The Shining Redux and Other Things Horror

The Shining Redux and Other Things Horror
by Steve Finkelstein

Fer Chrissakes, this is the fifth time I’ve used the word “horror” in the title of one of my articles! What is it with this morbid obsession? I better listen to Mommy and get back on my anti-psychotic meds...

All kidding aside, Dileep’s spirited and intelligent response to my critical drubbing of The Shining is certainly a rebut I would expect from one of the film’s innumerable devotees. What the fans of the Kubrick film might fail to realize, though, is that many prestigious critics of the time hated the film. Here’s a sampling:

“Intriguing but ineffectual adaptation of Stephen King’s thriller....Nicholson goes off the wall so quickly, there’s no time to get involved in his plight. Some eerie scenes, to be sure, but the film goes on forever.” -- Leonard Maltin, Movie & Video Guide

“Given the intense audience interest in The Shining, prior to its opening, this may be Warner Bros. biggest box office disappointment since Exorcist II. With everything to work with, director Stanley Kubrick has teamed with jumpy Jack Nicholson to destroy all that was so terrifying about Stephen King’s bestseller.

The truly amazing question is why a director of Kubrick’s stature would spend his time and effort on a novel he changes so much it’s barely recognizable, taking away whatever originality it possessed while emphasizing its banality....Compared to the exciting if somewhat corny conclusion to King’s novel...Kubrick might as well have finished with a blank film. In fact, he almost did.” -- “Har”, Variety

Many film buffs agree that the late New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael was probably the greatest film critic that ever lived. A sampling of her review of The Shining:

“Probably most of us go to a gothic eager to be manipulated by someone with finesse. But we don’t know how to read Kubrick’s signals; it may be that he simply doesn’t know us well enough anymore to manipulate us successfully. Again and again, the movie leads us to expect something--almost promses it--and then disappoints us.

What’s increasingly missing from Kubrick’s work is the spontaneity, the instinct, the lightness that would make us respond intuitively. We’re starved for pleasure at this movie...(Kubrick) was locked up with this project for more than three years, and if ever there was a movie that expressed cabin fever, this is it.”

Digressing back to Dileep’s article, while myself and other detractors of The Shining would disagree with many of his kudos for the film, he does bring up a fascinating point. He wrote, “The emotion of horror and its kin, fear, are very difficult to describe. They are the very things we spend our lives, as Sartre and Camus would have it, trying to build a wall against and die.” BINGO! This immediately clicked an association in my head to another film: Sidney Lumet’s brilliant 1965 film The Pawnbroker. The following rave review of The Pawnbroker from Mick Martin and Marsha Potter’s Video Movie Guide sounds exactly like Dileep’s preceding point:

“This is a somber and powerfully acted portrayal of a Jewish man who survived the Nazi holocaust, only to find his spirit still as bleak as the Harlem ghetto in which he operates a pawnshop. Rod Steiger gives a tour-de-force performance as a man with dead emotions who is shocked out of his zombielike existence by confronting the realities of modern urban life.”

The Pawnbroker contains some of the most horrifying scenes ever put on film, and yet I don’t consider it a horror film. However, the genre can be a subjective and amorphous one. Ivan Butler, in his book The Horror Film, also gives it a rave review and extensive coverage. Regardless of whether you consider it a horror film or not, I urge readers who have not seen it to go out and rent it. The horror in this film puts the contrived shocks in Kubrick’s film to shame.

These thoughts on The Pawnbroker bring up another point: What the hell is a horror film anyway? To my mind, a horror film has to contain a creature created by science (Frankenstein), superstition (Dracula), or hideous deformity (Phantom of the Opera). While Hitchcock’s Psycho is a classic, brilliant film, I have never considered it horror. The book on which it is based is a fictionalized account of Ed Gein, a 1950’s serial killer. In my view, horror has to be a fantasy; Psycho, which is based on real events, is something that could and did happen. Therefore, as far as I'm concerned, it is not a horror film.

Using this as criteria, what do I think are the greatest horror films ever made? I'm glad you asked. The following are listed in chronological order:

Noseferatu (1922)
Phantom of the Opera (1925)
Frankenstein (1931)
Freaks (1932)
Island of Lost Souls (1933)
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Dead of Night (1945)
Horror of Dracula (1958)
Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
The Exorcist (1973)
An American Werewolf in London (1981)

I’ll give an honorable mention to a relatively recent film: Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow (1999).

Halloween is coming up shortly and I can think of no better horror films than these to watch on an eerie, fog-shrouded, moonlit night.

See ya soon.

Steve can be reached at steve@babblog.com.