Why The Shining is Terrifying

As I thought about the film afterwards, and even when I wasn't thinking about it, there were things that bothered me, I became more and more convinced that there is a deep-rooted subtext in this film that addresses the Holocaust. The glow of that movie. It was about the genocide of the American Indians, so if you look at those three things, you'll start to understand this deeper story. The idea that Stanley Kubrick was involved in faking the Apollo moon landings. Room 237 is a fascinating documentary focusing on Stanley Kubrick's The Shining the Film Documents. the wealth of conspiracy theories that have emerged from different interpretations of the 1980s horror masterpiece, with different interviewees suggesting that the film is everything from a story of sexual hedonism to an allegory of the genocide of Native Americans and even a theory that the entire film is actually a coded confession from Kubrick about how he helped NASA fake the night of the moon.

It's a fascinating watch, but while hearing so many theories makes it hard to believe any one in particular, it makes one thing very clear. The Shining is a special film. an abyss-like quality that draws people to its edges and forces them to stare down into its dark depths and I am one of them. The Shining terrifies me and I've briefly documented the childhood trauma the film caused me in a previous video, but what I'd like to do today is try to dig a little deeper and shed some light on what exactly is so

terrifying

about this film. movie and why so many people feel so compelled to try to uncover its deepest layers based on the 1974 film. novel written by Stephen King, if you've never experienced the shine, the story goes that this recovering alcoholic and struggling writer, Jack Torrance is hired to be the snowy hotel's winter caretaker, a job that will allow his wife Wendy and son Danny to stay in the huge building completely alone all winter.

I think when you really look at it there are three fundamental parts to the brilliant story that make it so disturbing: the first is the sense of isolation that it provokes and the anxiety that arises from the fact that the Torrances are completely alone in the Overlook and although the isolation in itself is disturbing, what becomes

terrifying

is that we have never been more vulnerable than when we are alone and the brightness plays directly into that fear in the first 20 minutes of the film. There are so many subtle little hints that something bad is going to happen, we're told that Winter's previous caretaker went crazy and murdered his wife and daughters with a maximum of casual conversations, even ones that seem to lead Makar to big ideas like the cannibalism and the disturbed native Americans.

In cemeteries there is the constant idea of ​​violence and murder and within that anticipation there is anxiety, we know that the tolerances will be completely vulnerable to the malicious force that is coming, but perhaps even more disturbing is how that malicious force manifests itself as it passes week. and more of a hinge on seeing people who aren't there and acting in strange and disturbing ways until finally his madness increases to the point that he makes the decision that he is going to murder his wife and his son. . There's no nice way to say this, but in essence.

The Shining is a story about a man who harms his family, something so unnatural and horrible, but also something that happens every day. I think a lot of people tend to dismiss Stephen King as a pulpy horror writer, and I think that's not unwarranted in some cases. cases, but he is at his best when he explores the everyday horror ingrained in the human psyche, and Jack Torrance's desire to harm his family is perhaps the best example of this in his book that Stephen King's companion King wrote about how his own experience as a father influenced According to Jack Torence's writing, the protagonist is a man who broke his son's arm, who has a history of beating children, who is also beaten and, as a young father of two children, I They horrified my occasional feelings of actual antagonism toward my children.

If you never stop, will you never go to bed? There are times where I felt very angry at my children and even felt like I could hurt them, so Jack Torrance's character is this very dark fear taken to a horrible extreme and I think this is what makes him such a genuinely character. Disturbing, since when you think about it, all he really is is a deranged man with a sharp weapon and horror cinema has no shortage of those, but it's his connection to his victims, his family. The people he must care for and protect make his gradual descent into madness and resulting acts of violence so terrifying and it is the mere suggestion of this that makes some of the film's more understated moments so deeply disturbing. , so if we stop there These two factors alone are good enough to create a terrifying story, even apart from anything supernatural, but of course there is a supernatural element to the Overlook's brilliance: it is the hotel that who seems to be slowly twisting Jack's mind and tormenting the family with visions of blood. packed elevators and dismembered girls, but I think an important aspect of Overlook is the unusual way it interacts with the Torrances, unlike many of the more typical haunted houses in horror cinema, Overlook never directly relates to the family, never performs no physical action. or harms a member of Torrance, the only exception being the bruises Danny suffers from visiting room 237 and the door that opens on its own in the food cellar, but even those happen off-screen and could be explained in other ways in place of what appears to be the hotel.

What he tries to do is directly attack the sanity of its occupants by showing them things they don't want to see and whispering quietly to them in various lurid ways, and he seems to be doing this with a distinctly mocking distance, as he isn't trying to murder. the family is trying to get them to kill each other and that is an infinitely more disturbing goal as the hotel is a huge unknowable alien creature that delights in slowly crushing the lives of its inhabitants and I think this is a more effective way of think. As for the Overlook, it's actually not so much haunted as alive, there's a malevolent consciousness to the hotel, almost a Lovecraftian quality, as if the various entities that inhabit it are not individual ghosts but tendrils of a much larger universe. be unknowable and that to me is infinitely scarier than you would think with a premise so strong that when combined with Stanley Kubrick's cinematic experience you would have an instant horror smash hit but unusually this was not the case as The Shining was not.

Especially well received when it was released in 1980, the film suffered a lukewarm opening weekend, grossing significantly less than Ullman and Alien and was even criticized by several prominent film critics, with Variety magazine writing in its review of the film that Kubrick has teamed up with the nervous Jack. Nicholson to destroy everything scary about Stephen King's bestseller, the film was even nominated for two Golden Roses, with Kubrick for worst director and Shelley Duvall for worst actress, but that was nothing compared to the film's biggest detractor, the Stephen King himself, who charged the The film said that it had none of the heart of the novel and that it destroyed the character of Jack and Wendy Torrance, calling the film cold, heartless and misogynistic, but the quote that always stood out to me the most Attention is a king who reportedly played Kubrick after Watching the movie in which he said, I think he set out to make a movie that would hurt people and I don't think at the time King had any idea how much he thought about it.

It was true. The Shining is not an easy movie to watch, it has a slow pace. a growing fear, it is quite difficult to understand anything about it, it just feels bad and find an answer to why it is like that. I think we have to look at the very particular way that The Shining was created, in general, there are two general rules. When filming horror films, tight-angle close-ups are used to limit the audience's view of scenes, making them wonder what could be beyond the edge of the frame, as well as lots of quick cuts to make things feel frenetic. when the scares really happen and one What's so unusual about Brilliance is how it strays from both conventions.

Almost the entire film was shot with an 18-millimeter wide-angle lens, making the spaces of the Overlook Hotel appear gigantic and overwhelming in many shots, the background. completely envelops the characters, drowning them in large amounts of empty space and constantly visually reinforcing the idea that these characters are alone, which relates to the feeling of isolation we talked about earlier, but also means that when something appears it is very more shocking and terrifying. One of the reasons the hallway scene with the two girls is so shocking is that we are confronted with something that shouldn't be there at this point in the movie.

The movie spent almost 40 minutes visually assuring us that this hotel is empty except for the Torrance only to then break that assurance and this is a fundamental fear that The Shining plays on the Viennese that comes with people showing up in places they shouldn't be, but that It is also key to understanding the unease of how The Shining scares us through subtle visual horror while the movie has its more traditional scares. Much of the film's unease comes from the very nuanced ways it shows us things. In most horror cases, we experience this shock at the moment of impact, usually at the same point as the character does, but in the brightness.

Characters will often notice something before the camera reveals it to the audience, which creates these little moments of intense fear and suspense. Just watch this first scene in the playroom and see how long we endure Danny's reaction before moving on to the scare. The Shining isn't trying to surprise us, rather it clearly tells us that something bad is going to happen and then shows it to us, and I think the reason this approach works so well is that often what it shows us is something really horrible. and one of my personal issues. A favorite example of this is the infamous typewriter scene where Wendy discovers what exactly Jack has been typing: pages and pages and pages of the words "all work and no play" make Jack a dull and boring boy.

It's a moment that so brilliantly visually conveys something so horrible that the person Wendy loves and the only other adult in the hotel has gone irrevocably insane. This same penchant for deeply disturbing visual horror is even carried over to the performances of its actors. If you look at the big movie stars of the '70s and '80s, many of them had a clean, crisp, polished look, with an acting style that tended to be much more reserved than what you would see today, but on the contrary, Shelley Duvall and Jack Nicholson have a disturbing, almost disheveled quality, and this was largely an intentional decision by Kubrick.

Many of the close-ups were taken with the same eighteen millimeter lens that the panoramic shots were taken with, and when you use a wide-angle lens to take a close-up of a face, you have the effect of a long focal plane aperture. . of the image makes the facial features look distorted and strange and the use of this technique in the film creates an uncomfortable and almost strange look for the actors and I think this is very interesting because very often horror films cast actors very conventionally handsome in an effort to To add to the voyeuristic or fantastical elements of horror cinema, consciously distort the appearance of its actors.

The Shining removes that fantasy element and replaces it with a quality that feels sinister and strange, and this unsettling feeling is only enhanced by the performances of the There is a haunting quality to Nicholson and Duvall's performance in the parts of this film in the ones where Nicholson seems genuinely obnoxious and put together and Duvall seems legitimately terrified and the reason for this can be found in an interview with Ray Lovejoy, the editor of The Shining, where he talked about how Kubrick filmed dozens and dozens and dozens of takes of each individual takes, some of which reached triple digits and later, when Lovejoy was going through take after take, he would watch the actors slowly grow larger and turn as they became.

They were exhausted and were running out of conventional ways of portraying their actions until around 30 or 40 shots in they began to act in strange and unbalanced ways, spoke in unusual voices and contorted their faces into disturbing expressions and invariably these were the shots that were used in the final cut of the film and I think this is evident in the film itself, there is a genuinely disturbing aspect to the brilliant's performance and I think that is why both Nicholson and Evolved were heavily criticized upon the release of the film.film, considered unrealistic and cartoonish, but also why its performances seem so disturbing and so well remembered today, so what it boils down to is that every part of the Shining's visual direction is designed specifically to make us nervous and, when Matches the film's soundtrack, the unique haunting atmosphere it is so synonymous with.

With the film forming many of The Bright's tracks barely resemble music, but a cacophony of eerie sounds designed to seep into our subconscious and whisper to us that something is very wrong. There is an example of this towards the middle. of the movie that I really love is about a mistake where the hotel really starts to take control of Jack and there's a deep, strong beat mixed wonderfully with the creepy background atmosphere and it really gives way to that feeling that the hotel It's a huge life. pulsing entity, you mean just leaving the hotel, the sound of the shine is uncomfortable, it's hard to hear, but this is emblematic of Hair, the movie.

It was made when Stephen King called The Shining a movie to hurt people, was right, as every piece of music, every camera angle, every subtle inflection of dialogue is designed to cause emotional distress to the audience and, as a result, creates a kind of horror completely foreign to anything else in the genre and I think this is why it got such a critical reaction when it was first released, people just didn't know how to process it and I think even a slightly different version of the source material could have resulted in a dramatically different medium and fortunately for our purposes that medium exists.

Stephen King's The Shining is a three-part television miniseries released in 1997 whose goal was presumably to create an adaptation that more closely aligned with the original. book, which I think is a fair goal. Kubrick's version of The Shining dramatically altered important parts of the book's story and the novel itself is a fantastic piece of horror writing and, for what it's worth, the 1997 version is really successful in this regard, it's much more . Faithful adaptation, but it's also a much weaker piece of horror. If we were to summarize the key differences between the two versions, it would come down to two factors, atmosphere and ambiguity.

The 1997 version was filmed at the Stanley Hotel, the real hotel where Stephen King stayed. which originally inspired the story of The Shining and while I'm sure it means a lot to King personally, all the cramped spaces don't elicit the same feeling of isolation and emptiness that is so palpable in the original film, it feels more comforting and welcoming. than anything else and in the same way with the actors, Nicholson and Duvall were designed to look disconcerting, the new casts well, you get my point and you know that these are not the most important aspects of the miniseries to focus on, but the Atmosphere is created through details. and the nuance and complete lack of both in the more granular aspects of the miniseries production lead to an adaptation that feels flat with no depth or subtlety and the lack of subtlety leads us directly to our second factor: ambiguity, ambiguity is what drives much of the In Kubrick's The Shining, the concept of ghosts and the supernatural is used with such care and in such a particular way that it leaves room for you to wonder if the hotel is really haunted or if the family is simply is collectively going crazy, but the 1997 version doesn't leave the same room for interpretation, possibly the best example of this is how both versions interpret these sections of the book featuring the man in the wolf mask in the 1980s version ; appears towards the end of the film just as the tension is reaching its peak. climax and this happens is a disconcertingly out of place shock to the system with no context or even a hint of explanation just appears and then disappears now look at this same scare played by the 1997 version and for the record this is much closer to how it is in the book, but what really surprises me about this interpretation is how difficult it is to try to establish the Wolf Man as a direct physical threat, Danny, and the result is that he is so harmful that it is almost comical, whereas in the version Since the threat is so hidden and so ambiguous that our brains panic just trying to identify it, the miniseries is more committed to the act of violence than the threat of violence.

Jack even managed to harm both Danny and Wendy at various points in the miniseries, which is unlike the Kubrick version in which Jack never inflicts violence on any member of his family, but is the threat of that violence and the clarity with which it is conveyed which makes the '80s film actually end up feeling like a much more violent version even though there are only two instances of it. on screen and, conversely, the way the 97 version communicates its horror just feels clunky and over the top, it's creepy furniture that moves on its own, the actors wear silly ghost makeup and there's some really Hedge monster CG unfortunate and ends up feeling a lot more. emasculated safely and dated than the movie that came out 17 years earlier, if the 1980s version of The Shining was made to hurt people, then this version seems made for TV, but I think it also highlights what it does that the original is so special, so ambiguous and intangible. atmosphere that is the result of every little part of the film working at such a granular level that it creates this incredible feeling, but there is something more to the story of The Shining, something sinister and unknowable that is just out of reach and, personally, I think which is people trying to understand.

This feeling, this intangible second layer that has resulted in many strange theories surrounding the glow and I am not here to debate the validity of these conclusions because what is more interesting to me are the pure facts that they exist, the fact that they still exist. There are people trying to break this movie down to this day. I think the effectiveness of a horror piece can be measured by how long the experience stays with the viewer after the credits have rolled, and The Shining is unparalleled in this regard. a film that haunts people a film that through its meticulous construction creates a big makar little world in which it is very easy to get lost and I think that is why people like me and so many others are equally terrified and captivated by this film , its ability to infiltrate it. our subconscious and manipulate us at the subtlest level possible creating a kind of horror that stays with you trapping us in its dark hallways and never letting us go friends, thank you for joining me today.

I really hope you enjoyed the first of our horror themed videos for October it's also a little announcement. If you're in Dublin on November 11th, I'll be attending Jake, who was kind enough to invite me as a special guest, so if you're around, come and say hello. I want a big shout out to my sponsors of this video who have ever made this channel possible and if you want to be one of them, you can do so at patreon.com. Slash super eyepatch wolf this week. I would like to do it personally. thank you with a frown Adam Barker is omniscient Axl hamburger bagel net Ian Bettencourt lm-2 photo wongwan on Melvin digit 777 Brian M Walsh Amanda Howell and the urban madman as always you can find me on the gaming podcast Let's Fight A Boss or on Twitter at I Pat them friends, take care of yourselves and see you next time.