(On VHS, August 1999) So what happens when a very competent director decides to do a horror film—while having no idea what horror should be? You get The Shining, a “horror” film with 75 minute’s worth of setup, three or four really good scenes, no clear resolution and some interesting camera setups. Fans of classical horror won’t know what to do with the storyline, which mixes together monsters, hallucinations, split personalities, bloodbaths, ax murders, reincarnation and/or a whole lot of stuff. Yes, the technical side of the film is polished and the “classic” sequences stay in mind, but the movie itself flops around without too much vigor.
(Second Viewing, On Cable TV, September 2024) Oh my. Ignore the above review. I was wrong. So incredibly wrong. A chance re-watch of The Shining has me thinking that this is one of the finest horror films of the 1980s, if not of all time. While I don’t disagree with my former self that the film is often incoherent, I think I now get why it is — or rather, what’s the story behind the incoherence. The other thing is that an an older, savvier reviewer, I now place a lot more weight on execution than premise, and Kubrick’s work here is on the next level. While I think that most of the various interpretations about the true meaning of The Shining are putting things together in outlandish ways, there’s no denying that Stanley Kubrick has crammed so much stuff in the background of this film that it makes viewers desperate to dig into it. What’s more apparent to me, twenty-five years and thousands of movies later, is that you can recognize Kubrick’s genius here both by the amount of material that has been stolen from this film, but also by how the film remains original, surprising and subversive even after all these years. One underappreciated aspect, for instance, isn’t just how axe-crazy Jack Nicholson’s performance becomes, but how Shelley Duvall’s weak and ineffectual character makes the marital-abuse-gone-murderous thrust of the third act even more terrifying. Or how the camera work remains exemplary after so many imitators, or how much of a misdirection is the Scatman Crothers subplot. Or the growing sense of dread that radiates from the film even as it takes its time to set everything up. Or how deliciously effective the opening moments are at hooking viewers. One of the marks of a great film is how much discussion it generates and my that metric, The Shining was, is and will remain one landmark piece of horror cinema.
