The Shining: A Horror Fiasco

The Shining: The Inside Creep Show
by Dileep Rao

The Shining by Stanley Kubrick is perhaps the finest horror film ever made. Notice the operative word here is 'horror.' This is a horrific film, built by a master craftsman, lifted from the pages of a pulpy and overwritten novel by that master of action and mood, Stephen King.

Let's examine the word horror. Horror and horror movies (as they're commonly called) are two different things. Horror movies are usually splatterfests, predictable fulcrum's of tension released by either startle effects (which are scary in the way that nearly being struck by a car is scary) or gothic make-up effects. These films also have a whole legion of devotees who worship their every detail of phantasmagorical delight. So be it. I begrudge them nothing, though I do not share their fascinations or obsessions.

The emotion of horror and its kin, fear, are very difficult to actually 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. Real terror is also very difficult to describe, though those that have experienced it know its feeling. It's even harder to create this feeling in a film or a work of fictive design. The very phoniness of its 'handedness' is what usually makes it easy to spot and inure oneself to. It's other than us, other than truth and we can comfort ourselves in that. It isn't real, after all. The charm of splatter films and gothic horror fests is that they are not real; they advertise themselves as such, and thus juice up the theatricality and sound/visual effects. All of this does not transport us so much as distract us and then," Whammo!," startle us.

Enter Kubrick. His particular genius is a total understanding of the visual, the unwinding nature of film and how it affects the mind. He has always had a deep gift for telling his stories to our minds through a secret, visual door. This is sometimes discomforting to our expectations of narrative sense (2001: A Space Odyssey) or genre sense (The Killing, Paths of Glory) or to our sexual expectations (Lolita). Kubrick's dark sense that life is a joke (and that it's on us) is mapped into his films almost without exception. When he took on The Shining, he was working to create a scary film. One that started in reality and firmly pushed its way into the supernatural, all without the stock effects of startle horror or gothic hokum. This was going to be a psychological terror and Kubrick knew he had a secret weapon, a trump card. He had the gift of speaking to the subconscious, and that was where he would tell the story.

Much of what begins on the long drive to the Overlook is a narrative that is sparse and the setup is utterly pedestrian. The Torrances, including the pickled-in-alcohol Jack (Jack Nicholson), nervous shrew of a wife Wendy (Shelly Duvall) and boy Danny (Daniel Lloyd), are to take care of a hotel for the winter. The boy has some serious problems that are exacerbated by the new locale and his first understanding interaction with an adult is with the hotel's chef (Scatman Crothers). Then the tiny bits of dissonance creep in. Torrance hurls a stream of expletives at his wife. His mood is altered to match the boy's growing fear. The wife is an unreliable witness, as she is both inept and cowering in her congenital fear of her husband and a ninny in the growing strangeness of the events that surround her.

What most fans of the 'horror' genre don't get about this film is that it isn't for them. They are such devotees (and so exhausted in their fear fix) that they can't bear the tension that is building up in the film. It is still, like the tightening of a piano wire, one twist at a time. The boy is the only conduit for us and he is not rational. He is not only a child but an overwhelmed one, especially given the content of what his 'shining' is giving him. His performance is mesmerizing, true and totally beguiling. As this narrative is streaming at us, Kubrick is also beginning a weirder, non-rational dialogue with our subconscious with the imagery he is using. The film was one of the first to use the steadicam, not just because it was a cool new toy (sure, Kubrick loved those, but never indulged in them unless he thought them useful to his story), but because its smoothness was unnerving, raising the tension.

There are two things I have seen in this film that, no matter how many times I see them, still terrify me. The first is the sight of the two girls. Their bloody murder and the still inserts Kubrick drops into the film catch us in moments we can understand, "startle" moments. But just as we are startled (the shot that does the startling is of their bodies on the floor of a hotel room), another shot is spliced in. This insert is a shot of the two girls standing there looking at us. They're expression is inscrutable, a mix of expectation and accusation, a begging for a witness or a mouth to speak what happened.

The second is the opening of the elevator door. The imagery is now famous and vastly imitated (which by the way is what happens to most of Kubrick's film moments, they are imitated until they are a symbology of their own, lifted from their context and made into a language of simile). The door opens and a WALL of blood--not a pool, not a puddle, a wall--comes down the hall. (Editor's Note: I couldn't agree more. The combination of slow-motion visuals and complete silence in this scene allows us to focus all our attention on comprehending exactly what we are seeing and what it means. Therein lies the terror.)

There are also a million details that are psychologically terrifying: the conversation in the red bathroom between the butler and Torrance, the axe chopping, the glint in Nicholson's eye. The contents of his typing are deeply disturbing (as well as funny), the sound of the big wheel on the carpet, then the floor, then the carpet then the floor. The woman in the bath, her seduction and pusing sores are one for the ages, the curious man in the bear costume and the murderously-tinged fellatio that appears about to take place.

The tension of this film is unbearable, as the narrative sort of fades and the psychological warfare Kubrick conducts is in full pitch. The mind is not able to make sense of the imagery but it's pushing all the terror buttons. By the time Jack is turning in his Tonight Show schtick, the narrative is mostly comedy. It's broad, funny and bracing. But the psychological war is so effective to this point that we can't really take it in. All the way up to the bizarre and fitting zoom into the Overlook's historical photo array, the film is a thrilling touch at our weakest points: Kubrick is unspooling this film into our mind's eye. The back door is open and he's spooked the living daylights out of our irrational mind.

If there is one flaw with the film, it is the ending with Torrance frozen in the snow. This seems cheap and ineffective. We want a struggle to the death, father and son. Either we should have seen Torrance sit down and have a scotch with Danny in pieces, or we should have seen Danny kill his dad, but then be shown the kid in the photo just to realize that HE is the cause of the horror, not Torrance. There seems to be an indecision on Kubrick's part (or perhaps he regarded it as unimportant, who knows) as to what the literal narrative was and how to land it.

This is a flaw, true, but a quibble. The film is an emotionally perfect game. Kubrick pulls off one of the great magic acts of all time. In pitching terms, he gets us looking inside and then sails an unhittable pitch past our reason and into our subconscious, landing something that is so deeply disturbing, it resonates for years.

Dileep can be reached at dileep@babblog.com.