The Shining: The ground cries out

Kubrick’s masterpiece is a warning about building over violence and abuse.

Confession: For about 20 years, I was convinced The Shining was overrated. 

The last time I saw it, I was in my early twenties. I had read Stephen King’s novel a few years earlier and Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation was already considered a masterpiece by most people. I watched it one October afternoon after coming home from classes and was underwhelmed. 

Part of it was Kubrick’s coldness, which still sometimes causes his work to bounce off of me. The film didn’t have the emotional power or visceral terror of the horror movies I was used to; the imagery was striking, but I always felt like I was watching other people be scared, not feeling the emotion myself. And, to be honest, it was probably hard to be terrified by something I’d already seen parodied on The Simpsons. 

I came to embrace Stephen King’s well-known position that the movie was a bad adaptation of a classic novel. King’s book was an emotional and personal story about a man trying and failing to overcome his demons. Kubrick’s film, headlined by Jack Nicholson, was a movie where the craziness was telegraphed from the opening scene, and it was a cruel and unrelenting punishment to its characters. 

I recently revisited The Shining and was surprised to see how wrong I was. A long-time King reader – as anyone who reads this newsletter knows – I can feel the tension between the author’s humanism and Kubrick’s detachment. But I don’t think it’s a bad adaptation; the beats and themes of the novel are still there, just filtered through a different perspective. And while I still am not scared by the film’s more gruesome and haunting imagery, I can’t deny that the film has a power I didn’t, and maybe couldn’t, appreciate in my twenties. This is a movie not about ghosts, ghouls and haunted houses but about our attempts to paper over evil, to cover it with a smiley face in our families and cultures. But violence won’t be silenced, and the ground continues to cry out¹. 

Domestic terror 

It’s worth addressing a crucial shift in the movie’s perspective from that of the novel. It’s the reason why I think King, understandably, has such a hard time embracing this film, and why it’s easy to criticize Jack Nicholson’s performance. But it was also key to shaping my understanding of its themes. 

In the novel, Jack Torrance is the protagonist. Anyone who’s read In Writing can see King’s own struggles reflected in Jack’s writer's block, toil as an underpaid English teacher and struggles with addiction. Jack’s experiences at the Overlook turn him into a monster, but the novel’s tragic pull is because we view that transformation from his perspective. Jack does evil, unspeakable things, but the story resonates because King is wrestling with his own demons, and he even gives the character a brief moment of redemption in the story’s climax. King feels pity for Jack because he understands him; he is him. 

Kubrick re-positions the viewpoint, and doesn’t have much empathy for the abuser, a view many of us might share. Jack might be the first main character we see on screen, but the protagonists are Wendy and Danny, his wife and son. And before they make the trek to the Overlook, we’re keyed in that there’s already been domestic trouble. Jack once dislocated Danny’s shoulder – Wendy tells the doctor that it was just one time, he’d been drinking, and it hadn’t happened again. But watching Duvall in that scene, we can see Wendy suspects it’s a lie; maybe he didn’t hurt Danny again, maybe he has been a decent husband since the incident. But Wendy knows what we all do – abusers don’t quit, they just pause. The family clings to the hope that a change in scenery, a successful writing gig, some time away from the pressures at home will paper over their crumbling center. But there’s a reason Wendy is always smoking and over-eager to keep things calm; she’s walking on eggshells, trying not to set off the bomb that she knows still resides inside her husband. 

This information is in King’s novel; in fact, if I recall, Jack’s bad behavior is even a bit more notorious, because I believe he was fired from his teaching job for hitting a student. But because King is so personally tied to the main character, he can’t escape a twinge of sympathy. Jack is hopeful that his worst days are behind him. He just needs to spend time at the Overlook, keep off the booze and write. He wants to get better; the tragedy of Stephen King’s The Shining is that he’s not strong enough to resist the temptations of the Overlook. In Kubrick’s telling, the Overlook and its psychic pull only exacerbate and bring out a monster in hiding. 

King’s complaint about the casting of Jack Nicholson is that the audience knows shorthand that Jack Nicholson would go crazy, robbing the story of its suspense and tragedy. But if The Shining is repositioned from a story of a man trying to hold on to his sanity to one of a wife waiting for the beast to re-erupt, the casting makes perfect sense. There are hints that Jack is not the greatest husband or father before he picks up an ax and starts chasing the family through the Overlook’s corridors. On the ride up to the hotel, Danny complains that he’s hungry and Jack snipes that he should have eaten more earlier. When Wendy interrupts his writing one afternoon, the harshness of his reply seems shocking because we’re seeing it for the first time, but Wendy’s response lets us know this is a pattern. He belittles, snaps and condescends. He’s not a nice guy under the influence of the hotel; he’s an angry, abusive man before the supernatural pushes him to murder. 

And why is Jack so abusive? Because, like most abusers, he’s a weak failure trying to escape mediocrity. On his Letterboxd, Filmspotting co-host Adam Kempenaar points out that Jack is a frustrated writer. And when we see Wendy at home, the apartment is filled with books. Jack gets angry when she asks how his writing’s going; he likely blames her and Danny for stifling what he believes would be a promising writing career (after all, his episode toward Danny happened when the boy messed up his papers). He knows he’s a screw-up as a husband and father, and that he’s an unproductive writer. When under the sway of the Overlook, his argument to Wendy before he completely snaps is that taking Danny to the doctors would jeopardize his success as the caretaker of the hotel. And Nicholson’s tone suggests that Jack isn’t big on responsibility so much as he’s aware this is his last chance to be seen following through on something. 

I have to confess that I also used to buy the argument that Duvall’s performance was bad, a shrill and one-note misstep that robbed Wendy of any humanity. And, no. Duvall is fantastic. Again, I think part of the perception that this is a bad performance is because people think the character is just a weak and scared person without realizing…yes, of course she is. If we buy this as the portrait of a wife and mother who has suffered her husband’s rage and abuse, her performance tracks. Wendy is a good mother, she loves her son. But if she seems timid early on – smoking cigarettes while trying to convince the doctor that Jack’s abusive ways are done – it’s because we can see the fractures. She holds onto hope that domestic bliss will save the family; a happy son, a happy husband, maybe some time away. Danny’s seizure early on – and probably the presence of Tony, even if she claims to have accepted the imaginary friend – are hints that she can’t control things. They will fall apart if not addressed. When Jack goes completely mad, it’s not just terror over supernatural shock – it’s not even until the movie’s final moments that Wendy gets any sense there’s anything psychically off at the hotel – but confirmation that she was never able to keep Jack’s true nature at bay. Once an abuser, always abuser – and she can’t even keep him away from drinks; someone or something will always provide them – and she is now trapped in an isolated location with the monster she married. Duvall’s performance is powerful; it’s the most visceral depiction of sheer terror I’ve seen. 

I’d always chalked The Shining up as story about alcoholism, but its non-supernatural threats are about more than that. It’s about a man who’s violent at heart – with or without alcohol, although that definitely lubricates the threat – and how pretending it’s all okay, trying to control the environment and trying to pretend it will all just go away is just pushing it further down, setting it to erupt in the future. In King’s novel, the horror is rooted in the idea that this is the writer’s greatest fear about himself. In Kubrick’s film, the terror comes from the wife and child trapped with a dormant monster brought out to rage. 

Hotel hell 

The Shining as a tale of domestic horror is probably the most surface reading of the film, and I think there’s something thematically deeper that Kubrick is trying to get at. Because the Torrance family isn’t the only one in this film with secrets. 

The Overlook is a sentient presence throughout The Shining. Kubrick’s long Steadicam shots ensure we’re intimately familiar with its geography – and then he takes great pleasure in disorienting us, as when Danny rides his Big Wheel around the ground floor and then turns a corner only to be on a totally different floor (the movie never mentions this; we just understand it because of our knowledge of the Overlook, which makes it more disorienting). We instinctively know our way through the hotel’s lounges and hallways, we’ve walked through its kitchens and corridors. It surrounds us; Kubrick’s long tracking shots make us feel as if we’re passing through ourselves, or that we’re watching something pursue the characters. The Overlook is a character, not just another haunted house. It has its own desires and schemes, and it communicates. 

I’d probably love to visit The Overlook during open season. It's luxurious and stately, an architectural marvel with unique designs that people could probably spend all summer exploring. It’s the height of American opulence and escape, and I’m sure there are many other hotels like it throughout the country (and, famously, the hotel that provides The Shining’s exteriors, Colorado’s Timberline Lodge, is not even the hotel that inspired Stephen King. That would be The Stanley, where the 1997 TV adaptation of the novel was filmed; it’s also the hotel where Harry and Lloyd spend all their Samsonite money in Dumb and Dumber). 

But Kubrick gets great mileage out of The Overlook once it closes for the season and the house lights are out. It’s one of the great liminal spaces in American film, its hallways and ballrooms empty, shadows seeping in, gray light cast in from giant windows – that, of course, only show the snow-covered fields reminding us there’s no escape. Even in the scenes where there’s nothing eerie going on, the Overlook feels unsettling. Without the distraction of rich white folk, its secrets are laid bare. 

As in King’s novel, The Overlook has dark secrets long before the Torrance family sets foot in its lobby. We learn in the first scene that a former caretaker, Mr. Grady, murdered his wife and two daughters with an ax. We’re told that the hotel was built on an ancient Native burial ground, and its walls are festooned with Native art. It’s built on sour land, but just like Wendy trying to create a happy family and ignore the abuse at its center, American wealth constantly covers up the spilled blood. The Overlook is a retreat for the people whose wealth has caused them to abuse and denigrate others – could that be what’s going on with the film’s infamous dog-man? – and its sordid history is covered up with photos of fancy parties. But the blood does not stay silent. 

I don’t find The Shining’s supernatural moments particularly scary, but they definitely leave an impression. I think much of that is because Kubrick rarely films them as set pieces; many times, they’re not necessarily malevolent so much as they are just…there. The iconic Grady twins are scary because of their stillness; they just appear when Danny is riding around the hotel and they hold a firm gaze with the young boy, punctuated by shocking inserts of the gruesome violence their father carried out. When the elevators overflow with blood late in the movie, it’s not an attempt to drown Wendy – we don’t even see her escape it – so much as the hotel finally spilling its secrets. The ghosts are often The Overlook’s way of communicating, as if it can’t handle the years of cover-ups and dancing on its graves and is about to burst with the true horror of what happened on its grounds. There are probably as many theories about The Shining as there are rooms in the Overlook, but I think there’s validity to the ones that Kubrick is, in part, using this story to address America’s original sins against Native Americans (racism also seems to be on his mind when Grady, talking about Scatman Crothers’ chef, refers to him in a scathing racial slur, repeated by Jack). 

It was easy, in my memory, to see the titular “shining,” the psychic ability Danny has, as a strictly evil force. That’s how I remembered Tony. But there’s actually a supernatural battle being fought – I don’t think Kubrick puts too fine a point on it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the battle was more overt in King’s novel. For Danny, the Shine, while terrifying, is trying to alert him of danger even before they go to the Overlook – Tony tells Danny early on the hotel is bad, sends Danny visions of the hotel’s nightmares, and then resorts to taking him over and carving “REDRUM” on the wall to warn his mother. The Shine is also their hope of getting Crothers’ Dick Halloran² to the hotel to save them; and while that hope seems quickly dashed with Jack sinking an ax into Dick’s back, I guess he did leave a SnoCat to take back to town. The Shine seems to be begging Danny to see the hotel clearly. It’s a method of communicating the presence of evil. 

I can’t remember if King’s novel posits that Jack has a bit of The Shine himself, and there’s nothing overtly mentioned in the film, but it was a question I had on this viewing. Jack definitely sees things in the Overlook; the same things that Danny does. Maybe that’s why he drinks; it’s certainly what the Danny we meet in King’s sequel, Doctor Sleep, has substance abuse issues.³ But the hotel certainly wants him to see its secrets, although while something is trying to warn Danny, the Overlook is intent on seducing Jack. A nude woman slinks out of a bathtub – and while she harms Danny, she embraces Jack, although turning into a cackling hag seems like a bad plan. The bartender plies Jack with alcohol. They remind the frustrated failure that he has an important role to play. And by opening the doors into the ballroom, they give him a peek at the Good Life, where he can be an important member of The Overlook’s society; why else would he look so happy in the film’s final shot? 

The evil and secrets are spilling out of the Overlook, and at the end they’re being expelled so forcefully that even Wendy can see them. One side wants people to see the evil and harm the hotel is built on. The other says “ignore it; pay no attention to it, put on a happy face, live it up. Blood in the hallway? What blood?” Families create happy portraits to cover up abusive centers. America builds resorts on mass graves. But an abuser is always an abuser, and the victims of evil won’t stop crying out. They’ll erupt violently. We can escape, or we can give in. The choice is ours. 

Oh yeah, it’s also a great movie

Of course, the reason why there are so many theories to the film – and why it takes so many viewings to start picking them apart – is that Kubrick cloaks them behind an atmosphere of dread. John Alcott’s cinematographer is stark; I wouldn’t be surprised if this is where the social media obsession with liminal spaces has its roots. The score is oppressive, possibly the scariest thing in the movie. It thunders even under the production logos. A mix of pre-existing compositions and Wendy Carlos’ score, it rumbles and stings at all the right moments, and is one of the all-time greatest uses of music in horror. 

As with any Kubrick production, The Shining is meticulously composed. Ray Lovejoy’s editing is masterful. There are long, long stretches where the camera simply follows or waits, pregnant with suspense and terror. The movie lacks many traditional jump scares; the horror typical just builds and builds. But there are quick cuts that serve the same function, such as when Danny’s psychic visions take over or we see the aftermath of the Grady twins’ murder. Scenes will fade in and out of others while the dialogue continues, giving the sense that even the living characters are just ghosts fading into the Overlooks. I still don’t feel much of this is scary in a traditional sense – I don’t know that The Shining is a great Halloween movie, for example – but it creates a movie that is smothering, ultimately seeping under your skin. 

Kubrick famously put his actors through the paces, as he tended to do, with the confrontation between Jack and Wendy on the staircase requiring more than 100 takes. There’s controversy about whether Kubrick’s behavior toward Duvall bordered on abuse itself, and while she admitted that the shoot was “hell,” she also said that she was thankful for the opportunity to work with the master. This seems to be a common refrain of people who worked with the auteur, who could be a demanding and obsessive prick. And I’m not a fan of the “well, it gets results” argument – people should just not be assholes to other people – I can’t deny that Duvall’s performance feels terrified, exhausted and completely authentic. Likewise, I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a kid working through this material, but Danny Lloyd’s performance feels both genuinely child-like (there’s not a hint of precociousness) and his fear is palpable (and that Tony voice is the stuff of nightmares). 

And then there’s Nicholson. In a career filled with big performances, this is one of his most gigantic. No, I don’t buy his Jack Torrance as a realistic depiction of a person with mental illness. But there is an actual arc to Jack’s madness. Early on, he’s grumpy and frustrated. We know he’s abusive, but he largely seems depressed, bitter and smug – even his job interview in the film’s first scene feels a bit smarmy. And if we factor in Jack’s alcoholism, we see this as a portrait of man who is miserable with his life, doesn’t care much for his own family and doesn’t have his vice to help make things a bit more bearable. When Jack is given a drink by the ghost bartender, Nicholson’s performance becomes looser, bigger; I don’t want to say it’s likable, but it’s definitely filled with more energy. But, of course, Jack has no sense of moderation, and the drinking and the ghosts eventually turn his rage murderous. There’s still a twinge of humor in his madness (the iconic “here’s Johnny” line is a legitimately funny pop culture reference), but by the end, Nicholson’s face is contorted into nothing more than a mask of rage and hate. I don’t believe the best performances have to be subtle; Nicholson goes big and it works for the movie. He’s scarier than anything The Overlook can summon. 

Do I now find The Shining scary? Again, not in the traditional sense. It doesn’t get my pulse raising like the final 20 minutes of The Blair Witch Project, nor does it revolt me like Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. And I think even the supernatural jolts of The Conjuring are more frightening. But The Shining is tossing out its horror at a completely different level – it’s not a “good time” scary movie. It’s oppressive and mean. It’s a 2-hour moan about the evils of man and America. It sticks to your bones. It’s a masterpiece. 

1. At least, this is the interpretation I walked away with on this viewing. Kubrick’s film is famously resistant to a single interpretation, so much so that Rodney Asher’s Room 237 exists, not to settle on a definitive approach but to highlight the vast arrays of theories surrounding the movie (this is also why my views on this movie will probably be absolutely new to no one; this movie has been dissected more than almost any other movie). On this viewing, its themes of domestic violence and America’s original sins stood out to me. There’s probably also room for a billion others were I to sit and really pore over the imagery and dialogue, from it being a critique of capitalism, a horror movie about maintaining work-life balance or – as Roger Ebert theorized – a mental breakdown in which most the main characters might not even be present. I do think the Moon Landing theory is a bit of a stretch, though. 

2. I don’t have time to go into it in detail, but someone needs to write about Dick Halloran’s pervy Miami home. 

3. My original hope was to review The Shining and also watch Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep (which I had not seen) and write about that, but I ran out of time. Next year.