I hold my hands up. Not too long ago, I believed that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining was an underwhelming horror film. Don’t get me wrong, the acting is outstanding, the immersing wide shots make the cinematography gorgeous to behold and the accompanying soundtrack creates a truly chilling atmosphere. However, I firmly believe that a horror film should be scary. It should make you check that nobody is lurking in the dimly lit corner of your room. It should make you afraid to go to sleep. When it came to The Shining, up until now I have always held that it simply didn’t meet these criteria. Watching a slightly unhinged man chase his wife and son around a big hotel as he slowly slipped into insanity simply wasn’t scary enough for my tastes. Where were the malevolent spirits trying to haunt the family’s souls? Where were the demonic beings trying to push their way into the lives of the terrified family?
However, after giving it some thought and looking at the film with fresh eyes, I have changed my mind. I now believe it may just be one of the greatest horror films ever made.
In a recent interview with The Verge, Kubrick’s wife Christiane explains that:
“He wanted to make a ghost film. A ghost film! You know, just that – a good ghost film [that was] scary. That’s what he wanted to do.”
After reading this, I was compelled to watch the film once more and reassess my views. Only then did it dawn on me that The Shining is exactly what Christiane had said it was; a film entirely about ghosts. After all, what are ghosts? Simply beings we cannot see that subtly affect the minds of living people. In The Shining, over the course of the film Jack Torrance is slowly but radically influenced by an unseen force that we cannot see! He gradually deteriorates from a lively coherent individual to a terrifying, psychotic zombie-like monster. What can possibly cause a man to undergo this radical change in such a short space of time? The film gently suggests that Jack’s psychosis is the result of interference from a supernatural force, i.e a ghost or a spirit. What is most terrifying to the viewer is if an everyday guy like Jack Torrence can rapidly fall under the influence of some unknown supernatural force, might it be possible for us to suffer the same fate?
The Shining is far from a simple film. If you want to scratch the surface, Kubrick has included enough ideas and visual metaphors to keep you occupied for a long time. The documentary Room 237 explores a number of proposed theories as to what Kubrick wanted to express through The Shining and while many of the theories may say more about the theoriser than the film itself, some cannot be dismissed so easily. Kubrick was known to be a perfectionist who put an extreme amount of effort into getting his films to be just the way he wanted. Therefore, some of the things pointed out in Room 237 such as the impossibility of the layout of the hotel quite clearly exist for a reason.
When you start to analyse The Shining in greater detail, you end up diving head first down a rabbit hole that does not seem to have a visible end. At its broadest, the film hints at what it means to be human, with a mind that’s more akin to an endless labyrinth than the clear organised bunch of compartments that we like to think it contains. When it comes down to it, I think The Shining is terrifying because thinking about how our mind works is like thinking about the vastness of outer space or the contents of the afterlife. It is scary because we cannot contemplate it, it is beyond our understanding and therefore it takes on a sort of mysterious aura.
Ultimately, like all of Kubrick’s films and all good films in general, The Shining is as simple or as complex as you, the viewer, want it to be. For me it is simply a deep, invasive probing of the human mind and as there is nothing more paradoxical than something thinking about itself, The Shining is the most terrifying film ever made.
Fractalis - An ongoing journal 