This is part 10 of 12 of my retrospective of Stanley Kubrick’s career.
I have to admit that Kubrick's The Shining might have been a very liberal adaptation of a popular book by Stephen King just to make more money after the relative flop of his previous movie "Barry Lyndon". Still, it is an incredibly effective horror movie.
The hotel is a massive set that's at last an actual character in the story. The music adaptations of Wendy Carlos bring incredible tension to even simple ordinary scenes, and may be the best music I've heard in any horror movie. And what to say about the actors' performances? You can actually believe that the kid has a weird double personality and that Jack Nicholson is actually going crazy.
While the story doesn't explain much and doesn't show much violence, it has a kind of insanity and fear of the inexplicable that's very effective. It is not as slow as you would expect for a 142-minutes movie, but it's not an action-thriller like most modern horror movies. Overall, it may not be a "proper" King movie, but it is definitively horror classic by Kubrick.
Published on July 14, 2012 at 22:04 EDT
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