So my way to this one was a little roundabout. As I was looking over movies I wanted to check out, I had a couple of people recommend Doctor Sleep to me. I’m a fan of the director, and it’s a sequel to The Shining ,which is…and that’s when it hit me.
I’ve never written about The Shining on this thing.
This isn’t necessarily noteworthy - there are probably far more horror movies I haven't written about than ones I have. But back in the day I did a survey of my top ten horror movies, and I’ve already written about six of them. I’ll get to the rest of them in time. But I can’t even start to talk about Doctor Sleep without having talked about The Shining first. This is a big oversight on my part.
The Shining…that’s number one on the list. It is, for me, the ur-horror film.
It all started when I was nine or ten years old and saw an ad for it on television. This ad, as a matter of fact. I didn’t make it through the whole thing. Six seconds in, Jack Nicholson turning slowly toward the camera just pushed some lizard-brain nightmare button that said “NOPE” and I had to change the channel. Every time it came on TV after that, I’d change the channel as soon as it started. I don’t think I saw the full trailer until I found it on YouTube as an adult and I’m positive that if I’d made it through the whole thing as a little kid it would have scared me shitless. It’s a distillation of the film’s mood and aesthetic, evoking a powerful, inarticulate dread that almost felt overwhelming at the time. It felt less like a movie trailer and more like someone had managed to put one of my nightmares - cryptic, but full of fear - on film.
Fast forward about six years or so, and I’m a teenager who has since developed something of a taste for horror - more in literature than film, but nonetheless. I’d read a lot of Stephen King by this point, probably including the original novel upon which the film is based. So, one evening I saw that The Shining was showing on television. Not cable - network television. For those too young to appreciate the difference, this means a couple of things. First, that all of the most egregious stuff - profanity, nudity, and graphic violence - was going to be excised. Second, that it was going to be interrupted periodically by advertising. Add to that frequent interruptions by the state weather service who was busy tracking tornado activity in the region. It didn’t really make the evening more atmospheric or anything, mostly it just meant more interruptions.
None of that mattered. It scared the crap out of me. Even much older, even though it was a sanitized and frequently interrupted experience, it still scared the crap out of me. Any time anyone asks me what my favorite horror films are, this is the first one out of my mouth. It’s not the most unsettling, it’s not the most provocative, but it captures the feelings of my nightmares better than pretty much any movie out there.
And so here I’m going to try and pull that apart - why and how does it have this effect on me? How is it so good at creating a mood that so many other films struggle to create? And finally, how does it stand up now, after years of writing critically about horror movies?
Upon watching it again, I think in short that the key to this film’s effectiveness is a persistent sense of contrast and discordance - in the narrative, in the cinematography, in the interaction between the film and its score. This is a film that keeps you off-balance, and pulls you in different directions at once.
It starts early, with an ominous, dirgelike minor-key score over a beautiful tracking aerial shot of a car winding its way down a long mountain road. If you change the soundtrack, it’s a family holiday film. We’re presented with something innocuous on the surface, but the music is telling us that something bad is coming.
In the car are Jack and Wendy Torrance, and their son Danny. They’re headed into the mountains of Colorado, where Jack is interviewing for a winter caretaker position at the Overlook Hotel, a resort that operates from April to October, then closes down for five months. You’d think that ski season would be prime for them, but they get so much snow and the roads get so impassable that the cost of keeping everything clear basically eats up any profits they’d see. So they hire a winter caretaker to do minor repairs and upkeep, to make sure the boiler that heats the hotel doesn’t break down, to look after the property when the snowfall means nobody else can get there from town. It’s a tough job - the isolation gets to people. There was an…incident with a previous caretaker.
It’s a big change from what Jack was doing - he was teaching English at a school in Vermont, but…he left that job. He doesn’t want to talk about why. It was just a placeholder anyway. His real work is as a writer, and he’s looking forward to the solitude as an opportunity to start work on a novel. And then there’s Wendy and Danny. Wendy seems a little tired all the time, but she’s pleasant enough, even when she’s talking about the violent episode that got Jack to swear off drinking a few months ago. It’s sedate, conversational, but there’s an undercurrent of unease. Danny seems like a normal kid, mostly. He’s got a really active imagination, though. He has an imaginary friend named “Tony” who talks to him, talks through him. Tony can apparently see things before they happen.
Tony doesn’t like the hotel. Terrible things have happened in this hotel.
This is the first way the film creates a feeling of deep unease. It’s punctuated with title cards intended to mark the passage of time, or to separate the film into vignettes. We begin with “The Interview”, and then “Closing Day”, and then a leap to “A Month Later” with a sudden musical sting. It creates tension and a feeling of dislocation - a sense of time’s inevitable forward motion combined with unpredictable shifts, a feeling that we’re moving toward something inexorably, but we’re jarred out of a steady rhythm as soon as it’s established. The title cards appear throughout, moving from “A Month Later” to “Tuesday,’ repeating some days, moving from days to hours, expanding and contracting our sense of time. It’s deeply dislocating and from a contemporary standpoint, it’s not unlike the way time blurs in pandemic lockdown, how one day starts to look very much like another, how weeks blur together, and it’s either November or it’s Wednesday, or both. The end result feels like they’re sort of adrift in this giant hotel and at the same time moving toward some horrible conclusion. It’s a discordance of simultaneous timelessness and countdown to something.
This sense of being adrift is also reinforced (and subverted) by the cinematography. This isn’t really a film that uses a lot of medium shots. Shots are either of small figures dwarfed and swallowed by the rooms they inhabit, or close-ups and tight shots. There’s very little in between, and the close shots often have people placed exactly in the center of the frame in symmetric composition that draws your eye to the figures at the middle. There’s something really unnerving about extended close-ups on faces, it’s agitating, almost overstimulating, and that’s not even taking into account the fear on those faces. You can’t really look away, and there’s an exaggerated quality to the facial expressions in shots like these that reminds me very much of the intense emotions experienced in a nightmare. The lighting contributes to this as well - Jack is lit from above or below, rarely directly, which makes him look even more sinister, and the lighting palette is a mixture of warmer incandescents, natural lighting from windows, and the flat, harsh panels of fluorescents, reinforcing this feeling of disconnection, of things shifting as they do in dreams.
So everything is either very distant or uncomfortably close. and adding to the unease is a mix of slow dissolves and sudden cuts, of fast, tight zooms and slow zooms than deny you any kind of visual distance on what’s happening. It feels a little glib to talk about a film’s director as controlling what you see in a film, but here the way things are so strongly composed and presented really does feel like you don’t have much say in the matter, like you’re going to look at whatever’s happening whether you want to or not. It’s not chaotic at all, but neither is it fluent or familiar from minute to minute, so it keeps you on edge right from the start, and combined with the score and sound design, it creates tension in scenes out of something that might otherwise be innocuous. There’s nothing by itself scary about two little girls standing in the middle of a rec room, for example, but their sudden appearance, the way they hold the middle of the shot, their dead-eyed stare, it all combines to create a sense of the inexplicable and awful. In my nightmares, I’ll be faced with something similarly innocent on its own, but in the nightmare it carries some hidden, terrible meaning that I just somehow know. There’s a discordance in the visuals, then, where you’ll be presented with something that seems more or less normal, but the way it’s presented, and what you’re hearing on the soundtrack, are telling you it’s anything but.
Just as the visuals and the score change and shift to create a sense of unease, so does the narrative itself. It begins with supernatural elements there, but more in the background, the central story more one of Jack’s psychological disintegration. Just as we moving from the day the hotel closes to one month later, Jack’s descent feels just as abrupt, though it does feel forecasted - the sudden change in jobs, the incident with Danny, the relatively recent sobriety - it’s set up pretty clearly that he really has no business taking this job, so things catch up to him quick. As with the cinematography, it’s all about stark contrast - he’s fine, then he really, really isn’t. Wendy begins the film pleasant if not somewhat timid, but as we learn about what happened three years ago, the excuse-making becomes apparent, the beleaguered vigilance of an alcoholic’s spouse. It’s not an especially sympathetic portrayal - she’s hardly a portrait of courage, but it works to communicate that feelings of helplessness, and as things get worse, her feeble attempts to defend herself vividly describe anyone who has ever found themselves unable to run or speak or fight back in a nightmare. That feeling of being utterly ineffectual is almost primal.
As the movie moves on, it shifts from impending dread to a story of psychological disintegration to one more explicitly supernatural - the hotel is a malevolent place, but at first it seems like only Danny can see the wreckage of its past. But then, as Jack’s grasp on reality slips, the hotel becomes a more actively malicious force - the hotel hasn’t just had evil things happen there, the hotel itself is evil, an organism with its own consciousness, given voice by its ghosts. We get hints of this throughout as Steadicam shots give the impression of something ghostly, gliding along behind Wendy and Danny, something watching them and following them through the halls. Finally, it becomes apparent even to Wendy as the hotel shows its true face to all of them in the final act. We know that something bad is going to happen, then something bad does happen, but then it just keeps getting worse and worse, pushing beyond rational boundaries into the purer images of the subconscious.
It does a lot right, but I think the intervening years that I’ve spent watching lots and lots of horror movies with a critical eye has revealed some flaws. Jack’s rapid descent into madness can be explained by the leap in time, but there are already hints of it under the surface at the beginning - he never really seems like a sympathetic family man at all, and as things get worse it does collapse into scenery-chewing in places. Likewise, the pacing feels very slack to me - the vignette structure means that we get isolated moments that are themselves powerful, but the middle of the film meanders some and loses tension as a result. It can feel every inch of its almost two and half hours, which works for the drifting, rootless feeling of isolation, but it undoes some of the tension as well. We get scenes that work in isolation, but don’t really build on each other.
Stephen King has over the years been openly critical of this adaptation, taking exception to the way Jack and Wendy are depicted and deriding it as a beautiful film without any substance. Certainly, director Stanley Kubrick has been accused of lacking warmth, of making icy, unsympathetic, clinical films, and I don’t necessarily disagree, but I think it works for the film here. It’s not the more tragic story of the original text, of a Jack Torrance who’s trying to be a better person, who’s trying to battle his demons and who fails, or a Wendy Torrance who is strong and resolute when necessary, and does what she must to keep Danny safe. It’s about something bad that you see coming from the very beginning, with that ominous score over the opening tracking shot, but like a nightmare, it just keeps coming and coming and coming and getting worse than you imagined. The generally histrionic pitch of everyone’s behavior is the elevated, operatic pitch of dreams and nightmares.
It’s not the more human-scaled story King wrote - which is a fine piece of horror writing, no doubt about that - but it works very well as its own thing, impeccably styled and relentlessly uneasy. It may not have the visceral punch it did when I was a kid (though specific shots, scenes, and segments, have lost very little power over the years), but I see echoes of this film in every juxtaposition of the pastoral with the hysteric, symmetrical shots interrupted by a lone horrible figure in the center of the frame, the quick cut with musical sting, fast zooms, faces contorted with horror, and these are the sort of devices that never fail to get to me. They are the visual language of my nightmares, and that’s pretty much the highest praise I can give a horror film.
IMDB entry
Available from Amazon
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