an odd choice for him. Maybe he wanted to prove that even pulp fiction/horror could turn into a movie with artistic merit? If so, Well done.
Much has been written about the film craft on this one, so I won’t go into it much. I liked the way the camera sort of walked around with the characters a lot of the time.
The music was perfect and added a lot, as is so often the case with Kubrick films. And it has that sudden “big finish” that he often uses too.
It’s another 2-and-a-half-hour film, which is pretty typical for Kubrick. I’d have to say I can’t imagine making a better movie out of King’s book. How much of that is Kubrick, and how much Jack Nicholson? Hard to say.
Fool of Spirit 