The Shining: A Horror Fiasco

The Shining: A Horror Fiasco
by Steve Finkelstein

If one had to pick a candidate for the most disappointing horror movie of all time, the hands down choice would be 1980’s The Shining. Considering that the film was directed by Stanley Kubrick, who was probably the greatest English language director working in the cinema from the late 50’s through the mid 70’s, the film’s ineptitude came as a profound shock to those of us bowled over by such Kubrick genre masterpieces as Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange.

The Shining has one massive flaw--absolutely nothing happens in the film. The plot literally boils down to this: ex-boozer/schoolteacher/“writer” Jack Torrance becomes caretaker of a deserted Colorado hotel, dragging along his whining telepathic son and even more whiny wife. A mixture of cabin fever and evil spirits cause Jack to go looney-tooney, killing off the hotel’s telepathic cook (doesn’t every hotel have one?) and nearly killing off his wife and telepathic tot. Fortunately, the little twerp’s ESP abilities save the day as he lures his father to a frozen death in the hotel’s hedge maze. Mother and son escape in a Tucker Sno-Cat as the audience is overwhelmed by 2 and 1/2 hours of ennui and sleep. Finis.

The Stephen King novel the film was based on was overlong and cliched, but at least it was eventful. The novel contained some fine scattered moments of Grand Guginol--the attack of the topiary animals, the boiler explosion, Torrance bludgeoning himself with a croquet mallet, etc. Properly cut down, the novel could have been turned into a highly effective ghost thriller. Unfortunately, that certainly wasn’t the case here, nor was it with the 1997 TV miniseries remake of The Shining (more on that later).

There may be naysayers among you exclaiming, “Film and literature are two separate mediums! One shouldn’t knock a film for not being true to its source material!” True enough. 1951’s The Thing From Another World was Howard Hawks' cinematic riff on John Campbell’s Who Goes There? The film bore scant relation to the Campbell story because Hawks felt what worked on the literary page probably wouldn’t work on the soundstage. The film was a viable work in its own right and is considered by many to be one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time. Deviation from a source material is not a cinematic sin; lack of interest in a narrative is, and The Shining commits this offense in spades.

About now, the naysayers will be saying, “So what if the film’s pacing limps along like a pregnant pachyderm? The film is European in its methodical pacing and is more interested in examining the tortured psyche of Jack Torrance than in revealing screaming bogeymen lurking around hotel corridors.” Well, this approach has certainly worked in the past. Roman Polanski’s 1965 film Repulsion was a chilling, deliberately-paced account of a woman’s descent into psychosis. The crucial difference between Kubrick’s film and Polanski’s is that the schizophrenic character Catherine Deneuve portrays is of great interest to the audience; Nicholson’s Jack Torrance is decidely not.

The audience has trouble getting involved with Torrance because we really don’t know what forces drive him over the edge so quickly. A key example of this occurs early in the film: Jack hurls a torrent of obscenities at Wendy (Shelly Duvall) after she bursts into his room while he’s working on a manuscript. There’s no indication earlier in the film that such animosity existed between Jack and Wendy; the outburst seems forced and arbitrary. Kubrick gives no escalating buildup of tension between the couple and the scene comes off as contrived. At least in the King novel, some of Jack’s psychological demons originated in a tortured childhood where Jack was abused by an alcoholic father. No such character delineation is touched upon in the Kubrick film.

One of the most serious problems with The Shining is that it simply fails to frighten. In fact, quite the opposite occurs--many scenes are unintentionally hysterical. Case in point: early on in the film, Danny Torrance has a psychic flash-forward where he sees blood flowing out of the Overlook hotel elevator and the murdered twin girls standing in a corridor. Kubrick intercuts this scene with a closeup of Danny Lloyd’s face contorted in wide-eyed terror. The expression the child displays is so over-the-top that it reminds one of a shot from an early 20th century silent film, and it simply provokes snickers from the audience.

Danny Lloyd’s performance is another problem. His raspy voicings of his telepathic friend “Tony,” (complete with finger twitchings), are totally unconvincing. His is one of the worst performances turned in by a child actor in many years, yet one can’t say that his performance could be blamed on his youth. Witness the superb acting jobs done by child stars Pamela Franklin and Martin Stephens as the ghostly possessed children in Jack Clayton’s superb 1961 film The Innocents (based on Henry James The Turn of the Screw). Their totally convincing performances helped turn the Clayton film into a shattering experience and makes the Kubrick film look like a stroll in the park by comparison. An equally brilliant job by a child actor in a similar role was turned in by Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense.

Many scenes in the film that are supposed to convey suspense fail miserably. One is unsure if Kubrick is unaware of how to create tension in a horror film or if he is just tweaking the noses of horror film fans by making certain scenes drag on interminably. Perhaps he took a derisive view of the original novel and the horror genre in general, and decided to bore the crap out of the audience. If that was his intention, he succeeded admirably.

The directorial ineptitude of the film is highlighted in the sequence where the black telepath Halloran (Scatman Crothers) is rushing to the Overlook in a snowbound rescue attempt while Jack Torrance murderously stalks his wife and child. The scenes in this sequence drag on at a ponderous pace; where sequences should have been furiously intercut, we are instead treated to innumerable shots of snow covered highways.

The climactic sequence where Jack stalks Danny in the hedge maze is also devoid of suspense, presenting nothing more than a series of technically adroit but unbearably dull stedicam shots tracking the two actors. A film that exploited a similar sequence in a far more effective manner was William Cameron Menzies 1954 film The Maze. It’s amazing that a low budget film which contains Richard Carlson being menaced by a man in a giant frog suit in a hedge maze could be more frightening then The Shining, but even with its low budget limitations, The Maze puts Kubrick’s film to shame.

What many of the more perceptive critics fail to realize is that even cinema’s greatest directors turn out a turkey now and then. This has certainly been the case with such diverse artists as Hitchcock, Ford and Wyler. Such a film need not do damage to a great director’s canon of work; he merely bounces back and produces a film in his usual brilliant style. Such was the case with Kubrick. He followed The Shining with Full Metal Jacket, one of his best films, a surreal masterpiece that remains the best of the Vietnam war films.

The film was of such high quality one wondered how he could have stumbled so badly on The Shining. Apparently, this was not a lone opinion--no less than Stephen King said he was “horrified” at the liberties taken in the Kubrick version of his novel, which prompted him to do the aforementioned 1997 remake. Though more faithful to the source material, the TV version was as big a disaster as big screen predecessor. What is it about this book that results in movie and TV versions so resoundingly awful?

See ya soon.

Steve can be reached at steve@babblog.com.