The Shining

The Shining

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Movie Reviews of The Shining

Movie Review: Supplemental documentary alone worth the price
Summary: 5 Stars

As the title of this review suggests, the best reason to hit the Add to Shopping Cart button on The Shining is the accompanying documentary "The Making of the Shining". Unlike the usual E!-type pabulum designed strictly to hype the film, this little 16mm gem was made by Stanley Kubrick's daughter as an exuberant tribute to what her dad did for a living. Her conversation with Jack Nicholson in a bathroom mirror - she holding the camera, he brushing his teeth - is a wonderful, insightful moment. So is the footage of Kubrick directing Shelley Duvall, the cast rehearsing lines in the cavernous kitchen set, and the various interviews with cast members. If you want to see what Stanley Kubrick was like at work, this, sadly, is your only chance.

Like Barry Lyndon before it, The Shining seems to be, in part, an experiment. As Barry Lyndon shows us what a Kubrick costume drama would be like, so The Shining answers another eternal question - "What would a Stanley Kubrick horror film be like?"

Oddly, the other Kubrick film it is most like is 2001: A Space Odyssey. It has about the same running time; the same four-act construction; the sense of isolation; the long, wordless passages; a supernatural element; a homicidal maniac (HAL in the previous film, Jack in the latter); and a headlong rush into the unknown at the end (flying down corridors of light in 2001, running down corridors of a hedge maze in The Shining). The cliché is true: in some ways it is a thinking-man's horror film.

The Shining works on at least two levels. On the surface, we have the populist, iconic imagery - "Heeeeers's Johnny!", the blood pouring from the elevator, and Tony the gravel-voiced finger-puppet of doom. At the end, Kubrick even has fun with us by doing something we would not expect of him - the terrified wife sees visions of cobwebs and skeletons bathed in theatrical blue artificial moonlight. It's meant to be a grim joke about the genre. But like a great illusionist, Kubrick is misdirecting us, catching us off-gaurd with deft but cheap cinematic tricks so he can work on entirely deeper level. In this respect, The Shining owes more to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness than to Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13th.

This duality led to many critics to dismiss The Shining in their first reviews, as they responded to only the surface of the film. It did not earn blockbuster dollars in its first theatrical run, either. But then The Shining's second layer - the film the subconscious sees - began to take hold, and The Shining started to haunt our collective dreams. In a quiet moment, the memory of Danny Torrance wheeling his tricycle through the corridors of the Overlook will bubble up, and bring a genuine chill we may not have even felt when first we saw it. The Shining is most effective for its after-effect, rather than its initial catalogue of haunted-house theatrics.